I will not bore you with an exhaustive list of the gruesome abuse of innocent
Gambian citizens by the N.I.A. You have read about middle of the night
abductions, disappearances, torture of all kinds involving children, women,
men and the elderly. List members tend to know only about the cases reported
in the private media which is by no means the entire range of abuse
perpetrated by this infamous agency. In the provinces where N.I.A cruelty is
far more extensive, there is little or no reporting of the incessant abuse
inflicted on perceived opponents of the government. Poor people are often
dragged from their villages and bundled into pickup trucks to far flung
police stations for absolutely no reason other than an insidious exercise of
power by members of this notorious agency. To facilitate their abuse they
often ride with July 22 thugs who serve as informal adjutants fomenting
strife within the communities and acting as enforces of the Gestapo tactics
of the agency. These thugs are almost always people who have failed even by
community standards and have no credibility or standing amongst their peers.
They are hence eager to use their unholy alliance with the N.I.A to boost
their status through terror in the mistaken belief that destroying the lives
of their neighbors would somehow make them people they have never been. With
the police as an integral part of this nexus of abuse , the average citizen
is essentially reduced to serfdom in that he has no recourse to justice. Take
the case of Tata Camara of Georgetown. This 50 year old lady was dragged from
her home and thrown into a truck and driven over 300 miles into the dingy
gulags of the N.I.A in Banjul. There she was stripped naked and brutally
abused and left to wallow in a mosquito infested cell for days. Apart from
beatings and sleep and food depravation, they attempted to poison her by
spiking her food with insecticide and ran mock exceptions on her. What was
her crime? Absolutely nothing! Some N.I.A operative just decided that Tata
Camara needed to be punished for not supporting Yahya Jammeh. She had to be
admitted to a private clinic in Kololi for days after she was released. It is
absolutely intolerable that a middle aged woman who has broken no laws can be
abducted from her own home by a sitting government and savagely abused and
left for dead and yet this is all the N.I.A is about. It is not
trained,organised or run as an intelligence agency. What it infact is a
personal instrument of repression of Yahya Jammeh . He has his cronies at the
head and they are funded directly from off the books accounts in the
statehouse appropriations and they report only to him and often acts at his
behest. The recruits go through rudimentary police training of 12 weeks at
the PTC with a week of marshall arts and a few shooting sessions at fixed
targets. The training in what they call basic intelligence is so superficial
and inadequate that the N.I.A will never ever be able to function as an
effective intelligence agency. Not a single one of them can differentiate
between a palm pilot and a land mine because in all likelihood they have
never seen neither. Their idea for gathering intelligence is to put a simple
recorder in their pocket and go into a gathering say by the Quadrangle and
try to prompt people in a rather amateurish way to be recorded. After getting
cassette fulls of rumor and innuendo, they run off to their little offices
and try to transcribe these flawed audio recordings and pipe these raw
conversations into the huge rumor mill that is at the heart of their entire
operations. With the network of informers also conjuring up even more rumors,
the N.I.A spends all it's time chasing after bogus leads and hounding
innocent people in the process. Another favorite indulgence of the N.I.A is
what they call static surveillance in which they essentially camp close to a
target they intend to monitor. Because of poor training and the ever present
air of arrogance, they are often unsuccessful because they are conspicuous
and easy to figure out. For example they will attempt to "camp" at the shop
opposite or some distance from their targeted site even as it is clear that
neighborhood vous are always known to the entire neighborhood and awkward
strangers quickly stand out. The majority of N.I.A agents do not carry
firearms and the few that do can never shoot their way out of any predicament
because they are too poorly trained. I doubt if they even know how to clean a
pistol.
Since they are in no position to function as an intelligence agency,
the N.I.A has found itself more suited at everythingelse. I have had a hotel
manager tell me how they would come over to this private hotel and demand
that all the personnel records of the hotel be given to them. When the
manager asked why they wanted personnel records of a private business, the
answer was always the same and it was because they say so. They would demand
office space, breakfast and lunch to rifle through these records. Apparently
they wanted this hotel manager to bribe them out the constant nuisance they
were deliberately being. They are also now sitting on interviews for
government employees particularly at professional levels. They constantly
interrupt the interview process with Mccarthy like questions that has nothing
to with the job in question. Apparently those who seek employment from the
government must first pass the N.I.A loyalty test. They want to know if you
have been a member of this list, studied in America blah blah . Stupid and
pathetic. They dragged one guy who flew in from NewYork and happened to be
called Ebrima Ceesay. From the airport they hauled him off to Banjul hoping
that it was Ebrima Ceesay from Birmingham who they regard as a mortal enemy.
Similarly business competitors would routinely try to gain advantage by
bribing the N.I.A to harrass the competition by hauling a business man in and
just keep him to prevent him from clearing his goods . That way with each
additional day they can drive up his costs and undercut his competitiveness.
Fearing an entire ruination of their business, these victims just put up with
the abuse and sit there till some goon releases them.
Perhaps the one aspect of the N.I.A with the most comical value is
their attempts at phone tapping. With vintage equipment from Momar Ghadafi
they have the capacity to tap a few lines in the Gambia. The problem is the
targets already know the existence of the taps and hence lets them hear only
calls they need for them to hear or see faxes they want them to see. There is
nobody at the N.I.A who can decode even commercially available encrypted
correspondence or even telephone conversation in any of our local languages
with only a few coded vernacular words. In the meantime the level and
magnitude of crime is rising exponentially all over the country with armed
robberies, murder, drug and arms running being the most prevalent. You could
buy a gun quite easily in our country now and with tens of thousands of
people jammed in the greater Banjul area with no jobs and no prospects, crime
has only one way to head: up. A friend of mine was stunned at how people must
now mechanically insert screws on the windshields of their cars to avoid it
from being yanked off the car! Don't count on the police or the N.I.A to
actually begin to confront these important societal problems. They won't
because they have effectively unraveled as law enforcement institutions. They
have become professional hatchetmen who are by design ruining the country.
Sooner or later they would realise that a lawless Gambia is not in their best
interest too.
Karamba
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