‘His Spirit Was Broken’: Former Information Minister Sheriff Bojang Recalls Moment Jammeh Asked Him If He Could Hear His Mother Being Cursed A Day After He Lost The Election
Former Information Minister Sheriff Bojang has written about the day former President Yahya Jammeh asked him if he could hear his mother being cursed.
Jammeh suffered the shock of his life when the Adama Barrow-led opposition coalition demolished him at the December 2016 presidential election.
Sheriff Bojang who served as information minister between 2015 and 2016 in an opinion piece published in The Standard said he was with the former leader the day after he lost the election.
“I was with President Jammeh in his room the day after he lost the election. The presence had left him. Slumped across his desk, he forlornly told me, ‘Can you hear them cursing my mother?’ Even in the fortified executive office in the depths of the presidential office building, I could hear the frenzied crowds chanting the death of the dictatorship,” Mr Bojang who is also the proprietor of The Standard recalled.
He continued in his OpEd titled ‘Hubris’: I did not reply. I looked him straight in the eye. He was alive, breathing, but his spirit was broken, dead. My eyes misted. This was not the end I wished for him. I had become close to him. And like the dauphins to the French king, although I deeply love him and deeply hate him, I never wished him such an inglorious exit. But God decreed so.
“Indeed God decreed so, but in political calculus, what one does or fails to do basically determines one’s fate. If President Jammeh had listened and acted upon the advice of some of his aides, he would still have been resident at No 1 Marina Parade. Just like Donald Trump would have continued to live No 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for another four years if he had acted likewise. But hubris, they say, presages a fall.”
