Yahya Jammeh should be standing down today as president of Gambia, a former British colony. He lost an election last month and initially agreed to leave office quietly. That led to an outpouring of relief among the large majority of Gambians who chose to replace him with the unlikely figure of Adama Barrow, an Arsenal fan and property developer who once worked as an Argos security guard in London.
Unfortunately President Jammeh has since changed his mind. By refusing to accept the election result and declaring a state of emergency, he has manufactured a refugee crisis in which residents of the capital, Banjul, are fleeing in fear of their lives. For someone who has been in power for 22 years, with a military background and a record of arranging the disappearance of his opponents, much of this is depressingly predictable. Yet it is not too late for him to change his mind again. If he goes now, Mr Jammeh could still save his country from turmoil and his legacy from that of yet another dictator who succumbed to narcissism, delusion and corruption.
Mr Jammeh, then a 29-year-old army lieutenant, took power in a bloodless coup in 1994. He has since presided over significant development of Gambia’s tourist industry, which brands the country the “smiling face of West Africa” and attracts about 1,500 Britons a week in winter. He has also outlawed homosexuality, promoted bogus cures for Aids and jailed most of his political rivals. These include Ousainou Darboe, a human rights lawyer and opposition leader who would otherwise have stood for the presidency last month.
Mr Barrow stood in Mr Darboe’s place, as the consensus candidate of seven opposition parties. He has no political experience but he does have the rare distinction of a mandate. Western diplomats say the election Mr Jammeh now repudiates was the first on his watch in which votes were counted at polling stations rather than elsewhere, under the watchful eye of his security police.
Having won, Mr Barrow and his supporters floated the idea of prosecuting Mr Jammeh for alleged abuses of power. This may have been behind his attempts to stay in office, but the threat has in any case been retracted. Mr Barrow has assured Mr Jammeh that he will remain at liberty if he stands down and stays in Gambia, and four other countries have offered him asylum.
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If he does not back down, however, violence beckons. A group of West African states led by Senegal and including, crucially, Nigeria, has threatened to intervene militarily to oust him. A Nigerian warship is said to be already in position off the Gambian coast. The Senegalese thinking is that a surgical strike would be preferable to a long showdown of the kind that left thousands dead in Ivory Coast after elections in 2011.
This may be so, but if Gambia’s neighbours resort to force there is also the grave danger of an expanding civil war. If Mr Jammeh sees sense now he could still, as the US State Department has said, “leave office with his head held high”. If not, he will condemn his country to isolation and be remembered as a pariah. Gambia’s population is only two million, but the signal it would send through a peaceful and orderly transition would be no less powerful for that. It would be heard around the world, and especially in countries such as Britain, on whose visitors Gambia’s economy depends. It is past time for Yahya Jammeh to go.