Zeinab The Mule

We are certainly not referring her as a cross between a male donkey and a female horse which is what a mule is.  We are, instead, using the term as used in the drug trade as someone who is used to smuggle something illicit across borders.

In the case of Zeinab Jammeh, she has been the carrier of Jammeh's loot to safety abroad, a role she's perfectly suited for.  She's non-Gambian, never mingles with Gambians and the few who know her say she despises Gambians.  She doesn't speak any of the local languages and doesn't care to learn during her 15 plus years of marrying to the Gambian dictator.

Unlike many First Ladies, this woman  is not involved in any known national or continental cause, except setting up a prize for the first baby born in the New Year. Although the prize bears her name, she is hardly around to present the prize herself.  Her interests lie elsewhere; say in Rabat, Paris, Washington, Guinea-Conakry, Nairobi and Casablanca.  Morocco and Guinea, the preferred African destinations to stash Gambia's meager resources because she's of Moroccan-Guinean extraction.  She owns and runs a shopping mall in her native Morocco, apartment and commercial buildings in Conakry and a $3.5 million mansion in Potomac, Maryland.

It is alleged that she's also CEO of a charter airline operation based in Nairobi.  Little else is known at this stage of our inquiries. This is how close we've come to explaining the three to four jets parked at Banjul International Airport.  The probe continues.

However as the international noose begins to tighten around her husband's neck, The Mule, has switched gears.  Her twice a month visits to Washington DC have been curtailed significantly.  She has not been seen in the area in two months, which must be a record.  The tracking of her movements in and out of Washington DC has been excellently handled by a local group of dissidents based in the American capital called Democratic Union of Gambian Dissidents or DUGA which in the Wollof language, and  for the benefit of our non-Wollof speakers including Zeinab Jammeh, means "to enter."   DUGA seems to specialize in haranguing the Jammeh family.  It was the same group that held the dictator in a mid-Manhattan hotel for several days resulting in him missing most of his U.N. General Assembly engagements last year.

With all the problems Zeinab and her husband face in Washington, Paris now seems to be the preferred destination of the Jammeh's, where we are told, they have bought another mansion.  The French capital is also where Jammeh receives his medical treatment, with Washington still the place where the Jammehs take their two kids for medical treatment, including regular immunizations shots.  Us natives, we have the Francis Small Teaching Hospital all to ourselves with the empty medical cabinets to go with it.  All this from a guy who staged a military coup d'etat because the former President took commercial flights to London on official missions and holidays, considered extravagant but sees nothing now with owning 4 jet aircrafts, all privately-owned but state maintained and operated.  We've asked the regime on numerous occasions as to why Jammeh and his wife are sticking us with the bill,  We have yet to receive a response.

The day of reckoning is not far when Gambians will demand an accounting of all of our limited resources shamelessly being smuggled out by Zeinab The Mule to Morocco, Guinea-Conakry, France and the United States.
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Note:  I have tried to stick with what we refer to in the vernacular as "ndeyi mbilami" but I have to get this off my chest.  This lady, apart from Isatou-Njie Saidy, is the worst to have happened to the Gambia after Yaya Jammeh. Now that I have said what I wanted to say about her for the longest, I am back to, you know who.