Sergeant 844 Bayo should be the one on trial for corruption and abuse of office, not Lamin Camara

Principal, Damfaye Basic School

Sgt. 844 Bayo and his hand-written note

The legal case of Lamin Camara, Principal of Damfaye Basic School has been adjourned and scheduled to resume on Wednesday, the 13th January at the Bansang Magistrate Court.

The school principal was initially charged with false publication and broadcasting, later amended to include a libel charge for "exposing a police officer on the internet." The "exposed" officer is the one shown here, named Sgt.844 Bayo of the Kaur police station who demanded a bribe of D 3,000 (approx. US$ 66 ) - equivalent to twice his monthly salary - from the school principal for escorting donated materials from Gambians resident in the United States for Damfaye School, their alma mater. The materials are gifts to the school and not the personal property of Mr. Camara.

Mr. Camara now stands charged with false publication and broadcasting for a story that appeared on the sidisanneh,blogspot.com which you can find here, and not at www.seedysanneh.com.  For the record, such site does not exist as at the date and time of publishing this blog post.

Yaya Jammeh and his security forces are notoriously corrupt, crafty and fond of fabrication of evidence and known for concocting charges against innocent Gambians.  Lamin Camara is one such victim who could not have published nor broadcast a blog post that was written and published by this blogger.

The libel charge is equally preposterous.  How can Mr. Lamin Camara libel Sgt. 844 Bayo when it was the author of the blog post in question who also reported on the unsavory character named Sergeant 844 Bayo who preys on drivers plying the Kaur road, and ordinary citizens who are always being forced to part with their money and valuable personal articles.  He is a predator who should be charged with corruption and abuse of office - the signature charge of Jammeh's regime.

We will continue to monitor the case.  Our next installment will look at the disgraceful performance of the first prosecution witness (PW1) who must have suffered from instant amnesia.

Here is a synopsis of the cross examination signaling what's in store in subsequent court proceedings:-

When Lamin Camara who was acting as his own legal counsel asked PW1 "how many days did I spend with you at Bansang police station? I can't recall. "When was I taken to Janjangburay remand and how? His response? "I can't respond even though I escorted you."  When was my case mentioned at Brikamaba Magistrate's Court?" He responded in his characteristic style "I am the one that escorted you to Brikamaba court but I can't recall."  Maybe at the 13th January proceedings the Magistrate should bring back this moron and ask him his name.  I bet you, he will not be able to recall his name.

Editor-in-Chief of Standard newspaper resigns, "pushed by professional disagreement."

Lamin Njie, former Editor-in-Chief of Standard

Lamin Njie, Editor-in-Chief of The Standard newspaper, handed in his resignation letter, yesterday, Wednesday, The Point newspaper reports.

The resignation is not only rare but highly unusual in that The Standard is said to be owned by Sheriff Bojang, a journalist himself who is currently serving as Minister of Information and official spokesperson of the dictatorial regime of Yaya Jammeh.

Resignations, in general, are rare, especially based on principle which is the reason cited by Mr. Njie,  He said in his letter of resignation that he was "pushed by professional disagreement."

"I felt the need to protect my reputation, editorial freedoms and independence", he said, and proceeded to list his accomplishments and what he termed as "landmark initiatives"during his brief (10 months) tenure as editor - a function he assumed at the time he succeeded Mr. Sheriff Bojang when he vacated the editorship for his current ministerial duties.

"I leave with a sense of pride and satisfaction that I have consistently upheld basic journalistic values."  He wished the paper well in parting company with.  Mr, Njie's resignation is consistent with universal journalistic values of avoiding the conflict of interest posed by the owner accepting a ministerial appointment that carries with it the responsibilities of  acting as the regime's spokesperson.  

In a dictatorship that has one of the most repressive press laws in the world, owning and operating a newspaper - even by remote control - and overseeing these repulsive laws indeed pose a moral and journalistic dilemma, a professional and moral conflict that no journalist with a moral conscience can sustain for long.  We salute Mr. Lamin Njie for the professional manner in which he handled both his functions as editor and the gracious manner he walked away from what clearly a moral dilemma for him.

Note:  We call attention to our readers that the online edition of The Standard has not been published for a month or so which may or may not any bearing on this story.  Visitors to the website are being advised that it is being upgraded.

