President Jammeh Imposes Midnight Curfew On Gambia

By Ebrima G. Sankareh, Editor-In-Chief             

Unimpeachable sources close to the corridors of state power, say that Gambian President Yahya Jammeh intends to impose a midnight curfew on the West African state. According to our State House operative Kissy Kissy Mansa, effective immediately, any woman found on the streets after 12:00am will be arrested and detained and any man found outside at the same hour without genuine reasons, will be arrested, detained and charged with felony and upon conviction will be sent to Mile II Prisons.

This local man uses culture to express his freedom but now, the Gambian leader wants to seize all our freedoms.

While Kissy will not say what may have led the errant Head of state to such extremes, political observers link the move to the recent military purge in which the Country’s celebrity-like Chief of Defense Staff, Lt. General Lang Tombong Tamba, was sacked and dismissed from The Gambia National Army. Tamba was axed along four other senior military officers among them, a Captain Lamin Fatty who had close ties with the country’s former junta strongman, Captain Edward David Singhateh. Crucially, our source said, Captain Fatty was arrested at his native Essau village, Friday night and whisked to the local Barra Police Station, 7-sea miles off the capital, Banjul. Says Kissy Kissy Mansa, Captain Fatty under military escort (two SUVs) spent the night in detention at the Barra station and proceeded to Banjul’s Serious Crimes Unit, Saturday morning for questioning relating to State security. After what our unassailable source describes as “five grueling hours of interrogations, Fatty was let go.”

In another twist reveals Kissy, President Jammeh has appointed Captain Ebrima Bah as the country’s Military Inspector.

Meanwhile, the mini-West African state under Jammeh’s dictatorship since July, 1994 is once again, gripped in fear and uncertainty given the combustible combination of rumours and political innuendoes about the ramifications of the high profile sackings in the morally strapped Gambian military.

Like his predecessors, General Tamba is now reeling from the bad fall that is all too often characteristic of those who go to bed with strange bedfellows like Gambia’s cantankerous leader, Yahya Jammeh. Our sources report that groups of sympathizers and friends have been milling around his wife’s house expressing their heart-felt sympathies to the disgraced General who only hours before his sacking was probably more popular than the tyrant whom he bowed to defend at whatever cost. Today, like Baboucarr Jatta, Tamba too will join the list of disgraced officers and may be, be recycled once again. Remember, he was once fired and later reinstated! So was Jatta too!

Back tracking our student days at the Nusrat High School, I vividly remember in Lang Tombong Tamba (or LTT as Mr. A. K. Savage called him), a phenomenally disciplined, very sober, very calm fellow and a very shy personality at that. In fact, in late 1995, Lang Tombong, Alieu Bah (now at Mile II), Lawyer Lamin Camara, Tamsir Sallah and our late Head Girl, Amie Sowe and I, visited the Berending Secondary School in the NBD as members of the President’s Awards Scheme with our great Economics teacher who always stood towards us inlocoparentis, Eliman Njie. It was during this trip that I got to know this very shy, probably the most obedient peer I have ever encountered. Even after he graduated from Nusrat and enlisted in the Gendarmerie, Lang Tombong has never lost his sterling trademarks described above. The last time I saw and talked to Lang was in 1994 in the wee days of the coup and truth be told, he was not part of the group that ousted the Jawara regime but like the rest, he too had to join. What has always captured my imagination though, has always been how he allowed himself to be so immersed in Jammeh’s kleptocratic government knowing fully well, that one day, things will fall apart. Like the rest, all the best!