President Yahya Jammeh has appointed a
Nigerian man as Gambia’s top judge after sacking the only woman to have held
the post, his office said on Thursday.
Emmanuel Fagbenle
takes the role of “acting chief justice”, according to a presidential
statement, after Ghanaian-born Mabel Yamoa Agyemang was “relieved of her
appointment” without explanation on Monday.
The brief
communique gave no biographical details for Fagbenle, although he has been
cited by local media as presiding over many high-profile cases in recent years
and was sworn in as a Court of Appeal justice five years ago, according to a
government release dated from 2009.
Agyemang replaced
another Nigerian, Joseph Wowo, who became mired in a bribery scandal in July
last year and was jailed on a string of corruption charges in January.
She had been
practising law in Gambia since 2004, when she was appointed as an expert appeal
court judge after working in her native Ghana.
The president
regularly reshuffles his cabinet and judiciary in what many observers say is a
sign of insecurity and runs several key ministries himself, including defence
and religious affairs.
Jammeh sacked five
cabinet ministers in August as part of a ruthless shake-up of the government
which saw his justice minister lose her job.
Jammeh, who has
ruled mainland Africa’s smallest country with an aura of mysticism and an iron
fist since seizing power in 1994, vowed ahead of his swearing-in for a fourth
term in 2012 to eradicate corruption.
In the same year,
former information minister Amadou Scattred Janneh was sentenced to life in
prison for treason for distributing T-shirts which featured the slogan “End to
Dictatorship Now”.
A sliver of land
nestled within Senegal, Gambia has over the years also seen the arrest and
jailing of a number of senior military and police officers for crimes relating
to treason, drug trafficking and corruption.
Culled from
http://news.yahoo.com
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