Gambia, if you want to abate this clichéd "long way to go" of yours, start holding your intellectual community answerable, even though you’ll get on some nerves. Seriously, with all these highly educated folks, if you can count your role models or have more tinkerers than thinkers, you're screwed. So hold them accountable, like I see them holding your politicians accountable, that's only fair.
By 'intellectual community' I mean the ones you believe could lead the course of your journey, to guide and manage the common worker in the trenches, but who apparently are busy bickering over trivial differences, each trying to monopolise common sense, blaming the leadership like they’re not leaders themselves, flexing unprovoked nerve, calling one another names, jumping to conclusions, and thinking the worst of everything that doesn’t stem from them or someone they like - di jamanteh baat like, eh! Hanna jaama jex?
Ask them, how can a learned people who cannot even connect provide solutions to your shared problems? I get it! When they get stuck, they’ll take more foreign professionals into service to help, and the usually culturally unfriendly recommendations from those people, though inoperable will become untouchable, because “toubabu leng banna ti” – “toubab du niit,” as if they're not as degreed.
The irony is: the same "toubab" is the usual victim of their verbal onslaught, but that is when they aren't bickering for want of some new gaffe or negative incident to roast. They’ll whine endlessly about how your progress was brought to a halt by colonisation, forgetting that the United States of America was also colonised, and Europe after her complete destruction by the World War picked up because her thinkers were supportive.
Sometimes their priorities are so misplaced that they can spend dumb loads of energy trying to prove the blackness of Jesus Christ, like that's going to have any effect on the price of rice in Numuyel.
Hold them accountable my friend; let them stop using your history of being taken advantage of to take further advantage of you. If they tell you to be enterprising, take it, but don't expect them to be. Rather than innovation inclined, most of them are succession inclined. They come from grad school, get a job, wait for the boss to retire, get fired, or die, so that they can come next... and you wonder why the heated generational rivalry?
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