Editor,

Please allow me space in your widely read newspaper to praise  our President, Alhaji Dr Yahya  AJJ Jammeh, for his uncountable development achievements and his charisma.

It is indisputable to state that your ascension to power in the fortunate and Godly hours of Friday, 22 July, 1994, was no less a rescue for our homeland; and it has been revealing from the onset to date that you are the rightly appointed, annointed, ordained and divinely chosen by Him greater than all, Allah, to salvage our motherland from the shackles of colonialism and neo-colonialism by your performance, words and deeds. It is quite certain that the country’s electorate will continue to entrust you their votes since it is evident that you’ve rendered your heart and not your garments to the throne.

So we thank God for getting us and guiding our most needed redeemer, a leader whose love of life and compassion for people reached even beyond the Gambia’s borders.

An agent of peace, your perception is earning you applause and respect throughout the sub-region and the wider world.

Candidly speaking, there are very few comparable to you when it comes to defending the truth and listening to the dispossessed. You are determined that this country, under your administration, would avoid the pitfalls of its ignominious history and never succumb to temptations offered by political, economical, social and religious or spiritual vampires and scoundrels wanting to invade and spread their lethal cankerworm in our societies. Because not even those flattering honey tongues can lure or carry you away.

Sir, your coming is indeed apparent, to observations or conclusions made by renowned Ghanian writer; Aye Kwei Armah in the dedicative novel entitled: ‘The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born’. In other words, we should be expecting a messiah, a saviour, a redeemer who is to come help put our heads above water in all aspects of life and to further denounce and scorn all forms of bad governance on the continent.

Uncontestablely, your leadership qualities are second to none considering your high level of consciousness and the sanctified fact that ‘to live rightly in relation to money, power and sex is to live sacramentally, and that to misuse or abuse these three things is to desecrate the holy things of God’. May God give you more length of days, the longer you are present, the better.

However, I will want to divert a little bit, to express concern over the seemingly increasing number of youths involved in drug abuse and its related offenses, despite all the efforts of the N.D.E.A and other law enforcement agencies, including my own self.

  On the use of the truncheon, ‘batting’ against defaulters can pay more dividend, therefore we need a legal back-up to step-up the combat against drugs, ‘marijuana’ in particular. The fines and long jail sentences haven’t done enough to deter them; instead  it is turning many to mad men after their re-union in society, orchestrating trouble here and there. I  believe such is what is responsible for the rise in the crime rate, and I am of the view that a lot more conclusive measures need to be put up to effectively curtail that trend, since in dealing with crime, one has to tackle the root causes first.  

Sulayman Sowe

Banjul