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| The veiled ploy, masked behind the school ‘veil’ civil suit |   By Pa Louis Sambou P overty, crime, corruption, unemployment, worse than poor healthcare facilities and outcomes but to name a few of those issues which confronts The Gambia and which has serious societal consequences for ordinary people. In the face of such crises, apparently, in the unconventional wisdom of some, pupils’ ‘right’ to rebel against reasonable school regulations, is top priority – a ‘fundamental right’ which merits ‘special’ legal protection some fancifully argue (with a straight face no doubt), and hence the targeted civil suit against the respective Christian mission schools all of which indicate a very strong determination to vigorously resist the insidious invitation to permit the boundaries of school discipline to be the domain of external forces whose views and values are so antithetical to their own, among other things, they’re fatally hostile to the interests and principle of education as we und

B y Pa Louis Sambou   D uring the same week in which the subject of reintroduction of the death penalty in the UK held mainstream media bandwidth hostage, for those in opposition to such ineffective penal measure, it must have been a breath of fresh air to learn of  The Gambia NHRC’s publication headed: “ Advisory note on the abolition of the death penalty in The Gambia ”. This view is certainly consistent with the arguments advanced in making the case for abolition, but less so, for aspects of the publication which are so detached from the subject matter, I regret to say they give relevance to the phrase: ‘never judge a book by its cover’.   The death penalty, like a few other sticky areas of our legal order, is an adverse relic of colonialism which serves absolutely no useful purpose and for which there are much more effective alternatives. I cannot conceive of any situation in which State-sanctioned killing as a means of punishment would make society a better place; as a matter of f

| The Truth About The Rapidly Thinning Boundary Between ECOMIG and Senegalese Government Foreign Policy Interests & Its Implications |      By Pa Louis Sambou   T he presence of foreign troops of whatsoever nationality, fold or grade, on any third country is an exceptional phenomenon which is bound to attract a considerable degree of curiosity from ordinary citizens. The fact that this is so in our case is not an exception at all. Besides, one of the benefits of living in an open democratic society is, it avails as of right and constitutional entitlement, the freedom for questions to be asked of matters of public interest which are not fully understood. In light of the active provocation of conflict between The Gambia and MFDC fighters in Senegal’s Casamance regions by the foreign troops in question, it is of paramount importance that hard-hitting questions be asked as to whether these foreign troops are staying far too long for their own good and undoing all the good they have don