By Mama A. Touray
The chairman of the Gambia Livestock Marketing Agency (GLMA), Ebrima Cham, has told lawmakers his agency was blindsided by the Janneh Commission in its handling of cattle valuation linked to former President Yahya Jammeh.
Testifying before the National Assembly’s special committee probing the sale and disposal of assets identified by the Janneh Commission, Cham made the allegation after being shown a report compiled by the commission’s former secretary, Alhaji Mamadi Kurang. The document details the sale of cattle previously owned by Jammeh.
“What I have realized now is that we were [blindsided] for a purpose. It is very shocking and sad from what I have seen. It seems that the assignment given to us to do price estimation was purposeful and a blindside for us, and the fact that we were asked not to keep records is blindsiding,” Cham told the committee.
Expressing dismay at the contents of the report, Cham added: “It is a sort of blindsiding us to not know what is going to happen, because at the time we thought it was due to confidentiality — that is why the commission asked us not to take records. I could not see or imagine that a commission of inquiry could do such a thing, because an inquiry established by law to find facts went to bring fake, dubious reports like this.”
Challenging the report’s accuracy, Cham dismissed claims that female cattle could weigh as little as 40 kilograms. “It’s impossible for female cows to weigh 40kg,” he said.
Cham also questioned the legitimacy of the figures compiled by Kurang. “I don’t know when and how this report was generated,” he said.
During the hearing, Counsel Kah asked Cham whether his disbelief stemmed from shifts in market value over time. Cham responded: “I was not aware of any weight estimation or sex identification of these cattle. I don’t know how these things were generated, and not all the animals were tagged.”
He went on to explain that cattle must reach two years of age before becoming calves, asserting that a two-year-old calf cannot weigh 40 kilograms.
Kah then referenced Kurang’s own testimony, which claimed that GLMA had overseen tagging, valuation, and visual assessments of the cattle for pricing purposes. Cham flatly denied this.
“We did not estimate weight of any single animal because it doesn’t make sense. In the sub-region animals are not sold based on weight and how can we work around over 500 animals in that dust and weighing the animal, why weighing an animal that will not be sold by weight?” he said.
Cham acknowledged GLMA’s record-keeping shortcomings but defended the agency’s pricing approach: “Not keep records is erroneous but when we tag a sucking animals, the price we tag is D11,000 and the cow is D15,000.”
Refuting claims that GLMA based valuations on meat yields, he said: “I don’t know what he meant by a life cow when slaughtered you are expected to have 50% of the life kilos. If it’s 200 kilos when alive, when slaughtered you are expecting to have 100 kilos so it’s not feasible to do that for over 500 animals because it’s not practicable and the agency never use meat value on the animals.”
