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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