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            Gambia air safety chief: Targeted ouster?

      By Don Phillips International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2005
  PARIS Gambia's top airline regulator, a woman who was developing an international reputation for championing air safety on a continent where commercial aviation is far less safe than in the developed world, has been stripped of her post and is under house arrest, according to international aviation officials.


  The Gambian government has charged the official, Maimuna Taal, with misusing public funds and with other financial and administrative irregularities, the officials said.


  But some international aviation experts said they believed she was ousted for standing in the way of lucrative deals that were being pursued by high officials.


  These experts said they believed Taal's arrest marked a blow to efforts to promote air safety in Africa, which has a crash rate 30 times greater than Western Europe or the United States.


  The 36-year-old Taal, who has worked in aviation safety in Gambia for seven years, was the head of an African organization, the Banjul Accord Group, that aims to prevent political influence and graft from keeping unsafe aircraft flying across the continent. It includes Gambia, Mali, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Guinea.


  "She was a clear champion and the driving force behind regional safety," said Charles Schlumberger, principal air transport specialist with the World Bank, in an interview. "The whole energy and will of the movement may come to a dramatic slowdown."


  The World Bank has been providing financing for the group, part of an effort to strengthen aviation safety in Africa with support for multicountry agencies that would largely remove safety from direct political influence while pooling talent from many nations.


  "The removal of Ms. Taal raises great concern" for the future of this program, Schlumberger wrote in a memo to his superiors at the bank in Washington, adding that she was respected around the world and that "she showed no tolerance for bad governance or nepotism."


  The International Herald Tribune obtained a copy of the memo from an official outside the bank.


  William Voss, director of the air navigation bureau for the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, issued a carefully worded statement supporting Taal.


  "Ms. Taal is a partner for ICAO in promoting aviation safety in Africa," Voss said. "She has demonstrated conviction and determination in establishing and enforcing regulations for safe air transport operations."


  The International Civil Aviation Organization, made up of countries around the world, performs detailed safety audits of airlines worldwide. The organization had been counting on Taal to anchor the planned push for safety in Africa, the site of at least a quarter of the world's air crashes despite a far lower percentage of flights than other areas.


  The World Bank will decide in the next few months whether to renew support for airport construction, aviation safety and other projects worth millions of dollars in Gambia and elsewhere in Africa.


  Valdemar Correia, the aviation director general of Cape Verde, said that he believed that if it turned out that Taal did nothing illegal, her arrest "will have an adverse effect" on aviation safety projects.


  "She is a very well-trained person, with the knowledge and management style to put in place a good and strong civil aviation in Gambia," Correia said. "Madam Taal, she is a leader."


  The Gambian government would not discuss what charges had been made against Taal.


  Mam Bury Njie, secretary general in the office of the Gambian president, declined comment, referring a reporter to Lamin Sanneh, permanent secretary of the Gambia Civil Aviation Agency. Sanneh did not reply to e-mails, and several phone calls were not answered.


  But Schlumberger's World Bank memo, and information provided by other officials concerned with African aviation safety, made it clear that Taal's problems are almost certainly tied to her official duties.


  The officials said that one issue leading to her detention was her strong objection to a $2 million cancellation fee for an airport project that the Gambian government wanted her agency to pay, even though she had nothing to do with the project.


  The World Bank memo said that after Taal's removal, her successor immediately paid the $2 million, leaving the civil aviation authority unable to meet the next payroll from its own budget.


  "The removal of Ms. Maimuna Taal raises great concern," noted the memo.


  She was arrested Nov. 21 but has been under house arrest since her parents flew in from England five days later and provided bail.


  Her passport has been taken, her telephone cut off and her computer seized, according to official documents.


  Officials around the world concerned with international air safety were especially surprised by the move because, they said, high government officials in Gambia had stepped in once before when she had been threatened with arrest.


  "She was the voice of reality in a part of the world where corruption and nepotism prevail," Schlumberger said. "She, in the region, is absolutely the best."


  Taal had been scheduled to be the only English-language speaker at a coming meeting of members of the French National Assembly on aviation safety.


  Paul-Louis Arslanian, the longtime director of the French accident investigation agency BEA, said he was impressed with Taal even though he had never met her.


  Arslanian said he had no personal knowledge of the charges against her, but "this looks surprising, so in contradiction with the great esteem people have for her."


  "This is not necessarily a good thing for anybody and certainly not for Africa."





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    Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com








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