The Gambia either has a Constitution or it doesn't

Dictator Yaya Jammeh of The Gambia

The lawlessness displayed in recent years by the regime of Yaya Jammeh has reached a crescendo with his proclamation that The Gambia is now an Islamic Republic, without national debate or notice of any kind.

The 1997 Constitution, tailor-made to the liking of the would-be dictator who worked behind the scenes to manipulate the final draft, states unambiguously that The Gambia is a Sovereign Secular Republic.

The fact that this particular clause is an entrenched clause, meaning it cannot be changed without a national referendum, means little to a lawless man whose only interest is to stay in power for as long as his shenanigans are tolerated by a traumatized population.

Yaya Jammeh has amended  The Gambia's Constitution more times in 21 years than the United States managed to amend its own in its nearly 240-year history. Of course, he could not have accomplished such a feat without the collaborative effort of a rubber stamp parliament that approves law that gives Yaya Jammeh the power to dismiss them from the National Assemble to which they were duly elected by the people - their constituents - to represent their interests.

These illegalities were and, still are, encouraged by legal advisers, including more than a dozen or so Justice Ministers who have aided and abetted the dictator in the usurpation of the power initially vested in the people in a Constitution that was already flawed coming out of the government printing presses back in 1997.

Just like in Yaya Jammeh's security force - arrest and then investigate - his legislative agenda is similarly unconventional and highly self-serving, dictated by expediency than by protecting and promoting the general welfare of Gambians.  It is all about protecting and perpetuating the tyrannical rule of Yaya Jammeh.  Thus the Constitution is treated with contempt to embarrassing levels. Toilet paper, naturally, comes to mind.

Principal of Damfaye School is innocent

Lamin Camara - Head Master

It is absurd to accuse an innocent man whose only crime is to dedicate his entire professional life in the service of Gambian children as qualified teacher, who, according to sources, have chosen to stay in The Gambia to teach rather than migrate to Europe or the United States when he had the opportunity.

Our advise to the regime is:  Free an innocent man so that he can go back to his classroom and look after our kids and grand kids.

Lamin Camara, the principal of Damfaye was in Banjul to collect project material sent by well-meaning and caring Gambians living in the United States to complete a project at Damfaye School.

We do not know Lamin Camara and have never communicated with him.  Therefore, he could not have provided information at any time to the Sidi Sanneh Blog - sidisanneh.blogspot.com - or to anyone associated with the Blog.  The charges against Lamin Camara are trumped up which should be dropped.

We will refrain from going beyond the disclaimer and our original story that you can access here. What we can say at this point is this case exposes the level of corruption and how deep the scourge have become, permeating the entire police and security forces.

The system put in place by Yaya Jammeh - Sgt. Bayo is a former Green Boy - is corrupt to the core. Sergeant 844 Bayo who patrol the Kaur vicinity is known to be notoriously corrupt who demand bribes from drivers, passengers and poor farmers. We will have more to say about these criminals who pose as law enforcement officers.    FREE LAMIN CAMARA

Gambians bury their heads in the sand while Jammeh wreaks havoc on the country

"From the sublime to the ridiculous" was how a friend put it to me recently, talking about my country - The Gambia.

The remark was prompted by the recent decision by Gambian dictator to proclaim the country an Islamic Republic, contravening Gambian law.  The Yaya Jammeh- inspired 1997 Constitution is very clear as to the status of the Gambia as being a Sovereign, Secular Republic.

His proclamation came without national debate or warning and thus came as a surprise to many Gambia despite the idiosyncratic and erratic behavior of one of the remaining old-style African dictators in the Idi Amin Dada mold.  If Gambians were surprised at the declaration, the Christian community appeared to be in a state of shock.  It was reported that church attendance was higher than normal on the Sunday following the declaration, suggesting a disquiet (however suppressed) in a community that has lived harmoniously and side by side with the Muslim majority.

Jammeh's contempt of the Constitution that legitimized his military-turned-civilian rule is legendary. His declaration of the Gambia an Islamic Republic was immediately followed by a bizarrely crafted government circular - the first of the new year - informing civil servants "are no longer allowed to expose their hair during official working hours effective December 31, 2015."  "Female staff are urged" the circular continues "to use head tie and neatly wrap their hair."

