Opinion | SAM SARR OF DELUSION: A COLONEL WITHOUT CREDIBILITY, A DIPLOMAT WITHOUT DIGNITY, AND A WRITER WITHOUT WISDOM

By Kebeli Demba Nyima, Atlanta, GA

There are bad articles, worse rebuttals, and then there is what Mr. Samsudeen Sarr recently produced. Christopher Hitchens might’ve called it “a dog’s dinner laid out on the carpet of civil discourse.” One does not often encounter a piece so bereft of truth, so starved of self-awareness, and so thickly slathered in egotistical delusion that it reads less like a rebuttal and more like a soliloquy from a retired bureaucrat performing to an empty theatre. In fact, to call Sam Sarr’s response a rebuttal is to insult the very idea of written argument. What he has submitted to the public domain is not an essay; it is a literary miscarriage, the ramblings of a man drunk on the cheap liquor of his own pomposity. It is not satire, for it has no irony; not polemic, for it has no spine; not criticism, for it lacks both precision and evidence. It is, in short, a chaotic chorus of rhetorical false notes, lacking even the charm of amateurism.

But let us begin not with invective but with instruction. Before one sharpens the knife of critique, it is only fair to state what the patient ought to have been. Whether one is penning a scholarly treatise for The Oxford Review, a philosophical dialogue for The Times Literary Supplement, or even a scathing tabloid column for The Daily Express, all writing — whether academic, fictional, polemical or satirical — must honour the same foundational commandments. These are not the whims of ivory tower pedants; they are the ancient rites of literary civilisation.

First, coherence. A sentence must contain a subject, a verb, and an idea. These are not suggestions; they are prerequisites. A writer who abandons them has not written a paragraph, but committed a grammatical hit-and-run.

Second, structure. An argument is not a grocery list of grievances. It is a deliberate staircase of thought, each step bearing weight, leading somewhere. Whether one is defending Darwin, denouncing imperialism, or eulogising a friend, the architecture of thought must be evident.

Third, tone. A writer must know whether he is in a court, a pub, or a theatre and adjust his voice accordingly. To mistake sarcasm for wit, or rage for rhetoric, is to mistake the tantrum of a child for the thunder of Cicero.

Fourth, evidence. An accusation without proof is not heroism. It is cowardice. It is gossip. It is the whispered bile of men huddled in the corners of second-rate taverns off King’s Cross, where failed clerks and armchair revolutionaries nurse warm beer and colder reputations.

Fifth, and above all: language. Style matters. A good essay carries rhythm; it respects the music of the sentence. It does not stumble drunk through clauses, nor slap adjectives across nouns like wet paint on a crumbling wall. The best prose—yes, even in satire—has restraint, elegance, and bite.

By these standards—and they are universal, whether one writes from a study in Cambridge or a booth in the Dog and Trumpet Inn—Sam Sarr’s essay is not a rebuttal. It is a wreckage. A textual catastrophe. It does not advance argument; it collapses under its own smug weight. One could find more logic in the footnotes of a discarded Victorian pamphlet than in his entire screed.

To write is to think. To publish is to take responsibility for that thinking. Mr. Sarr, alas, has done neither. He has instead hurled syntax at the page like a schoolboy flinging porridge—hoping it sticks, unaware that it stinks.

Now to the specific charges he levelled—and the rebuttals he so richly deserves.

Let us begin with the lowest-hanging fruit—the claim that my article was “AI-generated,” supposedly confirmed by his omniscient nephew studying at the University of Maryland. One might forgive such a comically ill-informed assertion from a village elder misled by WhatsApp forwards, but not from a former lieutenant colonel. The idea that AI usage automatically equates to fraud is not only primitive, it is intellectually dishonest. As someone with a graduate degree in Information Technology, I understand both the architecture and ethical application of artificial intelligence. Sam, on the other hand, cannot tell the difference between a tool and a ghostwriter. AI is not autopilot; it is augmentation. It cannot replicate insight, experience, scholarly tone, or contextual nuance—which are all found, in abundance, in my original article. If your nephew’s definition of AI-generation is a well-written sentence, then perhaps your family needs less screen time and more scholarly reading. Instead of parroting digital hearsay, Mr. Sarr would do well to invest in understanding what he criticizes. After all, it is not technology that offends him, but the intellectual insecurity it exposes.

