We love rules and procedures, perhaps, for the enormous effort it requires to adhere to them that gives us the feeling
of accomplishment. It matters not even
when the rules happen to be a mishmash of convoluted impracticalities that may
act as impediment to the mission at the risk of invalidating the entire
process.
“Keeping it simple"
comes to mind. Call me naive and/or old
school but the issues facing The Gambia may be complex to a degree, but no more
so than any of its neighbors. Yet, Gambians
love to complicate things while our neighbors seem to be doing just fine.
We will pretend to be adopting democratic tools (like free and fair elections)
to represent the values of democracy, a process we will manage to bungle, not necessarily
because of incompetence but for our insatiable thirst to be all things to all
people.
Last year, when we
blogged that the size of the representation on the Executive of CORDEG was too
large for our purposes, it was not taken kindly in some quarters, especially
from the 'inclusiveness' crowd, some of whom are now being accused, wrongfully,
in our view, of manipulating the elections to fit their individual agendas.
If the committee was
kept at a reasonable size, yet still sensitive to the demographic and parochial
interests which then elects a leader who will, in turn, select his/her team for
presentation to the executive committee for endorsement by acclamation, they
could have avoided a lot of the pain they are putting those good people through
who are genuinely looking for effective solutions to Gambia's political
problems. If you cannot entrust
your CEO with the responsibilities outlined here, then you must search your
conscience. Trust is so fundamental
to making anything work.
We have also suggested
that the political parties be excluded from membership of CORDEG together with
ALL of their respective officials and members. UDP to UDP. PDOIS to
PDOIS, PPP to PPP, GMC to GMC and MOJA-G to MOJA-G. All those who no longer
wish to be associated with their former parties but are still interested in
continuing to be politicians should either join existing parties or form their
own. Perhaps the suggestion
will be appreciated more after recent developments. CORDEG should be for the rest of those who are
purely for civic empowerment, civic education and other non-political activities.
If CORDEG were kept
simple, the current structure would not have been as top-heavy and redundant as
it now appears to be on paper. Consequently, most would be out of a job if the structure were to
be streamlined. Potential 'losers' in a
restructured CORDEG will oppose the move which in turn will result in more
leaks to the press leading to further acrimony.
Changes must be effected
at CORDEG, the scope and magnitude of which can best be determined by the CEO and
what’s left of his executive team. It seems to us that a ‘vote of confidence’ - whatever form it might
take - should be among one of the options while there’s still some goodwill out
there. The renewal of the Executive Team's mandate after such a dramatic
configuration is a reasonable thing to do as a confidence building measure
after such dramatic developments that have shaken the confidence of many who
still believe in the process.
After all that has transpired
is CORDEG salvageable? Yes, but…
