The other Colobus in Gambia: Adama Barrow (the wheelbarrow)

Adama Barrow, the accidental president, who is said to have come from a sketchy background, was the candidate of desperation for the coalition of political parties in Gambia in 2016, when the nation had been taken hostage by another colobus Yahya Jammeh for the previous 22 years. The people had had it. Largely semi-literate, they were at an existential crossroads when an obscure Solo Sandeng emerged from among them to organize an impromptu peaceful demonstration at the Westfield Junction to demand electoral reforms. Mr. Sandeng was arrested and brutally tortured, his desecrated body hidden by Yahya's National Intelligence Agency (NIA) in order to cover up the dastardly crime. The leaders of Mr. Sandeng's political party, the United Democratic Party (UDP, coalition of PPP, NCP, GDP), led by party head Attorney Ousainou Darboe, took to the streets to demand Solo's body 'Dead or Alive'. They would also be met with brute force and beaten, then taken to the infamous Mile 2 prisons, where they would remain, charged with all manner of seditious crime. These two events would spur the great women of Gambia into another spontaneous but peaceful demonstration, with brooms and gourds in tow, dubbed Kalamaa Revolution. The women were also beaten, tortured, and imprisoned. The last of the women who were so tortured, succumbed just last year. Yahya now wastes away as a murder fugitive in Equatorial Guinea, south of Gambia.

Yahya's education did not go beyond high school, and because he did not have any skill that would enable him to eke out a living, if modest, his only ticket for survival was to join Gambia's rudimentary military police (Gendarmerie). It was from that vantage point, as late President Sir Dawda's Guard, that he and a handful of other listless soldiers were able to forment a coup d'etat to remove Sir Dawda's government from office. Like a colobus who found himself in the middle of a pile of bananas, he began to eliminate his fellow coupists and built a palace for himself in his ethnic enclave of Kanilai, and because Gambia is a poor country, ill-prepared for independent self governance and relyiant on foreign aid and loans for basic national responsibility such as payment of government salaries, the semi-literate Yahya would resort to providing safe haven for the MFDC freedom fighters of Cassamance in exchange for the lucrative proceeds from Rosewood lumber, drugs, and small arms. To launder those proceeds, he would prostitute Gambia's and Sir Dawda's long curated goodwill and reputation at the UN for the gullible Taiwanese government, gesticulating for the latter's independence and sovereignty at every opportunity. The semi-literate would also peddle a fosse islamization project to lure petro-dollars from Gambia's traditional friends in the Middle East. Electoral fraud and crimes against unarmed Gambians would prove his undoing and subsequent exile in the preserve that is Eq. Guinea. Solo Sandeng was Gambia's BouAzizi.

As it were, Adama Barrow became the last hope of a destitute and semi-literate peoples. He was also an obscure member of the UDP, and because the party commanded the largest electoral votes, and actually won all the previous elections held in Gambia since its inception in 1996, the wheelbarrow became the Coalition's defaultive flagbearer in the 2016 elections to remove Yahya and his gang from office, and according to the Coalition's Memorandum of Understanding, he would be a transitional president to serve only three years, and independent of his UDP party. Riding on the UDP's electoral fortunes and historic affinities, coupled with a fire at Yahya's party offices which consumed the 300,000 fraudulent voter cards he had amassed to steal the election, the wheelbarrow won the election with a landslide, proving once again, that in a free and fair election, the UDP was no match for Yahya. The Wheelbarrow's swearing-in however would be the stuff of legend. He had to flee to Mali, then escorted to Dakar, Senegal where he would be sworn-in, in absentia, while Yahya looted what was left in Gambia's treasury before he was forced out ostensibly by the other colobus of Senegal, Macky Sall.

The wheelbarrow would start from zero, for three years, at the end of which, he would oversee legitimate elections, but with the aid of UDP professionals, Gambia was readmitted in the British Commonwealth of Nations, and re-embraced by our traditional partners and friends around the world. The UDP professionals, some of whom were in the coalition government, succeeded in gaining the trust of donor countries to the tune of a billion Dollars, as well as the cancellation of foreign debt worth an equal amount, largely from the IMF, China, and a couple of other friendly nations, enough to tide the government over through the next five to six years. In this new-found wealth, and one year on, after his UDP professionals secured funding from Saudi Arabia and other OIC-member countries, colobusBarrow began to have second thoughts about the three-year transitional MOU. He set about firing all the coalition members of his government and gradually replacing them with Yahya's detritus who could not survive in the Eq. Guinea preserve with their wounded boss. This group of jesters and garden variety criminals helped colobusBarrow to form his own political party (NPP), largely drawn from his ethnic communities and Yahya's orphaned APRC occult community. Since 2017, I knew colobusBarrow was a clueless dotard, and I called him so, but lately, my friend and former intelligence officer Sulayman revealed that colobusBarrow suffers from a debilitating neural condition for which he has to be medicated to near-sedation, but which medication he's not disciplined enough to take, or to take as scheduled. Perhaps this is the reason he frequently dozes off, slumped, at meetings abroad. He is also not intellectually curious like Yahya, and reads English text at a Grade 8 level, thanks in part to his attendance of a Second Chance secondary school in Gambia before he lucked out on a visa to Europe, and then to England, where he would work briefly as a mall security guard. ColobusBarrow continues the legacy of Yahya in drugs trade and money laundering, and all manner of self-perpetuation crimes as he awaits his inevitable exile, perhaps to Morocco to join the other colobusSall.

Ladies and Gentlemen, here is what Gambians have been dealing with for the past eight years, and counting.

Haruna