The Verdict
It Is Time To Get Rid Of Our Lunatic Head Of State
By Adama Hawa in Banjul
I am now quite convinced that President Yahya Jammeh is indeed suffering from some mental deraignment, particularly when I watched him last night (Thursday) being interviewed by Momodou Sanyang (Putojat), Director General of the GRTS, talking about his latest Medical Myth Busting (MMB), the curing of infertility.
It was quite embarrassing to hear him talking with confidence that he has the power to drive away evil spirits which he said are usually responsible for causing infertility amongst women. I am really concerned how the rest of the civilized world would see Gambians when the person we have repeatedly elected as our leader behaves in such a disgraceful manner.
Anyone in his/her right frame of mind would question the sanity of those Gambians who not only continue to vote for Yahya Jammeh, but who also treat him like a super human being who indeed has all those crazy supernatural powers that he is claiming to possess. It is real shame to see people who are supposed to possess some basic intelligence treat Yahya Jammeh like a respectable person instead of the lunatic buffoon that he really is. It was amazing that throughout the two-hour programme on GRTS, Dr. Tamsir Mbowe, who he recently disgraced and removed as Secretary of State for Health, was not only sitting there always nodding his egg-shaped head like a lizard to everything that Yahya said, but he was even interjecting sometimes to confirm the superstitious claims made by the lunatic.
As Gambians, we should not only be embarrassed by such antics by our Head of State, but it has become quite urgent for everyone of us, both individually and collectively to do something as soon as possible to rid ourselves and our beloved country of this embarrassment. How we are going to do it, I am not so sure, but it is certainly an urgent assignment that we should all embark on.
Even though The Gambia is poor and very small, with hardly any influence on the rest of Africa or the world, it had been quite respected throughout the world. However, with the emergence of a lunatic Head of State like Yahya Jammeh, this peaceful little tourist paradise has now been transformed into the laughing stock of the world, with him not only making a fool of himself and the whole country by claiming to have the supernatural powers to cure HIV/AIDS and all other incurable diseases, but also acquiring the reputation of being a brutal dictator who kills his own people at will as well as all those he suspects of threatening his power base. We have all seen how he ordered the killing of several people, including Koro Ceesay, Deyda Hydara, Omar Barrow and 14 innocent students whose only crime had been to engage in a peaceful demonstration against the prevailing unfairness of his government, and of course the more than 50 innocent Ghanaian and other West African immigrants who tried to use The Gambia to migrate to Europe. We have also seen how he had recently been using crude methods of eliminating those he had used to do most of his dirty work. The most prominent examples had been Daba Marenah and four other security officials he killed after the so-called coup attempt in 2006, the killing of Almamo Manneh, as well as the latest clever elimination of his chief torturers like Tumbul Tamba (Pol Pot) and Musa Jammeh (Maliya Mungu), who both died from mysterious illnesses, probably from an Alexander Litvinenko type of poisoning. It is possible that he used his strange medicinal concoctions to eliminate them so that they would never be in a position to give evidence against the evil deeds he ordered them to carry out.
This is indeed a good lesson to all those who still allow themselves to be used by Yahya Jammeh to harass and intimidate the innocent people of The Gambia and the non-Gambians in our midst. Those who immediately come to mind are Alagie Martin (Lagos), Kausu Camara (Bombarde), Malick Jatta, Bora Colley and Sana Manjang, all of them presently in the army, as well as people like Ousman Sonko, the Secretary of State for the Interior, and all those who continue to torture people detained in the various detention centres dotted throughout the country.
Editor's Note:Famous Youth Leader Wassa Janneh was tortured by Yahya Jammeh's butcher boys. Janneh now lives in exile in New York while his tortuters are dying one after the other. I think the Community Court of West Africa should get in touch with Janneh whose case is similar to that of Musa Saidykhan.