Jammeh is a shady guy, but let’s assume he were chief of Senegal

What you need to know:

And Nigeria was announcing that its air force was running reconnaissance flights, but with the capacity to strike. Basically six armies are out to chase away Mr Jammeh. He has no chance in the world.
Regional block Ecowas is not with him. The AU is not with him. The UN is not with him. Most individual governments in West Africa are not with him. Several countries from beyond are not with him. The man is isolated.

Yahya Jammeh came in through force. Yahya Jammeh, as of this writing, is going out through force of some kind. That is just a nice bookend to a silly presidency. Karma!
Having lost an election he organised last month, Gambia’s president Jammeh, 22 years at the top, dug his heels into the concrete of the presidential palace in Banjul. He came to stay.
Now his bluff has been called. Even before Mr Adama Barrow, the man who trounced him, was sworn in at the Gambian embassy in Dakar, Senegal on the evening of Thursday, Senegalese ground troops had already trooped into The Gambia.
And Nigeria was announcing that its air force was running reconnaissance flights, but with the capacity to strike. Basically six armies are out to chase away Mr Jammeh. He has no chance in the world.
Regional block Ecowas is not with him. The AU is not with him. The UN is not with him. Most individual governments in West Africa are not with him. Several countries from beyond are not with him. The man is isolated.
Most likely by the time this column appears in print, Mr Jammeh will have been picked up and flown into exile in Guinea or some such place to live a life of semi-captivity for a long time.
That is the best case scenario. Time in jail could easily follow a humiliating trial for some of his extreme crudities in office.
Yet he had all the time to do the right thing: abide by the results of the elections and go into respectable retirement.
Having taken power through a coup at 29, the man has had no idea of living an ordinary life for much of his adult life.
So when it hit him that he was going home, he developed cold feet.
He turned petulant, conceding the election and then un-conceding. As some have suggested, he hoped to force some kind of power-sharing agreement with him staying on at the top.
For people who do actual work, life is lonely at the top. For pretenders, life is heaven up there and they would rather stay put.
Mr Jammeh never reckoned that his neighbours, unlike those in eastern Africa, take a dim view of shenanigans that seek to force power sharing.
To allow that arrangement would be to reward bad behaviour. Non-democrats are fought, not rewarded.
A question, though: if The Gambia were a larger, more powerful nation such as Senegal or Nigeria, would Ecowas and its partners be acting so brazenly, or would we be hearing calls for “all parties in Senegal to resolve Senegalese problems themselves”?
The example of Ivory Coast is a little different because confused Laurent Gbagbo was taken out essentially by the French.
There is a sense in which tiny Gambia is being bullied, even if it has a thuggish leader.
I have no idea at what point we will make peaceful transition of power the normal way of doing business in all of countries on the African continent.
Uganda, in particular, is so lacking in this area. If President Museveni delivers on the peaceful change, we may yet forgive him any and all failings.
His legacy would be quite secure. We wait. 2021 will come.
Or 2026. If however some higher power makes a move, then it is down to our national laws and institutions that have never had to deal with such a situation; basically it will be down to us.
Peaceful changeover of power can be interesting.
It can bring in a Barrack Obama but it can also throw up a Donald Trump.
Whoever these things drag into the doorway, you know the same process can kick out crooks and criminals.
When the system works, it self-corrects (most of the time). As it should.