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Don't Listen to Kukoi

The Independent (Banjul)
OPINION
October 25, 2004
Posted to the web October 26, 2004
Banjul
Every country has her own thorn on her side personified. For Sierra Leone it is
the roundly feared Foday Sankoh, for Liberia it is internationally despised
Charles Taylor and for Uganda it's the buffoonish Idi Amin, notorious for his
matchless cruelty from which their countries never recovered.
For The Gambia it is in the person of Kukoi Samba Sanyang, the runaway Gambian
fugitive, an amari aliquid who remains and should forever remain completely
shut out from the popular Gambian consciousness for maligning the national
psyche by committing a bloodbath that still remains pernicious to the welfare
of Gambian society, twenty-three years later.
His hateful name conjures up awe-inspiring terror in the inner being of every
Gambian heart and mind, forever unforgiving of the sense-defying aftermath.
Kukoi's spiteful, noisome value cannot be lost to anybody with deep-seated and
harrowing memories of July 1981 when this roving revolutionary wretch led a
brutish band of rabid revolutionary fanatics to hold a mortifyingly shocked
citizenry hostage. The ransom? Power, to be pulled from the bloody altar of
mindless cruelty meted out to fellow Gambian brothers and sisters whose only
crime was to have been at some wrong place at some wrong time. The inestimable
cost for this country in blood, flesh and tears, was paralyzing to ponder over
and foreboding to allow into the national consciousness of the future. For many
years Gambians have fought fitfully with their flaccid psyche to wrest it free
from the sobering grip of this horrendous blot on our assailed national
consciousness that needed to be emptied and cleansed entirely of the Kukoi
memory, for which it has no place.
Going by the revolutionary tract making the rounds in and out of the country,
Kukoi is still prepared to fight his way back to the national consciousness,
even at the cost of sacrificing others, and tearing this country apart once
again. This country deserves worthy sons and daughters renowned for the right
things and the right ideas, capable of striking an agreeable chord with the
rest of their compatriots. Kukoi just isn't the type that could make this
imaginary row of esteemed Gambians whose memories are cherished for their
contribution to protecting our otherwise precarious existence as a small and
powerless nation. Like the evil wind of passing spirits, Kukoi's memory should
vanish or be forcibly banished from the popular psyche and allow this country
time to punch its consciousness with the kind of confidence that has been
absent ever since he launched his rebellion that soiled our recent history.
One thing we know in tandem with the opinion shared by a groundswell of
Gambians is that Kukoi is still potentially dangerous, unpredictable, had honed
his revolutionary intellect with a resume of warmongering around the sub-region
and still stoutly carries a determined revolutionary heart. Through and
through, a distabilising influence for any country cursed with hosting,
monitoring and dealing with him.
Gambians should want not only his physical being in exile. They would also want
his accursed memory and anything else to do with him banished in like manner.
The more disservice Gambians can do to their country, to themselves and to
posterity is to lend, reconnect or reconcile their minds and cause with those
of Kukoi Samba Saitaneh who is still obsessed with some ill-contrived
revolutionary ideas that will never have touched base with even hitherto
idiolised communist gods like Lenin, Mao, and Karl Max if they were to be
reawakened from their sleep of death to appreciate just how fast the world has
overtaken the stifling and grim ideological façade that is communism or its
ideological half-brother, socialism. Revolutionary communism can never strike a
chord with Gambians. It is simply an obsolete and effete idea that will take a
million years to catch up with the permanently altering political matrix known
by the democratic world. Long live democracy even if it means, an
unsatisfactory one under Yahya Jammeh. No to militocracy, and the grim dictum
of revolutionary isms and schisms, uttered with the diabolical banging of
tables. Kukoi? No. He is synonymous with political irrelevance.

   

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