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Eye on the world: Transition of power in Africa
In “Why tiny Gambia’s political transition holds outsized meaning for many Africans” The Christian Science Monitor reports that the first change in president in over 22 years for the small African country of Gambia has bigger implications for the continent of more than 1.2 billion people. As soon as the outgoing president left the country, Twitter across the continent started trending with the hashtag #LessonsfromGambia—indicating that the transfer of power in this small country could ignite more unseating of long-standing rulers. “But if the departure of Mr. Jammeh—who had ruled the tiny country buried inside Senegal since taking office in a 1994 military coup—provoked many congratulations, equally exciting for Africa’s Twitterati was how it had happened. The Gambia’s transition was made possible in large part by the deft intervention of its neighbors in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), who over the past two months have shuffled between negotiations and the threat of military intervention to convince an often recalcitrant Jammeh that he had no choice but to go. On a continent where regional bodies have often failed —by accident and by design—to shelter democracy, that seemed for many here a watershed moment.” The Monitor continues, “Those tweets also speak to the outsized symbolic significance of The Gambia’s transition, which has felt to many in Africa like something far bigger than a changing of the presidential guard in the continent’s smallest mainland country. It seemed at times a warning for other long-standing dictators on the continent, which is home to seven of the world’s 10 longest-serving rulers.”
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