By Ebrima G. Sankareh, Editor in- Chief
Predictably, Gambian President Yahya Jammeh has sacked the Dean of the Gambian Cabinet, Trade& Employment Minister Susan Waffa Ogoo barely five months after his re-election as Head of State. In a release from State House read over state radio and TV, Gambians were told interalia, that “the President of the Republic of The Gambia, Alhaji Dr. Yahya A. J.J. Jammeh, acting under powers conferred on him by Section 71(4) B of the Constitution has relieved Minister Waffa Ogoo of her Cabinet appointment with immediate effect.”
A Library Science & English Literature graduate of the University of Ghana, Legon and Loughborough University of Technology, UK, Susan Waffa Ogoo was a librarian and later adjunct English lecturer at The Gambia College from 1979 to1994 when her former housemate Lt. Yahya Jammeh led a four-man military coup that ousted the constitutional government of Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara. Jammeh then appointed this unassuming madam to the Tourism portfolio. Evidently, Susan had a meteoric rise only because she tended to Yahya Jammeh pretty well during their formative years at the Tamba’s compound at Kanifing.
Since that fateful Friday, July 22nd. 1994 she has been a Minister in the government and saw its painful transition from a military junta to a kakistocratic civilian regime with a human rights record that now rivals Idi Amin’s Uganda. She could be described as the Dean of the Gambian Cabinet because thanks to her proximity to the corridors of power, she outlived most of her colleagues of more than 50-sacked ministers since the coup. One of them, Finance Minister Ousman Koro Ceesay was killed and his ministerial Mercedes set ablaze. Susan was deeply shaken by Koro’s mysterious death and there is evidence aplenty that she had personally talked to Edward Singhateh to boost up the security apparatus of the Civilian ministers at the time.
For those of us who knew Susan well before the coup and who have been observing every step that Jammeh takes, this sacking is not the least surprising. It can be recalled that in the aftermath of the normal dissolution of Cabinet towards the September presidential election, Susan Waffa Ogoo was among the last batch of Ministers to be appointed. And when she was finally re-appointed, she was moved from Tourism to Trade albeit, with reservations. By a twist of irony, Susan’s former English student at The Gambia College, Angella Bernadette Colley was appointed as Tourism Minister in the same fashion that she too was originally appointed- family tie.
The next Minister who may not survive Yahya Jammeh’s proverbial electric broom that ferociously sweeps every square foot of Gambian soil is Foreign Affairs Secretary Bala Garba Jahumpa. Like Susan, he too is a survivor and was only re-appointed thanks to some last minute string pulling by the acidic Banjul mafia, to which Bala although highly incompetent, belongs. In Jammeh’s Gambia, those who pay the political pipe piper, a sneaky bunch of political operatives called sycophants, blow the flute.
For now though it remains to be seen whether “Su” as we affectionately called her, will return to academia or just lay low and watch as most of her colleagues have done. With a high profile resume that boasts of a Presidential decoration, the prestigious “Officer of the Order of the Republic of The Gambia”-(ORG), she too, can hang on to that memorabilia to reminisce over the dictatorship and may be, pen her memoirs in a novel.
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