The recent revelations of theft of food stocks from the State House by two officers of the Senegalese military contingent in The Gambia was certainly a big embarrassment to President Adama Barrow and his government. This is no doubt the reason why the news was so controlled that hardly anyone in this country heard about it until after it was revealed by the Senegalese newspaper l’Observateur.
Of course, it was not quite a surprise that the government had to treat the news as a top secret and tightly kept the lid on it because apart from anything else, one of the officers involved is said to have been President Barrow’s ‘head of security’ and being involved in such an escapade at no less a place than the State House was not only an embarrassment but also quite a potential breach of national security. If those two officers had such unrestricted access to the food stocks at State House and sell them to outsiders, one would wonder what else they could have had access to.
While so far only those two officers have been mentioned in the scandal, but there is a high possibility that many others could have been involved, including some within the State House. We should also expect those members of the business community who had been buying those food items from the Senegalese officers to be confronted in order to get to the bottom of the scandal.
For quite a while now, the calls by several Gambians for the departure of ECOMIG and other foreign forces in this country had been growing louder, but it appears that the government had been giving a deaf ear to those calls. It is however quite hard to understand why, after more than eight years since the change of regime, the government still insists on keeping these so-called foreign ‘peacekeepers’ in this country, as if they still have no full confidence in our own security apparatus to keep the peace. I therefore tend to agree with Lt. Colonel Samsudeen Sarr that considering a similar scenario that happened prior to the 1994 coup, the prevailing situation could be a potential prescription for dissension within the security forces, which no one in their right frame of mind would ever pray for again in this country.
Therefore, we should only hope and pray that this incident would precipitate some sober rethinking within the corridors of power that we no longer need these foreign troops in our country and that our security forces have the capacity and professionalism to take care of every aspect of the country’s security.
Indeed, it is definitely not in this country’s long term security interest to continue to give unrestricted access to foreign forces to every nook and cranny of our very seat of government, which has the potential of one day being used against our security interests
There is no doubt that President Barrow and other members of his government would wish the scandal to go away, but with one of the Senegalese officers threatening to launch a legal challenge to his sacking, there is the potential of igniting more damaging revelations of what actually transpired.
