Dear Editor,
I read with keen interest the article by your reporter Alagie Manneh of an interview he had with the barrister Lamin J Darboe published on your edition of Tuesday, 8 February 2022 with the caption “Top Lawyer Says ‘No Diversity’ In Superior Courts”.
I have been following the writings of Lawyer Darbo over the years. I have always known that he is a brilliant lawyer and a very good penman. Now I should add controversial but also brave to my description of him.
He stated in the interview “… as of today, there is no diversity in the superior courts. Diversity, going to ethnicity, has been discussed, and it has been ventilated.”
Basically what Lamin Darbo is saying is that if you look at the supreme court, the appeal court and even the high court in The Gambia, most of the judges are people of certain tribes and that other tribes are pretty much under-represented or even not represented at all. If that is the case, why is it so? Is it because people from other tribes do not study law? Is it because lawyers from some tribes do not want to go on the bench or is there a deliberate attempt by the recruiting and appointing authorities not to recruit and appoint competent lawyers from certain tribes as judges.
Perhaps Mr Darbo should be even bolder and write one of his brilliant articles and tell us what he thinks in detail. We should have a debate on this. It is important
Pierre TS Sarr
Kotu West
What is Mayor Bensouda afraid of?
Dear Editor,
I am baffled by the degree and extent that the mayor of Kanifing municipality Talib Bensouda is going to, to make sure that the commission of inquiry set up by the Regional Administration minister Musa Drammeh does not come about?
Since the announcement of the desire of Minister Drammeh to set up the commission, Mayor Bensouda has done everything in his power to ensure that it fails even to the extent of paying a personal visit to President Adama Barrow apparently for him to convince the minister not to set up the commission. This is indeed strange!
At the beginning, I was not keen on the idea of a commission because we have had too many commissions since President Barrow came to power where the state spent cumulatively almost a billion dalasis and most of the commissions came to nothing.
However, the degree to which Mayor Bensouda and his people are fighting the idea of the KMC commission has left me curious and I suspect they might be afraid that many things hidden from public knowledge like alleged corruption and abuse of office on their part may come to light if the commission conducts public hearings.
For this very reason, I think the president himself should set up a proper commission of inquiry and look at all the issues on the table including the financing and acquisition of the trucks for the ‘Mballit Project’.
I really find it strange that Mayor Bensouda would be so averse to the idea of a commission of inquiry given the fact that his own good mother spent nearly two years as the principal director of a commission that interviewed and paraded hundreds of our fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts. So I think it is karma if Mayor Bensouda is to appear before a commission too.
Sang Mendy
Lamin
