Dr. Ousman Gajigo
Seedy Njie, the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, has been making headlines recently for all the wrong reasons. Despite the prominence of his name in public discourse, it is important to understand where ultimate responsibility truly lies. The fact of the matter is that Seedy Njie is simply an extension of President Adama Barrow.
There is a common misconception in The Gambia that poor advisors are the primary reason behind Adama Barrow’s poor leadership. In reality, the people who surround the president, whether as formal or informal advisors, are selected by him and serve at his pleasure. There are virtually no legal restrictions on the president’s ability to dismiss advisors, including ministers, at will.
President Adama Barrow alone made the conscious choice to surround himself with deeply poor advisors. These include the likes of Momodou Sabally, Dou Sanno, and Saihou Mballow, among others. Chief among them, however, is Seedy Njie who is not formally an advisor, but in practice seems to be the most influential one.
Seedy Njie was a political nonentity until he was plucked from obscurity by a desperate Yahya Jammeh, whose ministers were deserting him in his final days in office. It was obvious to everyone then and now that Jammeh would not have elevated him had his ministers remained loyal. Being the moral opportunist that he is, Seedy Njie willingly did the desperate dictator’s bidding, demonstrating to the entire country just how far he was willing to go – even at the risk of plunging the nation into civil war. He boarded the plane with the departing dictator, believing he had no future in the country. But when he sensed that there was equally no future alongside a dictator in exile – and that the incoming president was willing to do whatever it took to consolidate power – he did what any shamelessly power-hungry individual does: position himself close to power once again.
None of these details about Seedy Njie are unknown to President Adama Barrow. President Barrow made a deliberate decision to surround himself with such advisors – not out of ignorance about their true character, but precisely because of it. These advisors are the product of a conscious and calculated choice. President Barrow is content to have them around because of the services they render him. Whether they are harmful to the country is of no consequence to him. They serve the one metric that matters to Adama Barrow: holding on to power.
The presence of poor advisors such as Seedy Njie cannot, therefore, explain Adama Barrow’s poor leadership. Their presence is not the cause but a symptom – one of the many manifestations of the president’s own poor qualities. Chief among these are a lack of judgment, gross incompetence, and an absence of patriotism. These advisors are, in every meaningful sense, extensions of President Adama Barrow himself.
It is worth reflecting on what could have been. Good advisors do not simply appear by chance for a fortunate leader. Rather, good leaders deliberately seek out good advisors to strengthen their decision-making through expertise and sound analysis. In this way, good leaders are elevated by the advisors they choose, while poor leaders select advisors who make them worse.
As a further observation, the conduct of Seedy Njie reveals much about the broader character of the Adama Barrow administration. Consider the Vice President, Mohammed Jallow. He apparently finds it acceptable that a Deputy Speaker wields more influence than both himself and the Secretary General over appointments such as the Permanent Secretary in his own office. This is just one of several instances in which Seedy Njie has exercised outsized influence over decisions in ministries well outside his remit. Yet the cabinet members affected continue to serve comfortably within this arrangement.
While this may illustrate that Seedy Njie holds more sway than many individuals close to the president, it would be absurd to suggest he is more powerful than Adama Barrow. The president could remove him with a single phone call. Indeed, Seedy Njie could be returned to obscurity with the stroke of a pen. But President Barrow will not do this, because his interests and Seedy Njie’s actions are perfectly aligned.
To expect Adama Barrow to distance himself from Seedy Njie is to ask Adama Barrow to disavow himself. The former is as unlikely as the latter. Everything Seedy Njie does in this country – in action and in word – he does with the full blessing of President Barrow. This includes the bigotry, the disregard for due process, and the contempt for the rule of law. Seedy Njie’s recent actions are just the latest in a series that constitute a clear pattern.
It should now be obvious that Adama Barrow and his administration are a cancerous growth on this country. Tribal bigotry is not a crime against one ethnic group alone – it is a crime against the entire nation. The removal of this cancerous growth is not the responsibility of any one group, but of the whole country. Bigotry engenders division and we must be mindful not to fall into the trap. The way to fight that bigotry is to bring people together in a collective fight against a common enemy.
