A locally-recruited staff of the Washington DC Embassy, an
American of Filipino decent, was forced to resign by the Deputy Head of Mission,
Sheikh Omar Faye, after numerous years of service, according to online paper
reports.
The staff was accused of leaking information to the online
papers, and others opposed to the regime of Yaya Jammeh about the travel
arrangements of the recently appointed Foreign Minister, Neneh MacDouall-Gaye, who
was resident in the United States as refugee from the same government. The circumstances surrounding her secret
departure and subsequent appointment, all as a matter of days, are still
unclear.
The question that immediately comes to mind is why would an
American-Filipino, who has no apparent stake in the politics of The Gambia, and
appears to have never visited this tiny West African country, pass information
to online newspapers operated by opponents of the regime.
By all accounts, the locally-recruited staff, though small
and dwindling in number, are the heavy-lifters. Those remaining may, perhaps, be feeling that they
are being scapegoated by the Deputy Head of Mission and his Gambian staff
because they cannot point fingers at any one among themselves for fear of
recrimination from Banjul. Therefore, it
is more convenient to blame mismanagement of, and failures in, handling Embassy
information on locally recruited instead of civil service staff.
The fact that Neneh MacDouall-Gaye transformed herself from
a refugee to Foreign Minister of the same dictator that made her a refugee in
the first instance is the baffling part of the story. It has been established that she flew on the
dime of the Gambian taxpayers and not on a ‘cheap air ticket’ as she claimed,
and was issued with a temporary Gambian passport from the Embassy.
