As my compatriot, Hamjatta Kanteh, would say, when one reads Famara Jatta’s
Budget Speech, one is at a lost as to whether to cry or to laugh.  It is
just mind-boggling to me to see the Finance Minister (Famara Jatta)
willingly exhibit such ineptitude. But then again we all know that what we
have back home is the inmates running the asylum.  Mental midgets at the
helm of government.  One would have thought that with the magnitude of the
problems listed by none other than Jatta himself, we would have the best
minds in the universe trying to solve those problems.  Instead, we have
midgets trying to do the work of giants.

To demonstrate how pathetic this budget is, let me quote a few passages from
Jatta’s piece of trash. Jatta started by painting the dismal state of the
Gambia population. He said: “Today, our people continue to be afflicted by
ACUTE poverty (69% of persons and 54% of households) with MOST of our social
indicators lying FAR below the internationally acceptable minimum levels.
Infant and under-5 mortality rates are as high as 61 and 80 per thousand
populations. Access to safe drinking water stands at 79% (97% for urban and
50% for rural), the doctor patient ratio is one to every 15,269 population
and the patient per bed ratio is 916 per bed. Overall life expectancy is
59.3 years. The combined enrolment ratio is 41% while adult literacy is as
low as 33.1%. Infrastructural [sic] development is still at an infancy stage
with only 20% of the total road network paved. These are but only a FEW of
the DAUNTING challenges that we must confront and overcome, if we should win
the fight against poverty and deprivation.” Emphasis mine.

After reading this paragraph early in Jatta’s speech (paragraph 4), I said
to myself that perhaps if I read on I will see where Jatta was ‘confronting’
and ‘overcoming’ these ‘few daunting challenges’. I read the entire
191-paragraphed document and did not know whether to laugh or to cry. I
laughed at Jatta’s ineptitude, but cried when I saw the plight of Gambians.
We are in deep trouble. Jatta and his cohorts are overseeing a bankrupt
country. This man was peddling a budget running deficits of almost 400
million Dalasis and yet he opened his ‘solutions-side’ of the budget by
‘lecturing’ the APRC rubber-stamps in parliament about the intricacies of
Program Based Budgeting. As mentioned above, our ‘daunting challenges’ were
listed in paragraph 4 and in paragraph 5 Jatta started lecturing his cohorts
about PBB, as if he is lecturing a Finance 101 class. Is this man serious?

Here we see a government seriously lacking of ideas. Jatta is bringing back
the multi-year development plans that the AFPRC/APRC regime is so fond of
denouncing. Many times we have heard AFPRC/APRC stalwarts mocking the former
regime for their ‘Five-year Development Plans’. But that is the same thing
Jatta is talking about in his budget speech when he peddled the notion of
“Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF)”. The bottom-line is that these
fancy jargons amount to zilch. These jargons just enable inept governments
like the one we have back home to draw out grandiose plans to fool people.
They will promise gullible citizens big projects when they know that they
had no idea as to how to bring the projects to fruition apart from going
abroad to beg for money. Jatta betrays the fraud when he said on paragraph
nine that: “The MTEF is a form of programme based rolling plan, where
programme implementation is spread over a given number of years e.g. three
years. Whatever activity could not be implemented in the first year of plan
implementation is carried forward to the second year. The spill over of the
second year is then moved on to the third year and so on, so that at any one
time you have programmes for implementation spanning over three budget
years.” Hello!! Sounds like a Three-year (instead of the infamous Five-year)
Development Plan. I wonder who is now taking our people back to yesteryears.

Worst still, these people are rendering Gambians even poorer than they were
when we had the Five-year Development Plans. In paragraph 10 Jatta
‘astutely’ recognized that the ‘biggest constraint’ in our development
efforts has been the manpower needs for the implementation of the ‘Plans’.
Sadly though, that constraint is getting bigger as we speak. Arguably, most
of the aid that comes to the country comes in the form of Capacity Building
(although Jatta now prefers to use ‘Capacity Enhancement, Utilization and
Retention’. See paragraph 189).  These people are simply hilarious. They
lament about our manpower needs, yet Yaya grabs an axe and dismember the
civil service and in the process dismiss the most seasoned civil servants
that received the bulk of the aid coming to the country. The most educated
people in the country (thanks to scholarships from abroad) that can deliver
on these projects are bastardized by High School drop-outs. Mental midgets
like Famara Jatta are given the task of ‘overcoming’ our ‘daunting
challenges’. I want to inform Jatta that we still have a manpower problem
and will continue to have one as long as Yaya is in power. So, here again we
have the AFPRC/APRC identifying a problem they know they have no solution
for.

As we keep telling Gambians, these people cannot solve our problems. Matter
of fact, they are increasing our problems. The ‘highlights’ in the budget
merely talk about ongoing projects that were made possible because of loans
from institutions such as the African Development Bank. These projects will
happen even if ten-year-olds were running the country. We want to hear
something else from Jatta and his cohorts. We want to hear how they are
going to solve the ‘daunting challenges’ that face the Groundnut sector. We
want to hear about the gigantic budget deficits. We want to see results in
the Tourism industry. We want them to report the Inflation figures correctly
and stop playing games with silly jargons like ‘Consumer Price Index’.
Furthermore, we want them to bring down the price of rice, cooking oil,
kerosene, candles, sugar, etc. In short, we want to know how the country is
going to come out of the bankruptcy it is in.

