Hi Momodou this is a very good article.Thanks for forwarding it. Cheers and happy new year. (have you talked to father xmass on his trip to home ha ha!) Mbye Sey Momodou Camara <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Corruption and the Dirimocrats The Independent (Banjul) OPINION January 12, 2004 Posted to the web January 12, 2004 Banjul A Dirimo (bush rat) is an animal many households do not fancy. And for good reasons, most notably because of its vile stealing habits, which sometimes leave indescribable destruction in its wake. It has no shame. As far as its instincts go stealing is game and its subterranean network of holes, keeps the spoils and provides it ultimate refuge. Such an animal instinctively realises that it is a picture of scorn and ridicule to human beings and therefore keeps running from one corset to another in fear of being discovered. Its human "cousins" in The Gambia go a complicated step further by infiltrating, occupying and neutralising the system that would have been effectively used against them. They temporarily fade into the background only to appear in some other ways to continue with their programme of pillage and plunder. They don't only bite at the cake or the cherry or whatever is presented for national offer. They also destroy it, denying others the chance of having a bite. They behave as the animals - restless, appetite-prone, instinctive and shameless. In the same burrowing character like the animal from which this term is borrowed today's blood-sucking dirimocracts in The Gambia have swept almost everything before them into their glutinous subterranean holes not on the ground as their burrowing cousins would do but in the banks. These spoils take the form of cars and landed properties, leaving the rest of us in dejected feelings of want and privation. These are the bad citizens who do not care. These are the Dirimocrats against whom Operation No Compromise is fashioned. These are the inveterate knaves journalists like us have been working hard to expose and pin down. For what is the use of journalists if not to warn society before our national Armageddon comes calling with apocalyptic effect. We can recall late last year when some prosaic and misguided hoodlum answering to Burr Jobe's beck and call literally threw press-bound plates for a subsequent edition of The Independent, saying we are bad citizens, who will not rest until, The Gambia goes up in one huge civil inferno. We also remember Yankuba Touray's description of The Independent as a garbage paper and Abdoulie Kujabi's use of the word clandestine to define our paper. Now just some four months later, the whole country know who the real enemies of the nation are. They are those who deny the state revenues in taxes that accumulated to a whopping D160 million. In the same vein the whole world knows who the "garbage minds" are and the clandestine diamond dealers discovered hiding their criminal nudity from the glare of the public. Suffice it to add that the meaning of the word clandestine was momentarily lost to Kujabi who was heading an agency where such a word finds a more suitable home. Can we ask what the fate of those diamonds is? Where is the report on the saga, which was submitted since November 18? Was it stolen by our shameless Dirimocrats and ferreted away to their holes. Or should we use the word clandestine to explain the fact that it is out of circulation? What is the fate of the six who were dismissed? Are they to be prosecuted? Or again is the NIA applying the "clandestine code" to shut us out in perpetual ignorance? The Gambia is awash with bad citizens who do not think twice as they deprive the state of some crucial funds earmarked for relevant people- oriented projects that could have changed the sordid lives of the teeming thousands if not millions of poor Gambians. Other bad citizens are those who would sit in silent complicity over the reckless abandon with which these vile and reprehensible Dirimocrats are pillaging the country's meagre resources. Others would still pretend that all is normal because they are part of the system and would take great care not to incur the wrath of those who keep them there just to watch over some parochial interest and nothing more. Such people are Dirimocrats in themselves although of a far lesser degree. But by the time you say wow these small-time Dirimocrats have been transformed overnight into big-time Dirimocrats of the shiniest order. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2003 The Independent. 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