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Ex-NIA Director Samba Bah Dies

By EBRIMA G. SANKAREH, Editor-In-Chief

Unimpeachable sources nestled within the corridors of state power report that Mr. Samba Bah, erstwhile Interior Minister and erstwhile Director General of The Gambia’s most predacious National Intelligence Agency (NIA) has died of mysterious circumstances on Thursday. Says our State House operative, ever since his sacking as Interior Secretary in the pre-prelude to the failed coup of March, 2006 and his subsequent brief detention at The Gambia’s Mile II Prisons, Samba Bah has been suffering from multiple ailments that sent him to the United Kingdom for treatment. “If the Gambian people fail to tackle the bull by the horns, President Jammeh will eliminate all potential witnesses to atrocities committed by his regime before the day of reckoning and what we have witnessed in the past year is ample testimony to this” argues our State House correspondent. It can be recalled that Messrs: Munirou Darboe and Pa Jallow who succeeded Bah as NIA Directors had also died of similar circumstances in the past six months like wise Major Musa Jammeh, Captain Momodou Tumbul Tamba and Ousman Sanyang to name a few officers of the regime.

Until his appointment as Interior Secretary after the sacking of Ousman Badjie in 2006, Samba Bah was a career intelligence officer. He enlisted in The Gambia Police Force in the early 1970s after his graduation from High School. He was a Criminal Investigation Division Agent until the launching of the National Security Services (NSS) the forerunner to the notorious NIA where Bah rose through the ranks to become Deputy Chief to Kebba Ceesay. Two years before the 1994 coup Bah had warned of a political uprising that was meant to oust the PPP regime from power but after investigations failed to reach conclusions he was suspended without pay and subsequently had his services terminated. Soon after the PPP regime was ousted on July 22, 1994, the junta sought after Samba Bah and appointed him new NSS Chief. With the blessings of the Armed Forces Provincial Council that toppled the PPP regime, Bah was given Carte blanch powers and within a brief period he had changed the name of the NSS to the NIA. He went on a very serious house cleansing exercise that was seen by many as vindictive especially, towards Kebba Ceesay loyalists, his former boss who was at the time languishing behind the harrowing walls of Mile II Prisons. With Daba Marena as Operations Director and Landing Badjie as a key lieutenant, Samba Bah and team spearheaded an intelligence agency that will go down in African history as the most predacious, most violent and most vindictive. Although a very affable and charismatic character, a brilliant operator with a highly disciplined persona, in the end, Bah was more loyal to Yahya Jammeh and Edward Singhateh than the Gambian Constitution and like most officers of the regime; he too, allowed serious lapses of judgment to prevail over his code of conduct. In sum, the NIA was Samba Bah and Samba Bah was the NIA, a fact no lie, no denial can ever erase from history.