From digital ignorance, we move swiftly into academic fabrication. Mr. Sarr claims he graduated from Dekalb College in Atlanta, Georgia in 1985—a claim as verifiable as a unicorn sighting. Having scoured alumni directories, educational registries, and faculty logs, I found no trace—no citation, no archived newsletter, not even a yearbook nod—that links him to this institution. And unlike the academic records of Gambian institutions, those of U.S. colleges are centralized, digitized, and easily searchable. Any journalist worth their salt knows that a credible educational background leaves a digital footprint, especially in the United States where FERPA-compliant verification systems exist across the higher education landscape. So where, Sam, is the degree? What was the major? Who were your professors? What yearbook page celebrates your academic triumph? None of this exists because the story is, in all probability, invented. The tragedy is not just that he lied, but that he thought the lie would go unchallenged. In a world where truth is but a few clicks away, Mr. Sarr opted to die on the hill of his own imagination.

Sarr then pivots to what he imagines is a masterstroke of deduction: that I was sent, presumably by Alagie Yorro Jallow, to defend him in some tribal, familial, or ideological mission. The idea is as absurd as it is revealing. Absurd, because it reduces argument to allegiance as though I, a scholar with multiple earned degrees, international credentials, and an independent publishing record, must be a foot soldier in someone else’s army. Revealing, because it betrays Sarr’s own intellectual poverty; he cannot conceive of a world in which people write for principle rather than payroll.

I have no need to “defend” Mr. Jallow, nor have I ever received instruction or permission to critique Mr. Sarr. I write because I read. I critique because I care about standards. I expose, not because I am summoned, but because I am incensed. There is no tribal network behind my paragraphs, no political machine beneath my metaphors. There is only the pen, the brain, and the oath every serious writer takes—to name foolishness where he finds it, and to spare no fig leaf when the emperor is naked.

I have critiqued Mr. Sarr before. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly. Long before this particular episode, I have published essays in Kairo News, The Voice, and Concern TV The Gambia dissecting his bombast and exposing his inconsistencies. Some of those links still live (IN THE SAM SARR VS. GAF, THE VERDICT IS OUT – Gambia).Others have expired with the fickle memory of web servers. But hard copies remain, and the editors who published them will stand as witnesses if need be.

If Sarr were truly informed, he’d know this. If he had done even the barest minimum of research, he’d realise that my prose precedes Jallow. That my critiques precede his conspiracy. That my voice does not echo Yorro, it precedes him.

Then there is his libellous accusation that Alagie Yorro Jallow plagiarised his credentials, forged affiliations, and stole content to pad his résumé. A serious charge, were it supported by evidence. But this is Sarr’s signature move: to level accusations without burdening himself with proof. In any credible system of intellectual inquiry—be it the courts of Athens or the chambers of Westminster—such an unsubstantiated claim would collapse under cross-examination. In the tradition of Greek philosophical ethics, as argued by Isocrates and taught by Socrates, it is not enough to accuse; one must demonstrate. Assertions are not arguments. Rumours are not verdicts. Even the Sophists, for all their rhetorical vices, knew better than to fling such slanders without corroboration.

To accuse someone of forging credentials without supplying even a footnote or testimony is not just reckless—it is defamatory. It is the textual equivalent of arson. If Sarr believes that a Google search and a sneer make for evidence, he has mistaken internet gossip for jurisprudence. His writing does not seek truth; it seeks scandal. It does not expose liars; it manufactures victims. And in doing so, it says more about the author than the accused.

 Alagie Yorro Jallow has, over the course of his career, published under his real name, obtained recognisable fellowships, and appeared in public academic forums. His affiliations with respected institutions, including the Harvard Kennedy School, are documented, verifiable, and, unlike Sarr’s screeds, do not evaporate under scrutiny. I have personally reviewed his published empirical research in several high-impact academic journals, and not to mention the hundreds of articles Jallow has written across different local papers year in and year out without ever charging a penny. Jallow is to the publishing industry what a lighthouse is to mariners: steady, principled, and impossible to ignore even in the fog of mediocrity. His affiliations with respected institutions, including the Harvard Kennedy School, are documented, verifiable, and, unlike Sarr’s screeds, do not evaporate under scrutiny. Anyone with a browser and a conscience can find them. That Sarr cannot is not proof of Jallow’s fraudulence, but of his own failure.

