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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------