Clearly, the mental midgets do not know how to move our people forward. The
government has all but said that it is not the government’s job to ensure
that the farmers (the majority in the society) earn a decent living. Three
years in a row, we are reporting dismal performances in the Groundnut
sector. Famara Jatta’s budget has no solutions for our farmers in the coming
years. All he said was that there were plans to ‘redress’ the plight of the
farmers. We ask him to tell us those plans. I thought APRC had a manifesto
that addressed that problem. Where were those plans the past three years?
These people are jokers.

Talking about groundnut, we also want to hear about how the Alimenta Payment
“exerted pressure on the outcome of 2001 fiscal aggregates” (paragraph 21).
What is Famara Jatta talking about? Gambians should take Jatta to task on
his utterances. That is the whole purposed of publicizing the budget speech.
Exhibiting ineptitude is one thing. Cooking out national books is an
entirely different matter. So, Jatta has to be asked to clarify areas where
we think we sense discrepancies. What I am trying to say here is that, to my
knowledge the Alimenta settlement was financed by the EU. Granted, initially
Gambian Reserves were used in order to pay part of the settlement. But, the
EU gave us a grant to replenish the Reserves. So, Gambian taxes (fiscal
aggregates) did not suffer a net loss. Unless Jatta wants to tell us that
the EU did not deliver on its promise. Jatta needs to give us a better
explanation as to where their inept government put taxpayers’ moneys. I am
almost certain that it was not used to pay Alimenta. The more likely thing
is that taxpayers’ moneys were used to buy the fancy SUVs and pay for the
frivolous travel expenses of Jatta and his cohorts. There is more to this
budget than meets the eye. Jatta’s explanations do not add up.

For instance the man reported to us that our foreign reserves (overseen by
Central Bank) have suffered a drastic reduction of 12.1% (paragraph 26). If
I am not mistaken, this is the first such decline in our foreign reserves
since 1986/87. But the problem does not stop there. The explanation Jatta
gives us for the reduced reserves does not make sense. Jatta says in
paragraph 26 that: “The drop in the external reserves of the Bank was due to
the heavy debt service payments and Central Bank’s intervention to sell
foreign exchange in the inter-bank market in order to reverse the build-up
in commercial bank arrears”. Rubbish.

Let us look at the ‘debt excuse’ for instance. According to Jatta (paragraph
41), the government is going to reduce the ‘External Debt’ by $23 million
this year. But Jatta does not tell us what portion of the $23 million were
debt write-offs and whether the $12 million paid to Alimenta was part of
this $23 million. It is very important that Gambians know the make-up of
this $23 million and relate this to the “D234.6 million drawdown [sic] in
gross official reserves”. We are not interested in gross numbers. We want to
hear about net figures. Where did our Reserves go? The 12.1% figure
mentioned above is a ‘net figure’. We want to know where that went. No
smoking mirrors about a D234.6 million ‘draw-down’ in ‘gross official
reserves’. We know the Alimenta payment should not feature in ‘net’
discussions. EU gave us the money and we paid Alimenta off. Simple as that.

The bottom-line is that most of this Reserve was used to ‘intervene’ in the
foreign exchange market in the country. Out of the two reasons Jatta gave
us, this is the more plausible one. On this forum, we have on many occasions
warned the Opposition back home to keep a watchful eye on this phenomenon of
“Central Bank’s intervention to sell foreign exchange in the inter-bank
market”. I again reiterate my earlier caution. The Opposition back home
should dig deeper. There is lot more here than meets the eye.

Tourism in the country is down. Trade is down. Ordinary Gambians are poorer.
Who is ‘consuming’ all the foreign currency that is floating around in the
country? Famara Jatta tells us in paragraph 32 that: “the foreign exchange
market was quite vibrant as transaction volumes, measured by aggregate sales
and purchases of foreign currency in the inter-bank market, rose by 18% to
D6.8 billion by end-September”. D6.8 BILLION. Where is this money coming
from and who is using it to import goods? We all know that the ‘Re-export
Trade’ does not exist anymore. Again, trade (both import and export) is
down; tourism is down. There is a simple and sinister explanation for this
‘vibrancy’ in the inter-bank foreign exchange market. Famara Jatta gives us
an insight as to why the government and commercial banks in the country will
engage in these transactions when there appears to be no rational economic
basis for these transactions. Listen to Jatta: “The Dalasi fell by 12.4%
against the US Dollar and 5% against the Pound Sterling. The depreciation of
the Dalasi was more pronounced in the parallel market where it fell against
the Dollar and the Pound by 13.1% and 13.7% respectively. Thus the premium
between the parallel and inter-bank markets widened especially in the case
of the Pound from 3.4% at end-December 2000 to 10.8% at the end of September
2001 whilst in the case of the dollar, the movement was from 7.2% to 7.8%”
(paragraph 34).

When you read between the lines here what you see is that it does not take a
rocket scientist to figure out that when someone buys foreign currency in
the inter-bank market and sells it in the parallel market, one makes an easy
profit. In other words, government can sell pounds in the inter-bank market
and the buyer of those pounds will simply go to ‘Ganaw Marcheh’ and sell the
pounds and make a profit. What is wrong here? Something is very wrong here.
Our Reserves are meant to intervene to help banks finance foreign trade.
When we are told that trade is down, we have to ask the government why it is
necessary for the government to intervene in the currency markets. It is not
a coincident that the Reserves are measured in terms of ‘Import Cover’. What
proportion of the D6.8 billion Jatta talked about went to import goods for
ordinary Gambians? What portion of this money was only used to generate
profits through arbitrage in the currency markets? Are some government
officials benefiting from this ‘racket’?

I will read Famara Jatta’s piece of trash some more and come up with other
comments if need be.
KB


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