More importantly, in the classical tradition of philosophical dispute, such an accusation must bear the weight of logos, ethos, and pathos—reason, character, and persuasion. To levy an allegation as serious as credential forgery without a shred of verifiable documentation is to reject the very foundation of ethical inquiry. As Aristotle would say, the deliberate failure to differentiate between what is probable and what is proven is the domain not of philosophers, but of demagogues.

Sarr, in this moment, does not behave as a critic. He postures as a prosecutor in a court he cannot convene. Were this a tribunal in Athens, Socrates himself would have asked: where is the testimony, where is the material proof, and what logos supports this claim? In Westminster, such slander would meet the gavel of libel law. In a peer-reviewed forum, it would be returned unopened.

One suspects that had Mr. Sarr ever sat through a proper lecture on literary criticism, perhaps under the guidance of a professor of English literature or a philosopher versed in moral epistemology, he might have understood that criticism is not the same as slander, and scepticism is not licence for libel. Literary criticism, at its best, is an act of moral clarification, not an exercise in public character assassination. Plato would have called his method dialectical cowardice. Orwell would have called it cheap. And Virginia Woolf, had she encountered such prose, might have paused her sentence, blinked once, and poured herself another brandy in dismay.

This, in the end, is the tragedy of Sam Sarr—not that he lacks learning, but that he refuses instruction. He wanders the forum with the posture of a philosopher but the weapons of a heckler. He imagines himself a Socratic gadfly when he more closely resembles a disgruntled town crier in a broken hat, railing at the skies from an empty street.

There is no shame in not being a scholar. There is only shame in faking it. He should cease waging fights against minds whose altitude he cannot scale. One cannot box with thought. One cannot debate with echoes. His pen, if it is to be used at all, ought to be dipped in humility, not envy.

And let us spare a brief moment of empathy for those around him—his peers, his relatives, his unfortunate readers. How do they endure the avalanche of errors, the torrents of tantrums? How many polite silences have concealed private embarrassment? For surely, even among his friends, there must be those who wish he would simply write less and read more. There must be some who look at his keyboard and wonder—not when he will strike it again, but when he will stop.

He has confused assertion for articulation, fury for fluency. And for all his sound and fury, he signifies—nothing.

Lastly, let us consider the self-centered melodrama of a man who has lived past sixty yet writes with the tone of a sulking adolescent. His rhetorical style resembles that of a character in a poorly written Nollywood courtroom drama—grandiose, inaccurate, and utterly detached from reason. What kind of intellectual, if one can use the term loosely, spends his paragraphs posturing rather than persuading? Mr. Sarr writes not to inform, but to inflate. He views every disagreement as betrayal, every critique as blasphemy, and every critic as an enemy agent. This is not the behavior of a statesman; it is the tantrum of a man who mistakes memory for merit. His prose reads like a diary entry from a narcissist convinced that the world is conspiring to forget him. Rather than engage ideas, he indulges in character theatre, performing for an audience that exists only in his mind. The longer he speaks, the clearer it becomes: Sam Sarr is not debating. He is mourning his own irrelevance.

Final Thought

Sam Sarr is a colonel without credibility, a diplomat without dignity, and a writer without wisdom. The man cannot write. Worse still, he does not know he cannot write. Like a pianist with no fingers, he pounds the rhetorical keys and wonders why the result is not music.

Were this drivel submitted to Charles Kingsley or Matthew Arnold, it would return soaked in red ink and pity. Had it landed at The Spectator or Punch, it would have been used to mop the inkwells. If it had reached the desk of Thackeray, he would have parodied it; Ruskin would have rebuked it. There is not a single editor from the golden age of English prose who would have printed Sam Sarr’s rejoinder without shame—or satire.

And yet, in today’s Gambia, where journalism has been reduced to a hungry hustle where most so-called columnists possess little education beyond the school-leaving certificate, and many are poor, partisan, and dying for proximity to power, Sarr’s screed would be readily mistaken for statesmanship. Among the half-literate blogmen of the moment, his verbosity passes for valour, his confusion for complexity, and his conspiracy for commentary.

Grammar and Rhetorical Breakdown of Sam Sarr’s Rebuttal

Opening Statement:

“Well, well, well… look who decided to crawl out of obscurity to defend the ‘Harvard-educated intellectual’—and I use that term with the loosest stretch of imagination—Alagie Yorro Jallow.”

