NEWS 
UDP/NRP alliance responds to concerned Gambians
By AllGambian.net 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 26, 2006
  The UDP/NRP alliance has maintained that any
arrangements with NADD must take into consideration
the candidacies of Ousainou Darboe and Hamat Bah as
presidential and running mate respectively. The newly
formed opposition alliance was responding to a
proposal from a group of Concerned Gambians to bring
the fractured Gambian opposition to forge a unified
front to contest the October 2006 presidential
election. 

While maintaining that it is open to collaboration
with other parties, the alliance hinted that the NRP's
performance as the second largest opposition party in
the last presidential election cannot be ignored. 

We reproduce below an e-mail exchange between Ebraima
Manneh, senior Administrative Secretary of the UDP/NRP
alliance and Dr. Abdoulie Saine on behalf of the
Committee of Concerned Gambians.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dear Dr. Saine, 

We thank you for your email dated April 11th 2006 but
which we received on Saturday, 20th April. We
appreciate your interest in brokering a rapprochement
between the UDP/NRP Alliance and the NADD. Ideally,
having a unified opposition would help in our bid to
defeat the APRC in the forthcoming elections. 

We have studied carefully your ideas and it is
apparent that you have not exhausted all the possible
options. You have for example, left out Hamat Bah and
the NRP which is the second largest opposition party
and which came out third in the last presidential
elections. We cannot ignore this fact in any
arrangement that has to be worked out within the
opposition ranks. 

You will appreciate that we already have established
the UDP/NRP Alliance and our two parties have chosen
Ousainou Darbo as the presidential candidate for the
Alliance and Mr. Hamat Bah as the running mate. Any
arrangement with other parties would therefore start
from that position. 

We would like to confirm our earlier position that we
are open to cooperation and collaboration with all
other opposition parties that share whose objective is
to defeat the APRC in the presidential and national
Assembly elections. 

We thank you for your proposal and we hope that our
own reaction could engender more ideas in this regard.


Best regards 

Ebraima Manneh
Senior Administrative Secretary
18th May. 2006 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dear Mr. Manneh: 

Many thanks for your email and the response to the
proposals I sent on behalf of the "Committee of
Concerned Gambians." Also, thank you for sharing your
reaction(s) to the proposal with the NADD executive.
We are very pleased that the UDP/NRP executive took
the time to carefully consider the proposals. 

We sincerely agree that the proposals I delivered to
you for your executive's consideration, were not
exhaustive. In fact, the proposals were never intended
to be exhaustive but were to instead serve as a
skeletal foundation upon which the two political
entities UDP/NRP and NADD could build on and possibly
begin talks. 

That you shared the UDP/NRP executive's response to
the proposals with NADD's could, in the end, open
important lines of communication. This was our primary
objective. With regard to the specific party decisions
and intricate party positions, these can be made clear
when talks/ negotiations begin in earnest with NADD. 

I am sure you are aware of the many proposals being
floated around both in The Gambia and the Diaspora
following the Kombo East by-election outcome. The call
for unity from all political quarters has grown even
louder. The precise character/modality for unity will
be left to you, the politicians to spell out
precisely. It is clear, however, that a UDP/NRP/NADD
alliance could have easily clinched the seat in Kombo
East. 

As in all negotiations, some positions are not
negotiable. I suspect Hamat Bah's selection as
Ousainou's running-mate is one such position. Not
withstanding, it is our belief that other strategies/
modes of alliance formation can be explored amongst
your ranks. We will leave the details to those of you
on the ground. 

Again, on behalf of the "Committee of Concerned
Gambians" I thank the UDP/ NRP executive for its
thoughtful response to our proposal and hope that the
NADD's executive will seize the opportunity to respond
to your response to our proposal in order to begin
talks soon. I will share this response to your email
with the NADD executive as well. 

Kind regards,
Abdoulaye Saine 
 
  
 



Go To Top

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright © 2004 AllGambian.Net. All Rights Reserved.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