A Call for Ethical Political Discourse: Rebuilding The Gambia’s Moral Economy

In an era where political dialogue often descends into hostility, a powerful open letter is challenging Gambians to reflect on the moral foundations of their public discourse. This thoughtful appeal, addressed to all citizens but particularly to current and aspiring political leaders, urges a collective examination of how our words shape our nation’s social fabric.

The State of Our Political Dialogue

The letter emerges from growing concern that our political discourse is becoming increasingly offensive, objectionable, and damaging to our social fabric and national aspirations. While there are notable exceptions—a few political actors who maintain respectful engagement—the overall trend points toward troubling hostile statements that serve no one’s interest and harm our nation’s wellbeing.

What exactly constitutes the “moral economy” of political discourse? It refers to the unwritten moral rules that shape the legitimacy of political speech, the credibility of speakers, the emotional responses of audiences, and the ultimate value of political statements to the common good.

Beyond Partisan Battles

Political discourse isn’t merely about showcasing partisan positions, bashing opponents, safeguarding political interests, or scoring political points. It’s also a moral performance. Beneath every political argument, campaign speech, or public debate lies a system of values, expectations, and ethical judgments that govern how political actors—both leaders and citizens—communicate, address critics and opponents, mobilize support, or defend their preferred political loyalties.

That system of values, expectations, and ethical judgments needs to be kept healthy at all times. Political discourse, especially partisan political discourse, is above everything else about the wellbeing of society, of human beings, of current and future generations.

The True Purpose of Political Speech

It’s about assessing the state of society, measuring how our individual interests stand in relation to the common good. It’s about the ethical standards of the people, and the extent to which citizens are able to navigate the layered challenges and complexities of national life, and how healthy their interpersonal and inter-communal relationships are.

It’s about the challenges we face as a society, and about ways and means of meeting and satisfactorily overcoming, or adequately coping with those challenges in pursuit of the common good.

A Framework for Healthy Discourse

Fellow Gambians: Our political discourse should always be guided by truth, fairness, justice, and respect for human dignity. All our political actors—both leaders and citizens—should always speak with honesty, appeal to our shared values, and maintain a sense of moral responsibility toward each other and toward the common good.

When political actors speak this way, they reinforce our collective trust in the integrity of our social values. They reinforce confidence in our ability, as a community of intelligent people, to behave in mature, dignified and responsible ways. They prove that we can manage our irrational emotions, build healthy and productive relationships, and continually nurture our civic virtues.

The Consequences of Unhealthy Discourse

But, fellow Gambians, when political discourse is dominated by dishonesty, deception, manipulation, hate, disrespect, selfishness and a ‘anything goes if it works for me’ attitude, its moral economy shrinks, dries up, and collapses.

The social trust and mutual concern that sustain democratic life is eroded, and society loses its way and continually gropes in the darkness of political confusion and regression.

A Collective Responsibility

Unhealthy political discourse is like poison injected into the veins of our body politic. Every crude statement is another dose of poison harmful to our national wellbeing. It pays to remember that if the nation dies, the citizen dies.

Fellow Gambians: We all know that unhealthy political discourse is repugnant to all we hold truly dear, from our shared cultural values to the religious teachings that seek to guide us to lives of peace and harmony.

Our Shared Values

Both our cultural values and religious beliefs frown upon dishonesty, callousness and the moral corruption that characterize unhealthy political discourse. A majority of us pride ourselves in being good Muslims, good Christians or good adherents of other religions, all of whose teachings emphasize our responsibility to always speak the truth, to always be just, to always be righteous, to always show concern for others, and to always be as kind and considerate to others as possible.

The Path Forward

If we truly follow these teachings and live by them, our political discourse will become healthy, and our society will become stable and grow in the right direction—the direction of truth, justice, and a capacity to face and tackle our national challenges in an intelligent manner.

Fellow Gambians: It is crucially important that our political discourse addresses our pressing national issues and desists from turning political platforms into hostile battlegrounds where anything may be said, where right or wrong have no place, where truth and lies do not matter, where humans may be objectified and called animals, and where people’s reputations, dignities and characters may be freely smeared and assassinated.

No common good requires this kind of political discourse. No national interest is served by it. Ultimately, no benefit is to be gained by anyone from it.

Beyond Power Politics

Fellow Gambians: As a society struggling with many complex challenges of growth, development and even survival, we must realize that political discourse is not all about winning, retaining or losing power.

Our political statements create our political and social realities and determine our common national destiny. When our political statements are infused with integrity and concern for the truth, they become vehicles for the healthy growth and transformation of our society.

A Call to Action

But, when our political statements are amoral and corrupted by greedy, selfish interests and parochial considerations, they become harbingers of needless hostility, strife and social division.

Let us watch our political statements and ensure that what we say does not turn our country into a space of mutual contempt and hatred. Let us nurture, safeguard and upgrade the moral economy of our political discourse. In so doing, we greatly enhance our national wellbeing.

By Baba Galleh Jallow