Janneh Commission Secretary blames assistants for damaging testimony
In a twist before the National Assembly’s Special Select Committee probing the sale and disposal of assets identified by the Janneh Commission, on Thursday former Secretary General Ramatoulie Sarr fiercely pushed back against the damning accounts of her two assistants Fatou Drammeh and Kebba Bojang accusing them of letting personal grudges, jealousy, and friendship politics cloud their testimony.
Sarr, who was the custodian of all commission documents, faced grilling over her alleged failure to acknowledge two key reports: the infamous RS-34 which is the sale of only tractors, and RS-39 the sale of both tractors and other vehicles. While her assistants told the committee she not only saw the documents but directly instructed them to prepare the reports, Sarr flatly rejected their claims, insisting their evidence was tainted by long standing animosity.
“I am not surprised by what they said,” Sarr declared. “This is because Kebba was never in good terms with me. He expected to replace my predecessor, and when I got the appointment instead, he resented me ever since. Fatou?! She is his close ally. So it doesn’t surprise me they stood together against me.”
The Counsel, however, pressed Sarr relentlessly. He pointed out that as Secretary General, no official document could pass without her seeing. He reminded her that by her own admission, she demanded a report from her assistants on a Monday and by Tuesday, they delivered one.
“That is your testimony,” counsel told her bluntly. “But seven years later, you now claim you never saw the document. That is too convenient.”
Sarr stood firm, arguing she only discovered her copies of RS-34 and RS-39 at the end of the commission, when packing up files to hand over to the Ministry of Justice. “If they had filed it immediately, I would have seen it,” she insisted, maintaining that her assistants bypassed her deliberately.
The counsel repeatedly challenged her narrative, suggesting her testimony was difficult to swallow and at times speculative. At one point, counsel accused her of withholding evidence:
“From where I sit, Ms Sarr, it seems you know more. But you are still holding something back,” the counsel pressed.
Sarr admitted she had deliberately withheld details earlier, reluctant to bring “personal issues” into an official testimony. But under repeated questioning, she opened up.
“I gave no such instructions. The reports were not submitted to me at the time. I only found them much later.”
Beyond the technicalities of missing stamps and unsigned memos, the testimony exposed the challenges of leadership inside the Janneh Commission. Sarr admitted to being overwhelmed at times, delegating tasks to subordinates while juggling the Commission’s heavy workload. But she bristled at the suggestion that her leadership failures allowed key documents to slip through the cracks.
“This is one of the challenges of being a leader,” she said quietly at one point, as if reflecting on the bitterness that had unfolded between her and her deputies.
The counsel has demanded the production of the commission’s waybooks to establish whether the contested reports were indeed filed and when. But Sarr complicated matters further by revealing that when she returned in 2019, she found the storage room containing Janneh Commission documents “wide open, with papers scattered on the floor”.
Source: The Point
