When President Adama Barrow appointed Ida Jeng-Njie as the director-general of the Gambia Tourism Board (GTB) sometime ago, many commented on social media that the President had made the right choice.
Ida was among the GTBoard officials that were victimised for simply agitating for an exhaustive investigation into the dubious contracts for the construction of a four-star hotel in Barra and eco-lodges in Kunkilling and Sotuma Samba.
The contracts, which were awarded to a private construction company when Hamat Bah was the tourism and culture minister, were breached. But that’s a story for another day because our concern here is about how Ida Jeng-Njie reportedly started off her new role with a fist of iron, targeting established and struggling businesses in the Tourism Development Area(TDA).
Some keen observers, in fact, suggested that Ida has so many scores to settle with so many people in the industry that she may not be able to settle down to her relatively new job quickly. What scores does Ida have to settle and with whom? Well, JollofNews has no answer to that question, but what we already knew is that Ida has picked a fight with one of the country’s tourism investments. Instead of encouraging the progress of this development, Ida and her team have “stubbornly decided” to put spanners in the works by using tactics seen in some quarters as heavy-handed.
JollofNews is also in receipt of information from reliable sources that Ida has been accompanying the tourism minister on his tour of tourism facilities to, among others, identify structures for demolition even though some have been existing for many years now.
This is not what’s expected of a woman, who was picked to breathe a new lease of life into the tourism sector. During this low ebb of the tourist season, Ida should’ve been busy, setting priorities on how to increase tourist numbers and tourist money. Air tickets are expensive. Tourism numbers have dwindled, highlighting the need for an aggressive promotion of domestic, regional tourism. Ida surely has more important job to do than “score-settling” as alleged.
To be continued…
