A video showing me snapping at Lamin Njie, a journalist with Fatu Network has been going viral on Facebook since early this afternoon. In the video, I got frustrated after he insisted on interviewing me about the Supreme Court ruling on Ya Kumba Jaiteh’s case earlier today, and I used profanity.
From the bottom of my heart, I take full responsibility for my behavior and I want to unreservedly apologise to Mr. Njie and the management and staff of Fatu Network for my behavior.
For the past two decades of my career as a journalist, I’ve always believed in professional conduct both at work and off work, and I’ve always advocated for such. Since I started my career as a journalist, I’ve always preached and promote professional conduct and always strived to act in that manner.
But I’m human and like every other human being, I’m bound to make mistakes. What happened in Banjul in that video was an error of judgment on my part.
Lamin Njie has been my good friend and a mentee for a very long time and there was no justification for my behavior towards him. Like him, many younger journalists look up to me for inspiration and my action today was a betrayal of their trust and confidence in me.
As President of The Gambia Press Union, my number one task should be to support and protect every Gambian journalist and not to humiliate them. I want to therefore take this opportunity to apologise once again to Lamin Njie and Fatu Network, as well as all the Gambian journalists and the population for my action.
I wholeheartedly regret my action and I want to assure everybody that I’ll learn from this and there’ll never be a repeat by me. I’ll reach out to Lamin Njie to personally apologise.
I apologise to my colleagues at The Chronicle and the GPU executive for letting them down.
