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| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Momodou |
Posted - 30 Jul 2026 : 15:54:49
THE BIGGEST CONTRADICTION OF THE JULY 1981 UPRISING: HOW A VOTER’S CARD "LEGITIMISED" A VIOLENT ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY
By Dembo Fatty
Humans have always been social beings needing one another to lubricate the wheels of social cohesion and dependency.
And so when we settled down from a hunter-gatherer life, it became apparent that we needed structures and systems to help us navigate the intricacies of a sedentary life. Resources have become limited, land had to be shared and out of this was a more prominent role hitherto not very apparent. That is power. Who should lead us as communities? How do we legitimise that power so that we all could accept it and tow the line.
Out of this was born the Social Contract. An unwritten contract but an understanding that those who have been assigned our collective powers to speak and act on our collective best interest will be upright, indifferent to anything that will attempt to degenerate the common interest without fear or favour.
Different forms of governance were posited in our human past driven by cultural differences, environmental factors and economic considerations among others.
Fast forward to April 24th 1970, Gambians chose a Republican type of Government where power resides in the people, having the power to recall leaders every five years through a system of allocating every qualified citizen, a ballot token deposited with the candidate that best aligns with the policies and programmes of the individual voter.
Such acts guaranteed secrecy of the process and also the right to express our individual opinions and association. The process also guarantees our rights to not be associated with any candidate. That right is a guaranteed form of protest. In short, it upheld the right to associate and not to associate.
On July 30th 1981, a handful of civilians who for the most part were Taxi Drivers, walked from Tallinding with five local guns and a pistol to the Depot in Bakau, and miraculously managed to convince an armed and expected discipline force to participate in what was a treasonable act still baffles many a policy analyst.
The greatest casualty to our democracy was not the attempted coup in itself but how the plotters used the very instrument of democracy, the voter’s card, was used to legitimise the violent attempt to derail our democratic process high jacking the very tenets of the social contract.
What were the rebels thinking?
Did they believe that by using the voter’s card as a requirement to be given a gun, was in itself legitimising the violent takeover of power just as the same voters card legitimised the election into office of the government they were seeking to overthrow?
Clearly the former was organised chaos with limited choices of candidates and hence infringed on the rights of citizens to be availed with choices and where none of the presented choices rises to the expectation of a qualified voter, the system still guaranteed the voter to not associate at all and stay away from the selection process. The coup provided only one choice.
When a voter’s card became the instrument of terror, we failed woefully. For me, this act by the Rebels was the greatest assault on democracy. I would understand if they used a different scheme in allocating guns but not the voter’s card.
Democracy died twice on July 30th 1981. First, the violent take over and second the scheme of using the voter’s card. |
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