THE GAMBIAN JUDICIARY IS A FRAGMENT OF DUST UNDER THE SHOES OF YAHYA JAMMEH

THE IMPRISONMENT OF OUSMAN JAMMEH AS A CASE STUDY

By An Insider

The Imprisonment of Ousman Jammeh is nothing but a scheme designed to eradicate intellectuals from the Jammeh Administration. Why would Ousman Jammeh be charged in the first place because a former Permanent Secretary was still receiving salary months after his dismissal. How is he the cause of the loss of revenue to the Government of the Gambia and why would this be an Economic Crime.

Mr. Mbai, I was a Civil Servant and I know for sure that the system at the Government Treasury is so lax that when people leave the Civil Service most of the time their salaries continue flowing for months unnoticed. The job of informing the Treasury Department that a Civil Servant had left the Civil and to stop his or her salary is not the job of the Secretary General no matter how high a position the person has at the time of leaving the Service.

Each Department has an Accounting Officer and in the case of the Ministry of Finance the Chief Accounting Officer would be the Permanent Secretary as he authorizes all payment and Signs all cheques drawn from the Ministry.

When Serign Cham was dismissed it was up to the Permanent Secretary at the time to inform the accountant of the Ministry of Finance to stop paying him salary. Where this was not done, the Accounting Officer will still continue paying Serign Cham Salary because no directions were forthcoming for him to stop paying him salary.

The Office of the Secretary General is too high to monitor such activities. These are things that should be handled at the department level and not at the level of the Secretary General Office of the President. Serign Cham’s Salary was not coming from the desk of the Secretary General but from within the Ministry of Finance Directly.

One would therefore wonder why would Ousman Jammeh be charged and jailed for three years just D90,000 that was paid to Serign Cham. Can’t Serign Cham be asked to pay back the money to Government if the payments were not properly authorized?

I think the right thing to have done was just to ask Serign Cham to pay back and the matter be brought to a close rather than dismissing Ousman Jammeh and at the same time trying and jailing him for three years. Look at the way everything happened in such a short period of time.

In about one week, the man was not only dismissed but sent to prison for three hard years. Even wherein the man tried to act as a professional and accepted blame, the Yahya Jammeh Kangaroo Judiciary still found him guilty and sent him to the notorious Mile II Prison.

I sincerely think that the dismissal and imprisonment of Ousman Jammeh has nothing to do with the Serign Cham issue. Yahya Jammeh must be upset with him for another reason prompting him to take such a nasty measure against the man.

We are now witnessing a Gambia where intellectuals are becoming a target for Mile II Central Prisons and this is being executed by the Judiciary of the Gambia under Yahya Jammeh. I am sincerely sorry for Ousman Jammeh and if Allah does not help him, his life would be wasted away in that notorious and dirty prisons that is even unfit for Yahya Jammeh’s dogs.