THE Headline

[Top Headline in The Gambia’s Daily Observer www.observer.gm on Wednesday, February 21, 2007, reflecting international reaction to the top news story since our arrival (Please Note: This is not intended as my own opinion but the entire Daily Observer story, verbatim.)]:

Jammeh Aids Cure Real…Sky News** is Wrong

Sky News’s report on the President’s herbal cure for HIV was full of misinformation, lies and absurdities. Sky’s Africa correspondent, Emma Hurd, questioned the efficacy of the President’s cure on the apocryphal grounds that there was no evidence for it. This is an obvious falsity because patients were treated after having been diagnosed first by a qualified medical practitioner. And the results were also clinically confirmed by qualified medical personnel. The marked increase in the CD4 counts of the patients could not have been cooked up even by the most imaginative enthusiast.

It was simply out of churlish cynicism that the Sky report dared to suggest that the President and our Department of Health would put our lives at risk by concocting a bogus remedy. The idea that few in the country dare doubt the cure is quite simply based on ignorance.

One should therefore wonder why Sky News manufactured false information to discredit the God-given cure for Aids, which President Jammeh has already adequately demonstrated. It is false for Emma Hurd to claim that the U.N. has warned of the dangerous consequences of President Jammeh’s curative gifts. Which UN organization has made this statement? It was not mentioned in the Sky news report. The WHO is the UN organ responsible for health and this organization has not yet made any pronouncement on the matter. The Sky news statement is therefore false. The report is definitely written with a view to damage and not to authenticate. This is the cheapest form of reporting, not expected from Sky news. President Jammeh’s claim that he has treated dozens of Gambians with traditional medicine, succeeding where modern medical science has failed, is a living truth. There is ample evidence based on western scientific verification methods, through laboratory tests conducted by medical professors at the faculty of Medicine, Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Senegal, that patients who were tested Hiv positive prior to commencement of treatment were again tested after the treatment and the results showed that the virus became undetectable. That is to say the virus can no longer be seen, which in layman’s language and to the patients affected, the disease has been conquered. What other proofs are people still asking for? President Jammeh does not have to convince anyone that he has been given the gift and knowledge to cure Aids. And he does not have to explain to anyone the secret of this gift and knowledge to cure Aids.

The statement by Fadzai Gwarazimba, the UNDP coordinator in the Gambia,^^ quoted by Emma Hurd, is irresponsible and most unexpected from a UNDP resident representative as her statement is not based on any perceived sexual behaviour pattern by people of this country. In fact her statement is not only absurd but infantile, as it assumes that once the cure for aids has been found, there would be increased promiscuity. This is poor reasoning.

Gambians and all other people of hope should welcome this development in our country. Africans should be proud that an African is using African knowledge to cure the diseases and ailments of people, no matter what race. President Jammeh will cure anyone with Aids, be he black or white, because his knowledge is a gift to humanity at large. We must wake up to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry, who control the major seats of power around the world will not be happy with President Jammeh’s gift and knowledge to cure Aids, as there are billions of dollars attached to research, to find a western medicine to cure Aids and to sell existing and ineffective drugs to fight Aids. Indeed this little country called The Gambia with its gifted leader has now become the biggest threat to the interests of the multi-national drug companies, who may even have shares in Sky news. We would therefore not be surprised that Emma Hurd is promoting the interests of the multi-national drug companies, who hide behind the name of western medicine to peddle their useless drugs.

Gambians and many more people will continue to go to President Jammeh to be cured of the disease that is de-populating most countries in Africa today. The people who were cured are living evidence of President Jammeh’s success.

**Sky News is a popular British news service, after BBC.
^^After this story was published, the UNDP representative was deported from the Gambia.