By Kebeli Demba Nyima,
Atlanta, USA
I read Dr Ebrima Ceesay’s commentary, “Ba Tambadou and Amie Bensouda Exhonerated,” published in The Standard on 18 November 2025, and my first concern arises from the headline itself. There is no English word “exhonerated”; the correct term is “exonerated”. If this is actually what the author intended, then the mistake is not merely typographical but semantically misleading, and it raises questions about both linguistic precision and the moral judgment underpinning the argument. Exoneration, in its simplest and most commonly accepted terms, refers to a formal clearing of blame following an independently conducted investigation, a judicially supervised process or a formally recognised review. On the basis of this definition, one is naturally compelled to question how such a conclusion could be reasonably reached, given that the two high-profile lawyers he seeks to defend merely provided testimony before Parliament, not a court of law, and the National Assembly has neither formally nor officially issued any pronouncement, report or procedurally valid finding that actually clears Ba Tambedou and Amie Bensouda of any legal wrongdoing.
It is therefore necessary, before accepting the comforting certainty suggested by Dr. Ceesay’s article, to revisit the relevant facts with a degree of rigour that his commentary does not adequately demonstrate. Put differently, before we take seriously his invocation of those overburdened terms “exoneration” and “vindication”, we must first set out, calmly and precisely, what sits in the public record about Ba Tambadou, his family, the Jammeh assets and the role of Amie Bensouda. Only when that ground is clear can we show why it is intellectually dishonest for anyone to pretend that a polite afternoon in Parliament has wiped the slate clean.
The first episode that poisons the well of easy absolution is the Sheriff Tambadou affair. In 2017, Sheriff M Tambadou, brother of the then Attorney General Abubacarr “Ba” Tambadou, served on the private prosecution team in the NIA 9 trial concerning the killing of Solo Sandeng. A secretly recorded audio of Sheriff’s conversation with the wife of former NIA Director Yankuba Badjie circulated widely. In that recording, he appears to discuss the case with a close relative of the accused in a manner that many Gambians interpreted as an attempt to “sell justice” or at the very least to mix professional responsibility with private sympathy. The leak caused an uproar; Sheriff withdrew from the case, and Ba Tambadou tendered his resignation as Minister of Justice. President Barrow rejected that resignation, publicly expressing “trust and confidence” in Ba’s integrity, and the matter ended there: no criminal investigation, no disciplinary tribunal, no formal finding of misconduct, only a quiet recusal by the brother and a political endorsement of the minister.
In any jurisdiction that takes prosecutorial ethics seriously, a recorded conversation between a prosecutor and the family of an accused in a politically sensitive murder trial would normally trigger an independent inquiry, not a family-managed withdrawal. At the very least, the integrity of the proceedings would be examined by an external body, and the possibility of obstruction or undue influence would not be resolved by the simple expedient of the minister’s brother stepping aside. The fact that in The Gambia the response was limited to resignation offers and withdrawals, without any transparent investigation, is not a sign of a system that has “exonerated” anyone. It is a sign of a system that prefers to defuse scandal through choreography rather than confrontation. To take that episode and fold it into a narrative of unblemished integrity is to ask the public to forget what they heard with their own ears.
The diplomatic passport saga deepens that unease. In 2019, it emerged that several of Ba Tambadou’s sisters held Gambian diplomatic passports. Public reporting named Haddyjatou (Jatou) Tambadou Faal among the beneficiaries and identified her as the wife of businessman Ndeneh Faal, who has been repeatedly described in Gambian public discourse as a convicted Senegalese drug dealer.
Whether every element of that characterisation would withstand the strict evidentiary standards of a court is a separate question. What is not in dispute is that, at a time when the Barrow administration claimed to be cleaning up the notorious abuses of the diplomatic passport system under Jammeh, the Justice Minister’s immediate family were among those enjoying this privilege. That is not illegality in itself, but it is a textbook case of political tone deafness and conflict of interest optics. A Justice Minister who sits at the centre of reform efforts and asset recovery processes cannot blithely preside over such arrangements and later be presented to the nation as a model of immaculate propriety.
The entire management of the Jammeh assets, where both Ba Tambadou and Amie Bensouda loom large, is another arena in which the smell of impropriety hangs in the air even when hard proof is concealed behind official curtains. The Janneh Commission was set up to trace and recover the sprawling wealth that Yahya Jammeh siphoned from the Gambian state. It documented extensive corruption and recommended forfeiture of properties and businesses tied to the former president. When it came to disposing of those assets, however, the process slid into a grey zone that civil society groups and auditors have since condemned as opaque and potentially corrupt. The National Audit Office reported that it could not obtain key supporting documents for hundreds of millions of dalasis in proceeds from the sale of Jammeh’s assets, including bidding documents, advertisements, valuations, and the appointment and licensing of auctioneers.
Gambia Participates and other watchdogs have openly questioned the transparency and integrity of the disposal process, warning that the refusal or failure to produce basic documentation undermines public trust in what was supposed to be a landmark exercise in accountability.
Amie Bensouda, as lead counsel to the Janneh Commission and later a central witness before the National Assembly’s Special Select Committee on the sale of Jammeh’s assets, has taken great pains to insist that neither she nor her family bought Jammeh properties. In her closing remarks to the Committee she said she was “relieved” that there was no evidence linking her or her chambers to such purchases.
