Today is Eid Mubarak, a celebratory occasion after the end of Ramadan. It’s a day I will therefore, exploit as a special moment for reconciliation with everyone including my unknown friend Amadou Dibba. By saying so I mean to end this exchange with him; an engagement that I feel is not at all, productive anymore. After all, the cause of the debate, the case of the six imprisoned Gambian journalists has long been resolved in The Gambia leaving us in a battle of words that will take us nowhere but merely waste our time.

For instance, it didn’t make sense to me when in my attempt to register the difficulty I sometimes have in reading and understanding his wordings, Mr. Dibba grilled me over my poor grammar for missing one or two negligible misplaced words in a three-thousand-word essay; but still in that same paper, he failed to notice similar mistakes he had committed. This is how he put it: 
“It is a source of rejoice (a verb)” when joy (a noun) should have been where rejoice is or using an adverb where an adjective should have been, such as “The maestro,” whoever that is, “writes in….flawlessly jargon.”

Well, I say to him that coming from someone who, in defiance of decency in literary circles, finds it germane to pick on another’s piece in the manner that he does to mine, he should have been meticulous enough to cross his ‘T’s and dot his ‘I’s. But then again, to even state that he should be meticulous suggests that he knows as much as he portrays with an insufferable air of self-importance.

So I don’t know how meticulous Mr. Dibba was in cutting his “T’s” and dotting his “I’s” and still missed the following in his paper?

Well I am sorry to disappoint him this guy does here is not about recoil just yet. Or: But the most interesting part in this particular section, which sent me into a fit of convulsive laughter (to be “quiet” honest).  ..........account of their grievance, to confront them with “life” fire power was to attempt to kill a fly with a sledge hammer.
I could also argue that it should be “quite” the adverb and not quiet the adjective or noun he should have used. He also needed “live” as an adjective to describe the firepower (one word) instead of “life” fire power, which is a noun that is self-descriptive. Sledgehammer is also one word.

Mr. Dibba should recognized the fact that English is a language we use and not a language to enslave us, and therefore, its mastery never to serve as a yardstick to measure people’s intelligence or credibility. Certainly, I put a lot of importance in grammar, which I believe makes a great deal, or all the difference in communicating the right written or spoken message. But when a grammatical mistake is not that serious to alter the meaning of a sentence and has nothing to do with pedagogy, then cherry picking the error borders on a meaningless exercise, a mere storm in a tea cup. I still read books authored by acclaimed writers and find mistakes that slipped through the common cracks cause by human fallibility. Do I consider the editors incapable of being meticulous enough to cut their “T’s” and dot their “I’s”? I don’t think so Mr. Dibba. However, in the spirit of the Eid and for reconciliation, I will accept the grammatical deficiency in me that makes him a better writer of the English Language and sure, more intelligent as well. Excellent source for rejoice!

The last point I want to discuss before conceding to him again is the issue of the Western-educated doctors. I had throughout the exercise, believed that Mr. Dibba was chastising us for adopting what he called the self-preservation instinct and had not realized that in his defence to remain anonymous, he was equally adopting the same mechanism. In fact, I believe since his recent eruption from wherever he had been staying dormant for all these fifteen years of Jammeh’s rule until my Sabarry” proposal, he has only been relentlessly chastising me. When I was talking about cyber warriors, which he believes to be part of, the likes of Mr. Dibba were never in my mind. With all those writers I read on Gambia’s political problems, unless he was on a site I couldn’t access, I wonder whether he has ever written anything about the Jammeh government-the coup, the students’ demonstration, the death of Deyda Hydara or anything that usually triggered
heated debate among cyber writers. Even when the journalists were arrested and put on trial, Dibba, as far as I know, never said a word. But when I wrote about the Sabarry approach, he came obviously giving me the impression that his battle was all about me. Let me reconstruct how he started in his first paper that I believe was clearly meant to chastise me. He wrote: 

Thus the foregoing serves to bolster my belief that any attempt at a Sabarry mission is doomed to be rebuffed by a President who seems to think that appearing tough and impervious to pleas from all would serve to relieve his government of any responsibility to investigate or facilitate the investigation of the murder of a person who had been a nag to the government’s efforts to institutionalise media censorship.  The reference to the so-called support the country’s Western-educated medical doctors gave President Jammeh’s traditional medical practice on curing HIV/AIDS as a measure of his popularity is, for want of a better word, inaneas no less could be expected of the said doctors as apologists of President Jammeh’s actions, willy-nilly. Sarr stated in the same piece that at a point during his incarceration, his thoughts gravitated towards begging for mercy. It is my opinion that the same instinct for self-preservation that impelled him to conceive of that idea is certainly the very same one that dictated the so-called Western-educated doctors’ pronouncements and actions on an issue they know more than anybody else meant everything to their boss.

