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President Jammeh gives D3million dowry to new wife

--Dispatches memo to all foreign missions

By Ebrima G. Sankareh, Editor-In-Chief

EXACTLY two months to our scoop that Gambia’s megalomaniac Head of state, Yahya Jammeh, weds Ms. Alima Sallah (The Gambia Echo June 14, 2010), and the shameful silence and indignation that greeted our report, we report yet again, based on the veracity of our unimpeachable sources, that President Jammeh gives three million Gambian dalasis ($125,000 US dollars) as traditional dowry to his bride, Alima Sallah.

Alima Sallah, 18, Gambia's new First Lady 

            Over the past two months, we have read with amazement, the irksome statements and tasteless pedantic demagoguery from some of the most rabid rogues of the Jammeh network, each trying to discredit our scoop as utter false and today, like before, we stand with relief that our scoop has passed the test of time leaving our egg-head detractors in utter shame. For better or worse, Gambian president, Yahya Jammeh, now has a second wife in the person of Madam Alima Sallah, the daughter of career civil servant and current Gambian Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, O. G. Sallah, and famed beautician, Zahra Miknas.

         According to our most trusted Kissy Kissy Mansa, just this Monday, President Jammeh instructed for a diplomatic dispatch to be sent to all Gambian foreign missions, announcing his marriage to an 18-year old girl from the lush suburbs of Fajara. Curiously though and by a cruel twist of concomitant irony, it was Fajara that stood out in Jammeh’s anti-corruption rhetoric when he seized power 16-years ago, promising to fix corruption and bring in a trinity of transparency, accountability and probity; lofty words that have since faded into political oblivion. Today, the same shameless lieutenant, this hitherto unknown political quantity, masquerading as Gambia’s Moses or a Jesus, has become the exact antithesis of a dude dying to fix corruption and in fact, becomes the most corruptible Gambian ever since the inception of that poverty-ravaged mini-state. In Jammeh therefore, are circumfused all the ingredients of greed, hypocrisy, nastiness, political chicanery, vindictiveness and malfeasance, an utterly despicable dictator with a propensity for brutality who is increasingly pushing this once peaceful state into the brink of political paralysis. Perish the sentiments that Jammeh was a savior who came to cleanse The Gambia of its filth. On the contrary, Jammeh is the real devil!

            Reveals Kissy Kissy Mansa, all Gambian diplomatic and foreign missions have since been sent the diplomatic dispatch, Monday August 16, 2010, announcing Yahya Jammeh’s official marriage to Alima Sallah and instructing all Ambassadors to immediately write congratulatory letters to the Gambian leader notoriously insisting to be addressed as Professor. Apart from his high school education and a two-month police training crash program in Alabama, USA, Jammeh has a chain of doctored credentials among them, a catalogue of dubious diplomas from schools that only exist in his imagination.

            Quoting from the presidential memo, Kissy Kissy Mansa reveals that a high profile wedding is slated for mid-September at the end of the Holy month of Ramadan when President Jammeh will declare a week long national holiday in appreciation of his newly wed wife’s maintenance of her chastity until he deflowered her at Kanilai last month according to Gambian traditional beliefs. Unimpeachable sources reveal that the 3,000,000.00 Gambian dalasis dowry are in appreciation of the girl’s virginity and the Gambian leader has also promised to provide scholarships to all of her five siblings all the way to doctoral levels if they so choose.

            Significantly, several senior officials who spoke to this reporter on conditions of strictest confidentiality, particularly female officials, President Jammeh’s wedding of Alima is seen as a welcome development since according to most of these folks, the other First Lady, Zainab Jammeh, of mixed Moroccan and Guinean parentage, is largely viewed as an arrogant idiot out of tether and out of sync with the rhythm of the Gambian people. Others still argue that Zainab deserves a competitor in the State House because she has little or no respect for Gambians claiming that majority of our folk posses an offensive odor that she had to hire Philippinos as her maids. There are also wild allegations that Zainab hardly allows President Jammeh’s mom to play with her grandchildren, Mariam and Mohammed Jammeh lest the old woman infects them.

            On a more paradigmatic approach, others still argue, that it was high time Jammeh married a Gambian woman to circumvent the millions of dollars that Zainab has been spending like a drunken sailor in all her unending trips to expensive resorts and places around the Western world.      

            Whatever the rationale or theories abound, the fact remains that Yahya Jammeh is a genocidal murderer who came to office with anger and the cancer of jealousy that first set him in a collision course with the people of Fajara that he once hated and mistreated, seized their homes and froze their bank accounts based on purely circumstantial evidence. Lo and behold, the very people he threatened to send six feet deep are now his confidants, wheeler dealers and now, in-laws. And as has always been the case in history, his too is a story to be written at a later date when a new dispensation emerges out of the ashes of his maladministration, and a significant difference with Jawara’s down fall am afraid, is that Jammeh’s will be pretty nasty considering all the innocent people he and Edward Singhateh and co have liquidated in chilling circumstances. Lamentably, his disgraced alter ego, Edward David Singhateh, notoriously called the butcher of Banjul, is now consigned to his home, converted to Islam, changed his name to Ebrima Singhateh, married a young Fula girl and roaming the streets like a born again simpleton as if though, conversion to Islam and a name change are enough to redeem one of all those atrocities. Like Singhateh, another crop of henchmen, complicitious bandits, cold blooded murderers and torture agents continue to make noise all over the cosmos, some in unprecedented verbiage and facile foolishness, now masquerade as barons of human rights when they were complicitious. Sometimes it is good to be quiet because those who identified people to be executed are equally culpable before any credible court of law. I didn’t know is ignorance and “ignorance of the law (they say) is no excuse.”

            For now though, it remains to be seen how complicitious criminals can effectively promote justice in a country like ours where so many people and victims are sitting down with enormous incriminating evidence against those very complicitious cowards, anxiously awaiting for that day, when Jammeh and his gang of criminals will be confessing their heinous crimes to the Gambian people in a fashion reminiscent of that sacred Latin phrase, Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!