From The IDEPENDENT NEWSPaper

  Banjul

Poor Pirang has been very seriously forgotten. No compensation no assurances
from their exploiters and the government for years of exploitation.

That village was the centre of one of the most dervish pillages by a
transnational company ever recorded in The Gambia.

For many years the transnational company Scan Gambia used a good part of
Pirang to develop fish farming and reaped millions of Dalasi, which were
siphoned off to banks beyond our shores. For many years the people of Pirang
were completely and disastrously left out of any benefiting scheme, that would
have at least partially compensated them for the use of their land. For so
many years they have known only exploitation and poverty and ignorance of how
the imbalance between rich and powerful countries who seem to want more and
the pauperized countries, who live poorer by the hour works.

Now many years after the exploiters have left, Pirang is still struggling with
the deleterious consequences of an exploited environment and an abused people.
What was once a very fertile area has been reduced to a scrub of salty expanse
that could never be useful in any way for the farming community of Pirang. The
transformation of the land by Scan-Gambia was made without due consideration
to the long-term environment consequences and the sinister discomfort of
villagers who now know that their land is a vast waste. In fact that land is a
cruel reminder of the drama played by strangers who by the irony of fate were
accepted there to pursue their own interest despite the rapacious end-result
of heightening the already abject form of poverty in that village.

Where can the lost generation of Pirang cling to after all that they had
proudly owed in the land far back in time was disgracefully degraded and
subsequently destroyed.

It is already sad and sickening that such naked wicked exploitation has to
take place in our age when civilization has instructed us to respect the
concerns and problems of others and that the freedom to pursue an objective
stops at where another person's begin. But it is even more unspeakable where
born-Gambians were helping in this whole ugly plunder.

For Gambians who could only just see beyond their nose that feathering their
own nest was the overriding cause over the collective concern, it was just
normal to join in the pillage.

In our view they had even done greater disservice to Pirang and the Gambia
than those who cross the seas to stuff their pockets fat. It is a shame that
those strangers have long departed but those Gambians who had conspired with
them to plunder Pirang are sharing in the rot and blot.

Shame to them all, whether they were members of the former regime or actual
employees!

Shame also on the fact that no compensation scheme was ever mooted by the
discredited PPP regime or the current government despite persistent cries to
that effect by the poor people of Pirang. We think this world of globalisation
is very hypocritical in the sense that justice is never for the poor and
defenseless. The plight of Nigeria's Ogoniland is a classical case. For many
years the Ogoni question has hung lie an accursed scar on the conscience of
the civilized world, notwithstanding the painful realization that if the
exploiters were the exploited and vice versa, the cries for justice would have
reverberated everywhere But justice is only for the rich and the favoured.

The case of Pirang is just a tip of the iceberg but its people, thanks to
government indifference, will have to live daily with this waste, which has
rendered them a lost generation - lost in the mystifying haze of poverty borne
out of exploitation.


For Freedom

Saiks

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