By Lamin Njie
Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou’s ‘political brinkmanship’ comments are for President Adama Barrow, Madi Jobarteh has said.
Mr Tambadou at the legal year opening last Sunday vowed to arrest and drag to court former president Yahya Jammeh if he ever returned to the country. The justice minister said no amount of idle political talk or political brinkmanship could stop that from happening.
Madi Jobarteh has pored over the justice minister’s comments telling The Fatu Network Mr Tambadou’s political brinkmanship comments are for President Barrow.
Mr Jobarteh said: “[The lack of political will] is what is bringing up this march, especially where you have the president himself go to rallies and speak about, ‘Yahya Jammeh can return to The Gambia but not as a president but as a private citizen’.
“I think that is a huge misconception and something unbecoming of President Barrow to say, indicative of, really, that lack of political will. Given also the way and manner he has been getting himself closer to APRC and even bringing in key Jammeh enablers right inside his cabinet and to other parts of his government, which is also the valve that has given the air to APRC to breathe to the point that Yahya Jammeh himself would have the audacity to say that, ‘Gambians miss me, I am better than Barrow’, and all of those things.
“So what Ba said last week should be something that should have been said since 2017. But what Barrow has been saying, what his spokesperson Sankareh said, that ‘his [Jammeh’s] security cannot be guaranteed’. Yes, his security should be guaranteed by the state because the state has a responsibility to guarantee the security of each and every Gambian.
“But when Ba said… There are two things in his statement; no amount of political talk and no amount of political brinkmanship. For me, I have distributed that to two people. Idle talk is about Fabakary Tombong Jatta and his APRC folks who are in that idle talk that ‘Yahya Jammeh did not kill anyone, Yahya Jammeh did not torture anyone, Yahya Jammeh is innocent’.
“The second thing is political brinkmanship. When we talk about political brinkmanship, it is when politicians engage in maneuvers, in schemes, in that kind of games in order to seek votes, in order to seek support, to seek legitimacy, in places where they are not even needed. And that is what we see Barrow do. I don’t know what is in Ba’s mind, but in my analysis of that speech, that political brinkmanship is for Barrow.”
