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| Ebrima Sillah, Information Minister |
The Gambia's Information Minister, Ebrima Sillah, was the first government official to address the $752,544.42 bank transfer that was deposited in the First Lady's foundation that carries her name - Fatoumata Barrow Foundation (FaBB). The amount was electronically transferred from the industrial and Commercial Bank of China to the GTBank in Banjul via Hong Kong. Although this transfer took place last December, it was not until August this year that it became known to the public that led to a barrage of questions from journalists. political pundits and opposition party operatives.
The questions linger to date which led to the surprising attempt by the Information Minister to provide answers resulting, in our view, to more questions, casting doubt to the veracity of his account of events. According to Mr. Sillah, when the president was about to travel to China last December, the officials realized five days before the trip that there was no money in the budget to charter the aircraft. So they, presumably meaning the President's Office staff, decided to seek financial assistance from "friendly partners", one of which turns out to be a Chinese company angling for a contract with the government, to pay for the cost of chartering an aircraft from a Portuguese company to ferry the presidential delegation to Beijing.
Asked as to why the amount amount was lodged into a private Foundation created and led by the wife of the president and not in a government account, the minister explained that the Secretary General advised that the funds would not have been available in time to pay for the trip. Therefore, the best option was to deposit the amount into the Foundation's account at the GTBank.
The minister insisted that the "First Lady she was not even aware of it...she was never consulted" before the amount was deposited into an account. Although she was a signatory to the account, the minister added, she never managed the account. But when it became imperative to redirect the money to the aircraft leasing company, the First Lady had to step in to ensure that the transfer was effected.
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| Fatou Ceesay, FaBB Foundation |
Acknowledging the unorthodox - but not necessarily the shadiness of the - approach, financing the Head of State's mission to China that requires the involvement of a Chinese company poses a challenge to the Barrow government. When asked the apparent conflict of interest and the ethical dilemma the financial transaction posed, the minister apologized profusely for the error in judgment for the government to chose this route of financing and admitted severally that the matter could have been handled better. He further promised that, in future, the Barrow government he described as a "listening government", will not repeat the same mistakes again.
When the scandal first broke last August, eight months after the transfer from China was made, Ambassador-at-Large Ms. Fatou Ceesay, a member of the Board of the Fatoumatta Barrow Foundation and an influential member of the Barrow circle, promised that an investigation will be conducted. However, she immediately follow it with the warning that the Board was under no obligation to share the results of the investigations because the Foundation was a private entity and thus was not subject to public scrutiny. What has changed?
Gambians are now being fed information that is presumably coming from State House, unless told otherwise. When we contacted him to find out whether the customary government press release was imminent given the importance of the issue, the Information Minister, who was en route to the airport to join his flight home, told us that the answers he gave to the United Democratic Party's Bantaba TV interview program "were honest, based on what I know about the matter."
If the minister's responses were based on investigations conducted by the State House, when will we get to hear from FaBB Board member Fatou Ceesay on the outcome of their own investigations, if different from the version shared by the Information Minister. We look forward to hearing from her or a representative of the Board of Directors.
In moving forward, however, the financial entanglement of the Foundation with State House is one more reason the private entity argument must be put to rest based on information shared by the Information Minister. As we conclude this blog post, we'd like to leave our readers with the following question which we will pursue in subsequent installments: If the Fatoumatta Foundations is a private entity by law, why would a private entity provide its privately- held and -operated account for the purposes of funnelling funds from a state-owned public Chinese company to finance the foreign travels of the Head of State - a public official?
The fact that the Finance Ministry appears to have been circumvented in these scandals suggests a far greater problem than meets the eye.
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Note: In subsequent blog posts we will be looking into the implications of the extra-budgetary activities of the State House and the challenges they pose in managing our public finances and the need to change our attitudes
