Amadou
Scattred Janneh, former Minister of Information and Communication
Infrastructure under the Jammeh regime, has said former President Yahya
Jammeh’s regime was a “classical tyranny”.
Mr
Janneh spoke during an exclusive interview with The Point newspaper on Friday
at the Kairaba Beach Hotel.
Janneh
was arrested and jailed for merely printing T-shirts with the words: “To end
dictatorship in The Gambia” under the Jammeh regime, but was later released and
taken to the United States, following the intervention of U.S. civil rights
icon Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Janneh
in the interview added that Jammeh was a “tyrant and authoritarian ruler” who
arrested people without any charge and detained them for years, as well as
perpetrating people’s disappearance without trace during his rule.
Freedom
of expression was frustrated and media personalities became Jammeh’s prior
target.
Jammeh’s
regime “executed nine prisoners, some of them without even exhausting their
legal remedies,” he continued.
According
to Amadou Janneh, The Gambia became the butt of jokes around the world, the
moment Jammeh claimed that he could cure all kinds of diseases, including AIDS,
instead of addressing the situation of human rights violations in his country.
He
also accused Jammeh’s regime of spending millions of dalasis on endless
festivals and on his family, especially his wife, who was touring the whole
world on Gambian tax payers’ money.
Amadou
Janneh accused Jammeh of owning a mansion in Maryland in the United States
costing $1.5 million, while Gambians are wallowing in poverty and suffering.
Yahya
Jammeh was not a Pan-Africanist, as he claimed to be, because Jammeh’s
Pan-Africanism was inconsistent with the vision of the likes of Kwame Nkrumah
and others, Janneh added.
