Well written Karamba. Truly well analysed! Good stuff for our history.
Congratulations.
Pa Small


>From: [log in to unmask]
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Yahya and Zainab Jammeh's overseas trips
>Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 15:45:31 EDT
>
>In a light drizzle on this mild summer Sunday, a chartered aircraft would
>depart from a suburban Washington, DC airport carrying Zainab Jammeh and a
>dozen other people after several days surjourn in DC. This would be the
>fourth such trip this lady has taken and on each of them she would be flown
>in on a special chartered flight with at least a dozen people in her
>entourage, the plane returns to Gambia while she and her coterie settle
>into
>a swank five star hotel in suites costing hundreds of dollars a night.
>After
>the duration of her stay usually a week or more, another chartered flights
>departs from Yundum and lands into one of the metro DC area airports, picks
>her and the ever present entourage and flies them back home. Excluding the
>exorbitant amounts of money she spends in boutiques in exclusive Georgetown
>and other high priced jaunts, the aggregate cost of these trips which stand
>at 8 round trips from metro DC to Yundum is in the millions of Dalasis. For
>each trip The Gambia government spends tens of thousands of dollars in jet
>fuel, landing fees, accommodation and perdiem for the entourage. The
>exclusive Washington Hospital Center where Zainab had her baby and continue
>to get post natal care bills out thousands of dollars to the Gambia
>government. This does not include the hefty bill incurred when she stayed
>in
>the pricey maternal suites in the days before and after her delivery. For
>that our treasury forked over a thousand dollars a night. Not a single one
>of
>her trips in the United States has ever been on behalf of our people or
>brought them an iota of a benefit. They have all been personal outings apar
>with those taken by well endowed monarchs. While thousands of Gambians lay
>convulsing in fetid hospital beds, or die premature deaths brought on by
>poor
>diets, unsafe drinking water or a million other afflictions associated with
>poverty, Yahya Jammeh and his wife are running travel bills approaching
>D20million this year alone. Not a single one of these trips has and will
>ever
>amount to anything but the outright robbery it really is. You would think
>for
>a guy who at D26,000 per month is paying himself the highest salary for any
>head of State either in absolute terms or in proportion to economy size
>would
>not further fleece the almost destitute people of his country. Instead he
>additionally pays himself tens of thousands of Dalasis for each night spent
>overseas in perdiem. This is the ONLY reason Yahya Jammeh is the only
>President that arrives first for every meeting and is always the last to
>depart.It is not an affinity for work or a strong desire among his
>colleagues
>to interact with him, on the contrary most self respecting leaders snicker
>at
>even an accidental meetings with him in conference floors. They view him as
>a
>nihilistic baffoon. President Obasanjo of Nigeria gave him a taste of what
>real Presidents really think of him in Cuba when the Group of 77 met there.
>He gave him a stern tongue lashing.Travelling is nothing but a cheating
>scheme for Yahya Jammeh. Take his most recent one for example. He ran off
>to
>Lusaka getting there early and leaving late on a chartered plane,and
>swiftly
>proceeded to Ukraine purporting to work on bilateral relationships between
>the Gambia and that far off East European nation more than 10,000 miles
>away.
>There is not going to be any fruitful or feasible commercial ties between
>the
>two countries and the only reason he went to Kiev is because someone was
>willing to receive him and he has a plane to get there.Most importantly he
>would get additional thousands in perdiem . With all of the available
>resources being squandered on fraud-laden trips, real and meaningful
>representation buy qualified diplomats and other envoys have been given
>short
>shrift.  Our embassies are nothing but depleted outposts led by people like
>John .P. Bojang out here in the United States who can hardly order a pizza
>much less represent a nation. He presides over a chronically understaffed
>and
>underfunded bereau with virtually no access to the U.S government. All they
>do is to sit and yawn all day . The only thing they are good  at is to
>secure
>first class bookings for Zainab at the fanciest hotels in town and arrange
>for limousine services while she is here.
>      It is for similar reasons of greed that Sedat Jobe is eager and
>willing
>to obfuscate and lie about the true nature of the brutal regime he is part
>of. He and people like him are willing to strike a Faustian Bargain in
>which
>they are willing to physically thread on corpses of their fellow citizens
>murdered by their government as long as they get to keep their positions.
>There is nothing on this planet that would inhibit them from latching onto
>this evil administration. That is why they are always rationalising murder,
>torture, abduction, plunder and just about anything emblematic of this
>regime. Nothing galls me more than seeing folks professing religion , a
>fine
>education and other attributes of a civilised human being saying that all
>of
>the creulty and evil this government has brought on our people has to be
>considered in conjuction with infrastructure!!!The implication being that
>all
>of those atrocities  are somehow historical footnotes of little or no
>significance that must be necessarily supplanted by a building or a road.
>It
>is an unforgivable and base act of sinful rationalisation. There is a
>distinct difference between right and wrong. At the end of the day each of
>us
>would have to live with the choices we make and that includes our
>obligations
>to our God, our families and to our fellow human beings. Yahya Jammeh and
>his
>administration are Satanic and those who oppose him must  approach him as a
>mortal enemy. There is no middle ground
>Karamba
>
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