That may well be true as far as direct acquisition is concerned. Yet the controversy has never been confined to the narrow question of whether she personally signed a purchase agreement. It extends to the design and governance of the disposal process itself, the lack of transparency around buyer identities and valuations, and the perception that politically connected actors were able, through layers of intermediaries, to profit from assets seized in the name of justice. The Commission’s own report acknowledges that it refrained from adjudicating third party claims to land in order to avoid being drawn into disputes between the state, Jammeh and ordinary citizens, which left a significant amount of complexity unresolved.
The case of Nyang Njie, the economist and commentator, illustrates the murkiness of this terrain. He has publicly acknowledged acquiring a Range Rover originally belonging to Jammeh through a private transaction with a second party who had bought it at auction. The former ruling APRC alleges that the vehicle, worth significantly more, was obtained for a fraction of its value, and public debate has swirled around whether politically exposed individuals were able to benefit from underpriced sales. Whatever one makes of Njie’s explanations, his own admissions confirm that assets moved swiftly from state-sanctioned auctions into private hands through informal resale, without any robust scrutiny of who ultimately benefited. That reality alone is enough to puncture the comfortable line that the process was self-evidently clean and that only malice or legal ignorance could have produced the suspicions that arose.
Set against this pattern, the idea that a single round of parliamentary testimony has “exonerated” Ba Tambadou and Amie Bensouda is not only linguistically sloppy; it is intellectually insulting. They are, by any measure, highly sophisticated legal practitioners, educated in reputable universities and seasoned in international and domestic litigation. Many of the parliamentarians questioning them, by contrast, are not lawyers and do not hold advanced degrees. There is no shame in that fact; representation does not require a PhD. But it does mean that a hearing of this kind is structurally unequal. It is closer to a professional footballer casually dribbling around a team of earnest but untrained teenagers than to a tight contest between evenly matched sides. Under those conditions, the appearance of clarity can be manufactured with ease. A confident barrister with a thick file and a well practised narrative will always sound more authoritative than a legislator unfamiliar with the intricacies of trust law, asset forfeiture regimes and conflict of interest doctrine. Parliament in such circumstances is not a court; it is a stage.
When Ceesay now writes as if this performance has settled the matter, he is not describing reality; he is participating in its rebranding. The Sheriff Tambadou audio did not vanish. The diplomatic passport controversies did not evaporate. The missing documents flagged by the Auditor General did not magically appear. The questions about who really benefited from the Jammeh asset sales remain on the table. And the fact that Parliament, as presently constituted, lacks both the legal powers and the technical depth to function as an independent tribunal means that its hearings can never amount to exoneration in any serious sense. At best, they are opportunities for clarification. At worst, they are opportunities for very clever people to talk over the heads of everyone in the room.
You do not need a parliamentary committee to recognise that these arrangements were at the very least profoundly improper in ethical terms, even if criminal liability has not been established. A Justice Minister whose brother is embroiled in a scandal that shakes a flagship murder trial, who offers his resignation only for it to be politely declined, and whose sisters enjoy diplomatic privileges while the passport system is under scrutiny, cannot be presented as the embodiment of pristine institutional virtue. A lead counsel who presided over a process now criticised by auditors and civic organisations for lack of transparency cannot be declared “exonerated” simply because no one has yet proved she personally bought a property. The real lesson of the record is not that Ba and Bensouda have been vindicated by law; it is that the law has not been allowed to do its full work upon them.
That is the background that any honest commentary must acknowledge. Once it is laid out, the claim of exoneration does not merely appear hasty. It appears almost surreal, a piece of wishful thinking masquerading as legal pronouncement.
So now returning to Dr Ceesay’s central claim that the concerns were “rooted not in substantive evidence but in widespread misunderstandings,” it must be said that this is a disingenuous attempt to pivot systemic failure into public ignorance. The concerns were not born of conjecture; they were fuelled by the opacity and procedural chaos surrounding the disposal of vast public assets. This operational deficiency is precisely what necessitated parliamentary scrutiny in the first place. The intensity of public reaction reflected a profound breach of public trust, not media malice or a lack of legal education among the population. The failure of those who initially voiced criticisms to “acknowledge the findings publicly” is irrelevant. Silence from critics does not equate to the exoneration of the accused.
The critical distinction that Mr Ceesay and others advancing this narrative continue to overlook is the fundamental separation of powers. A legislative inquiry is an exercise in political accountability; it is not a court of final appeal. The National Assembly lacks the constitutional mandate to issue findings, acquittals or declarations of propriety or impropriety that would amount to true vindication. To confuse a successful political defence, in which individuals defend their reputation before a committee, with a formal clearance issued by a competent body is a dangerous precedent that diminishes the authority of the judiciary.
If the institutional mechanisms “ultimately functioned as intended,” as Dr Ceesay claims, then the final determination should have been delivered by a court, not by a committee of legislators.
Furthermore, the author’s attempt to frame this episode as a valuable lesson in “preserving the credibility of national institutions” is undermined by the very necessity of the inquiry. Institutions function as intended when transparency is internal, consistent and routine, not when it must be coerced by media pressure or parliamentary intervention. The vindication that is required at this stage is not for the individuals involved but for the system itself. Such vindication can only be achieved through a formal, independent and judicial audit of the asset recovery framework. Until a legally empowered body confirms that the procedures were sound and the governance beyond reproach, any claim of exoneration based solely on testimony remains an empty pronouncement that weakens public understanding of the level of institutional rigour required for true accountability.