And in his conclusion of that paper Dibba wrote:  Speaking of confronting the truth, it is my view that if a person decides to speak and defend the truth, it must not be half-truths, for this could be more dangerous than outright lies. In my second article, which coincided with the release of the journalists, I tried to put it to Mr. Dibba that I was not willing to debate somebody I didn’t know which he responded to with the following:

At this point let me state that the release of our uncles, brothers and sister, agreeable and relieving as it is, did not come about as a result of the almighty Sabarry mission in the formula and style proposed by our dear and respected Samsudeen Sarr.  This, it must be noted, is in counter-distinction to the despicable alacrity to crawl in supplication for mercy even when one has not done any wrong. The God-given dignity, not ego, will naturally militate against the pursuit of such a mission by the dignified. That is why Sam’s proposal can only be a recipe for those who do not value such a gift, and by god there are many such people.

Apart from the fact that by so doing Mr. Sarr has drifted from the point of departure- i.e. addressing in totality the points he has been challenged on, such as ... the vacuity in using the apparent approval given by the Western-educated doctors of Jammeh’s HIV/AIDS healing programme ..........  Because of lack of tenable points in support of his stance, he resorts to the unconscionable challenge in a bid to deter those of us who cannot sit by and let people imbibe just any idea.
 
However in his last article, he left me baffled when he strongly denied chastising us for the self-preservation instinct by saying this: Mr. Sarr made reference to my supposed chastisement of him and the so-called Western educated doctors for acting on the instinct of self-preservation during his incarceration in Mile II and at the outset of President Jammeh’s HIV/AIDS healing programme respectively, trying to draw a parallel in my rationalization of my right to do so under given circumstances on the one hand, and his and the so-called Western educated doctors’ claim to it on the other, admitting that while in his case it might have been so, in the case of the doctors (I choose to drop the ‘so-called’ so as not to entangle myself in verbiage) it is doubtful.

He also accuses me of chiding both him and the doctors for it when my only crime is to mention that that is what has taken place. He might as well have said that I pilloried myself for claiming any right to self-preservation. So you see it is not ‘disingenuous’ after all to lump both Sarr and the doctors, (or should I say all of us?) as hankerers after self-preservation.

That was not the only issue he now denies being scornful about but this one in his first paper as well: Jammeh’s apology for popularity is all the more tainted with dubious and sometimes reprehensible acts that often result in drawing a mostly unthinking rabble attracted more by the pomp and pageantry, as well as few others in officialdom who are forced by the urge to avoid senseless victimisation for failing to show up at such gatherings and events.

I commented on the statement as being bigotry after simplifying it thus: I think he simply meant to say that Jammeh’s popularity is marred with shady and sometimes bad actions that often as a result draw a mostly unthinking low-class people attracted by the splendid-displays (the same as pomp and pageantry) together with few class of officials impelled by the usual self-preservation instinct.
 
In his last paper Mr. Dibba explained the above in a context absolutely different from the above: Then, to consummate the bunkum he is intent on dishing out, he spices up his mistaken observations by accusing me of arrogance for showing the difference between the drive of various classes to show up in occasions which seem to be Sarr’s perfect platforms to determine President Jammeh’s popularity. My response to that is that I believe that our duty as social beings to be accommodating of the shortcomings of each other does not detract from the fact that we are of varying degrees of faculties and abilities, a creation of Providence, so much so that it becomes cynical of that person who seeks to fault one who, out of necessity, has to make a reference to the phenomenon without singling out any person or group of persons from among the rabble or working classes.

I will not bother to go into the details of answering other questions raised by Mr. Dibba for fear of causing more misunderstanding and disagreements. But I can briefly comment on the student demonstrations and the allusions to the Holy Quran about killing human beings. Yes the Holy Book calls for a life for a life, but also says that thieves should be amputated from their wrist, adulterers publicly stoned to death, women to stay at home and never go to school and so on and so forth. Well since The Gambia was founded, with all its predominantly Muslim population, the state has always been secular with no desire now or in the future to adopt Islamic Law.

And as what is deemed a national security threat or not, that answer can only be given by government officials privy to state secrets that are classified so. Americans still don’t understand what their national security has to do with the CIA illegally wiretapping thousands of their telephones without their knowledge or authorization. So what President Jammeh treats as a national security issue is only known to him and to perhaps those closely guided circle of officials informed about it on a need-to-know basis.
Finally, the Ghanaians! I think the UN and ECOWAS fact-finding team that investigated the matter in The Gambia and came to the conclusion that The Gambia government had nothing to do with their mysterious death must have the answers in their records to all the pertinent questions raised by Mr. Dibba. I now close my case with Mr. Dibba with the final word SABARRY! 

Last night was terrific. Floyd Mayweather after his absence from the ring on boxing retirement for twenty-one months put up a spectacular performance by defeating Marquez the Mexican warrior. So far, I think it was the best fight I watched this year. I look forward to his fight with Coto or Parquel next year. That should be even better.

Till next week, may the Almighty God bless all and wish everyone to a great, prosperous life in the coming year.

Samsudeen Sarr,
Newark, New Jersey.    

Lt. Colonel Samsudeen Sarr (Rtd.)