The Verdict

 

Neneh Macdouall-Gaye: What goes around comes around

 

By Adama Hawa

 

The recent appointment of Neneh Macdouall-Gaye as Managing Director of the pro-government Daily Observer, barely three months after her sacking as Secretary of State for Communication, and Information Technology, is quite reminiscent of what happened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the early 1960s when senior members of the Chinese Communist Party and the government used to be deployed to the country-side to do manual labour in state run collective farms.

 

It is quite interesting to see Neneh being plugged from the highest echelons of the regime to the insignificant position of head of a party propaganda organ like the Observer. Who knows, probably her next appointment would be as chief cook at the State House or the chief game warden at President Jammeh’s zoo at Kanilai. It appears that she will take whatever is given to her, for the very fact that she completely alienated the entire Gambian society during her tenure as Information Secretary, all in a bid to please the master. As a result therefore, she is very unlikely to get any more respect and sympathy from the society and her only salvation lies in taking whatever crumps the master gives her in order to survive.

 

Therefore, as long as President Jammeh’s Cabinet colleagues continue to treat him like a demi-god with supernatural powers, he will forever continue to in turn, treat them like trash, as well as continue to trample upon their basic human rights and those of all Gambians.

 

It is indeed quite embarrassing to see our Head of State behave like he is one rung above the rest of the human race, claiming to have the cure for all the incurable diseases through spiritual means. Gambians certainly do not deserve this type of a leader, and we should all hope and pray to the Almighty to end this embarrassment he has placed on us, apparently because of our own gullibility.

 

Of course, as they say, people get the type of government they deserve. Therefore, Gambians, especially, morally bankrupt people like Neneh and some of her former Cabinet colleagues, as well as many of the senior government officials, deserve exactly the type of daily humiliations they get from Yahya Jammeh and his collaborators. This is because through their gullibility and lack of self-confidence, they have allowed Yahya to trample upon their rights with ease as they continue to treat him like a super human in whose hands lay their survival and destiny.

 

There is no doubt that if at the very beginning, they had shown Yahya that he was just one amongst equals rather than treating him like a demi-god, he would not today be manifesting such arrogance and lack of respect for everyone, and behaving like someone who knows everything more than anyone else.

 

Therefore, people like Neneh deserve every bit of the humiliation that they get from Yahya, because they helped to create the monster that has now been terrorising the whole country, with total disrespect for the people’s basic human rights.

 

As regards Nenneh’s predecessor at the Daily Observer, Dida Halake, the chickens have come home to roost. We can all recall how a few weeks ago, he was shouting and ranting at the top of his voice in blind support of the regime, and in the process, insulting all Gambians, particularly members of the Gambia Press Union, whom he said were not his partners but rather as tools of the opposition.

 

However, with the humiliation he is currently under-going in the hands of the very people he was defending, one would wonder what would now be in his mind, and whether he has regretted behaving in such a gang-ho fashion just to get Yahya Jammeh’s attention. He was detained for several days at the very Kotu police station at which he caused the detention of Deputy Permanent Secretary, Momodou Njie, after he reported that innocent soul to the authorities for saying the obvious truth that the Observer did not belong to Amadou Samba but to Yahya Jammeh.

 

It is therefore quite hard to see how this same Dida Halake would expect those same people he was insulting to now sympathise with his predicament. If indeed he had any ‘pure blood’ running in his veins, as soon as he gets out of this problem, he would go back to wherever he came from instead of staying put with the hope that he would also be recycled like Neneh and other puppets of the regime