This opening line dribbles into view like a child’s imitation of debate. “Well, well, well” is the linguistic equivalent of knocking thrice on your own coffin. “Crawl out of obscurity” is so exhausted a phrase it ought to be put to rest beside “grasping at straws” and “pot calling kettle black.” The “loosest stretch of imagination” is a redundancy—a tautological circus trick performed without flair. And those em-dashes! Abused again, scattered like rifle shots in a war against logic.

Violations:

• Redundant phrasing
• Misused em-dash (again)
• Tired clichés and lack of rhetorical sophistication

Correction (Literary Scathing): “One is not surprised to find you championing Mr. Jallow—though one might wish you had arrived armed with something sturdier than clichés, bravado, and broken grammar.”

“Your write-up is a dazzling cocktail of fiction, desperation, and laughable sycophancy, served up with all the finesse of a clumsy circus act.”

A cocktail, served with circus acts? Mixed metaphor is the poor man’s poetry, and here we have a veritable soup of it. Fiction and desperation do not pair well in a glass, and “laughable sycophancy” is an accusation better proven than presumed. The whole construction reads like the work of a man leafing through a thesaurus while riding a unicycle over the ruins of coherence. It sounds less like a sentence and more like something overheard in the smoky backroom of the Dog & Boar in Soho.

Violations:

• Conflated and clashing metaphors
• Overstuffed abstract nouns
• Pretentious phrasing without supporting logic

Correction: “Your article is an uncooked stew of falsehoods, hyperbole, and sycophantic bravado—disguised, unsuccessfully, as criticism.”

“First things first: while you strut around pretending to possess encyclopedic knowledge about me…”

“First things first” belongs to grocery lists, not rhetorical engagement. “Strut around” is a phrase fit for gossip rags and political cartoons, not rebuttal. “Encyclopedic knowledge” is not only unqualified—it is vaguely vainglorious. This sentence is a verbal puff of smoke with no fire beneath it. It sounds as though dictated between mouthfuls of pickled herring at a Bloomsbury brasserie.

Violations:

• Colloquial intro in a informal/formal setting
• Verb-noun mismatches
• Inflated tone with no substance

Correction: “You presume, erroneously, to lecture others on my biography—a presumption as unsupported as it is self-serving.”

“I must confess—I had never heard of you until your delusions were splattered across my screen.”

“Splattered” is a verb better left to ketchup or misfired paintball. The sentence lacks sophistication, and “I must confess” is a rhetorical sigh, not a claim. A scholar rebuts with citation, not confession. It reeks of something penned hastily in a King’s Cross public house, before last orders.

Violations:

• Vulgar verb usage
• Self-referential tone

Correction: “I had not encountered your name in serious circles prior to this spectacle, and I fear that acquaintance has not improved opinion.”

“A ghostwriter? A figment of someone’s inflated ego? A chatbot on steroids?”

This is not an argument. This is a Twitter thread. Each phrase lacks a verb; each is a stunted stump where a sentence once might have grown. “Chatbot on steroids” is a phrase so overused it now belongs to the graveyard of dying tech analogies. It reads like a pub quiz team brainstorming insults after three rounds of gin.

Violations:

• Fragmented rhetoric
• Slang and informal constructs
• Incomplete clause structures

Correction: “One wonders whether you are a silent hand behind borrowed words, a construct of borrowed bluster, or simply a mimic programmed for provocation.”

“You boldly proclaimed I only had an O-level certificate before joining the army. Oh, how original.”

No citation. No evidence. No structure. “Boldly proclaimed” is empty flourish. “Oh, how original” is the sneer of a schoolboy, not the argument of a gentleman. Were this line uttered in a Cambridge common room, it would be followed swiftly by the gentle closing of doors to future conversation.

Violations:

• No punctuation after “proclaimed”
• Weak sarcasm without proof
• Juvenile tone

Correction: “If your claim regarding my academic record is based on more than tavern talk, I suggest you provide evidence. Otherwise, your originality is as shallow as your grammar.”

Next time, Colonel, less caffeine, less cigarette and more citations.

Please see one of my previous articles about Sam Sarr: IN THE SAM SARR VS. GAF, THE VERDICT IS OUT – Gambia