Unconfirmed reports said the wife and
children of outgoing President Yahya Jammeh have left Banjul, the
capital city of Gambia on the eve of the deadline given him by the ECOWAS and the African Union to quit power.
Gambians and tourists were also leaving
in droves. Bus parks were scenes of chaos as people boarded buses,
packing suitcases onto trucks and hiring canoes to flee the capital of
Banjul, as President Yahya Jammeh clung to power on the eve of his rival
Adama Barrow’s planned swearing in.
The Banjul airport was also chaotic as many people struggled to board planes to fly out of the country
Jammeh, a former soldier who once vowed
to rule for “a billion years”, is refusing to step down, despite
condemnation from regional leaders and threat of an imminent invasion by
West African troops to enforce his election defeat. Today, his kangaroo parliament extended his tenure by three months, a day after it passed a state of emergency law for the same period.
The crowd at Banjul airport on Wed., Jan 18, 2017 | Reuters
Residents in two Senegalese border towns
reported heavy troop movements towards the frontier and a Senegalese
military source confirmed the build up.
In a sign he is digging in, Gambia’s
National Assembly passed a resolution to allow Jammeh, who has been in
power since a 1994 coup, to stay in office for three months from
Wednesday.
The president’s allies have deserted in
their droves — at least eight ministers have so far resigned of whom
four quit in the past 48 hours — and it is unclear how many of his own
armed forces will be willing to defend him once his mandate expires.
But many Gambians are not waiting to find out.
At the sandy Bundung Garage bus station
in the capital, Banjul, women carrying infants strapped to their backs
queued up to get the belongings they had salvaged onto buses bound for
the southern border with Senegal.
Men and children sat patiently amid piles of suitcases, rolled up foam mattresses, bags of rice, bottles of cooking oil.
“The last three days we’ve been
submerged,” said bus park manager Sonore Momodou Choi, his face shaded
from the blazing sun by a fishing hat.
“Normally we load three minibuses per day. This week we’re 25 a day, not including the bigger buses.”
Jammeh declared a state of emergency on
Tuesday, but a Banjul-based diplomat said it wasn’t clear what extra
powers this would give his forces or if the president even had the
authority to enforce it.
Others fled on pirogues across the river that splits Africa’s smallest country down the middle.
In Zinguinchor, in Senegal’s Casamance
region south of Gambia, a Reuters witness saw 12 children crammed in the
back of a van on a beach less a few hundred metres from the Gambian
border next to a heap of belongings in plastic bags.
“We were scared by what we saw on the
news,” explained 14 year old Moussa Camara from Kafotang in Gambia. He
crossed over in a pirogue with 27 other family members on Tuesday.
At least 26,000 people have fled Gambia
to Senegal fearing unrest, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said on
Wednesday, citing Senegalese government figures. (Reuters/NAN)
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