Personnel Management Office (PMO), the issuing agency, has been sidelined by the dictatorship in the human resource management of the civil service since Jammeh seized power in 1994.  All civil servants are hired and fired by the dictator.

The sublime, according to my friend, was when the country was considered one of the few multi-party democracies in Africa in the company of Mauritius and Botswana, swimming in a sea of single-party dictatorship.  Gambia took her rightful place in the community of nations under its first President in the 60s through the 90s when he was deposed by Yaya Jammeh in 1994. Gambia was the smallest country on the African continent but had one of the best managed free market economies. The country's human rights record earned it the headquarters of the African Union's (then OAU) African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights.

Under Jammeh, The Gambia has descended into the ridiculous with bizarre pronouncements and threats to his enemies, real and perceived.  He sees nothing wrong with threatening to slit the throats of gays and lesbians and the claim to have discovered the cure for AIDS.  His medical quackery extended beyond AIDS to include the cure for diabetes, high blood pressure and numerous other diseases.

Jammeh unilaterally withdrew Gambia's 48-year membership of the Commonwealth without consultation, neither with Gambians nor with regional leaders.  His reason for leaving was that the Commonwealth was a colonial relic that belongs in the dustbin of history - a withdrawal that was preceded by his abrupt and unceremonious severance of diplomatic ties with Taiwan that shocked diplomats in both Banjul and Taipei.  Jammeh's Ambassador in Taipei only learned about the diplomatic breakup when he was summoned to the Foreign Minister to be served notice to leave the country.

On the human rights front, Jammeh had murdered, extra-judicially executed, tortured, maimed, imprisoned and exiled journalists.  He'd gunned down 14 unarmed school children who were demonstrating against renegade security elements who had caused the death of a young student and had raped another student.  He had inflicted so much pain and suffering on Gambians, they have been traumatized into submission.

Gambia's economy, the crown jewel Jammeh inherited from Sir Dawda K. Jawara, has being degraded to a level that it now ranked 16th in the 16-Member ECOWAS from 3rd position behind Cote d'Ivoire and Cabo Verde when he seized power in 1994, transforming the country in the process from being the "supermarket of the sub-region" to its current economic basket case status. .        

Jammeh's New Year message was deceitful, contemptuous and defiant

In his 2016 New Year message to Gambians, Jammeh boasted of reducing hunger and malnutrition by 7.7% in 23 years which works out to an average annual of 0.36 per cent.   The population of The Gambia almost doubled during the same period from slightly over 1.0 million to 1.9 million.  No wonder, the incidence of poverty continues to increase at an alarming rate.  69 per cent of Gambians, according to UNDP Human Development Index, are living below the poverty line, defined as anyone living on $ 1.25 or less.  The Gambia is still low income despite the promise by Jammeh to transform the country into a Middle Income Country (MIC) by 2020; it is still food-deficit country with a subsistence economy despite his repeated and unfulfilled promises since 1994 food (rice) self-sufficiency.   

Children in Central River and Upper River Divisions are suffering from kwashiorkor which is an extreme form of malnutrition that the regime of Jammeh has been concealing from the public for three consecutive years.  And according to Jammeh’s own Finance Minister, there is no respite in sight when he warned the National Assembly a couple of weeks ago that 2016 is going to be another difficult year, after two successive years of decline of agricultural production.

The nation’s farmers were expecting to be informed of the market arrangements for this year’s groundnut buying season and about the legal status of the Gambia Groundnut Corporation (GGC), a bankrupt Agency that ironically has monopoly over the sub-sector.  What is the legal status of the proposed National Food Security, Processing and Marketing Corporation (NFSPMC)? Has the GGC been subsumed by NFSPMC as mooted by the regime several months ago?  Gambian farmers feel abandoned by their government because it is January and still no official announcement has been made regarding the producer price for their produce.  These should be the priority areas of the regime.  Let us get our national priorities right.

Yaya Jammeh also tried - in the lamest of fashion - to explain to Gambians, and particularly to Gambian Christians, why he declared The Gambia an Islamic Republic, without national discourse or any form of warning of any kind.  His rationale for tampering with the secularity of the state is that Muslims constitute the majority which, in the eyes of a myopic and erratic leader, is sufficient – damn what anyone thinks.  If majority rule justifies preemption of minority rights, then Sir Dawda missed his chance of renaming the country The Islamo-Mandinka Republic of The Gambia.  

Jammeh also used the occasion to telegraph to the IMF, World Bank, AfDB and the rest of the development community that he intends to ignore IMF advise, by continuing to intervene in the foreign exchange market.  He evidently had convinced himself that his intervention will correct what he described as “certain distortions and market failures that resulted in the continuous dwindling of the value of the dalasi against foreign currencies.”   Yaya Jammeh did not stop at that.  He proceeded to suggest that what he’s doing is no different from what the U.S. Federal Reserve or the Bank of England would have done in managing a financial crisis – an absolute misrepresentation of the facts.  These Central Banks are independent of the executive branches of their respective governments as the CBG was empowered by law.  But since Jammeh is the law, I guess we are at the mercy of the dictator.

By his unilateral actions in the foreign exchange markets, Jammeh has set us back to pre-January 1986, i.e. before the dalasi was floated and an interbank market for foreign exchange created, allowing the dalasi to float freely – a system that served the Gambia and its economy well. Yaya Jammeh is determined to destroy that too, as he’s destroyed so many component parts of a financial infrastructure that was painstakingly put together by Gambians at tremendous cost. The retrenchment that took place during the Economic Recovery Program that resulted in many Gambians losing their jobs is a distance but painful reminder of the sacrifices that many made to reconfigure Gambia’s economy that was the envy of our regional partners.  Jammeh has squandered it all.

 

Realizing that his market interference is not supported, not only by the IMF and other donors but by a hamstrung and marginalized business community, he tried, in the same message, to say that his regime “subscribes to the principles and spirit of the free market system”, expecting Gambians will buy his bale of goods.  Happily and finally, Gambians know better and can now see through his every bumbling move.  Jammeh will destroy the economy for his own individual selfish business interest.  It is such a human catastrophe that a head of state legally permitted to engage in business,  consuming all his time at the expense of the economic and social welfare of not only the Nation but individual businesses that must compete with him in a rigged market.

As we usher in the New Year, all opponents of this incompetent regime must rededicate ourselves to the restoration of democracy and the rule of law in a country we love and hold dear.  We must, at the same time, recommit ourselves to the peaceful removal of the cancer, from Gambia's our body politic.       

Senegalese President Macky Sall unilaterally reduces presidential term from 7 to 5 years

President Macky Sall of Senegal 

President Macky Sall of Senegal has announced the reduction of the presidential term from the current seven to five.

The unilateral decision will take effect immediately, preempting the need for a referendum as originally envisaged.

The decision also clears a huddle that parliamentarians were concerned about i.e the cost of conducting such an electoral exercise as well as ending what has been described as "confusion among politicians over the holding of the referendum".

The presidential decree means that the next presidential elections in Senegal will now take place in 2017 when Macky Sall will be seeking his second term,  Should he win, it will be his final term since he is term-limited,

The seven-year term has been constitutional limit since Senegal gained independence from France in 1960.  President Wade promised to reduce it to five during his 2000 presidential campaign but failed to fulfill the promise to the electorate.  That promise is now being fulfilled.

The decision will certainly be welcomed across the continent in general and among President Macky Sall's colleagues in the ECOWAS region, all  but two of whom have agreed to presidential term limits in the 16-Member regional organization.

The United States and the European Union countries will also welcome the decision as a measure that can only strengthen Senegal's democracy which is already the pride of Africa.

Only The Gambia and Togo opposed the proposal - a proposal that enjoys ECOWAS-wide support, especially among ordinary citizens who are tired of dictatorships that have contributed in a significant measure to the general backwardness and lack of economic progress which usually accompanies the absence of democracy and the rule of law.

We hope colleagues of the Senegalese president in the region and across the continent will emulate him by committing themselves to term limits which are a sure and certain way of eliminating harsh and brutal dictatorship that countries, like The Gambia, under a 21-year dictatorship of Yaya Jammeh, are undergoing presently.