Folks, even the government's own mouth piece cannot deny the reality on the
ground.  I had told Gassama a while back that 9 out of 10 construction
projects he was boasting about in the Gambia was financed by us in the
diaspora.  Even the Observer knows that diasporan Gambians are the ones
supporting and preventing a collapse of our economy.  Please read on.


Economic commonsense for dummies

The Daily Observer (Banjul)

EDITORIAL
January 28, 2003
Posted to the web January 28, 2003

Banjul

The recently increased transport fares, in some instances by about 40 per
cent, has marked the latest among the new challenging trend that has come to
mark the realities of life that we are having to face everyday these days.

Since about six months ago, the price of almost every imaginable thing in
the country has changed, and the change has not been favourable to the
majority of people in this country, indigenes or aliens.

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First, it was the Dalasi that took a plunge, and we were told not to panic.

The President even called all of his men, and in the full glare of our
television screens, gave them just about two weeks to mop up the problem.

Unfortunately, the situation has refused to be mopped up. Apparently, the
problem must be stubborn.

Next, we were told how certain bad foreigners are taking all our money to
their country and leaving us with little. There appeared, also on our
television screens, bigwigs who seemed to have immediate answers to every
thinkable problem. Seems all that too was just hot air, and talk, they say,
is cheap. Foreigners became the scapegoat, but the 'experts' conveniently
forgot that were it not for the money Gambians abroad remit back home,
thousands of children wouldn't attend school and several of the houses that
grace our streets today would never have been there. Economic activity, they
should have realised, does not know foreigner or indigene, all it knows is
activity, just activity.

Then, the Government itself rolled out new measures for 2003, in it, we were
going to have to pay increased taxes, and the subsidies we enjoyed on
petroleum products were also removed. We are a lazy lot, they said, and it
wasn't really worth taking all that trouble on our behalf.

So the prices of food items increased because the Dollar did. And we have
been told to thank some large-hearted guys for keeping the prices of food
affordable. Affordable could be nebulous anyhow, but its fine to believe
that we could have been starving if these godsend were not busy salvaging
our cause from the hands of unscrupulous businesspeople.

Fuel prices also had to increase twice in a quarter of a year because our
foreign reserves were no longer as strong to keep them down. And in keeping
faith with the law of direct proportionality, transport fares have also
increased along with fuel prices. While we cannot blame Government for the
fare increase, (after all, there are no secretaries of state among taxi and
van drivers), it beggars belief that a Government that realises that an
increased fuel price leads inevitably to increase in fares fails to apply
the same economic commonsense to the need to increase the salaries of its
thousands of poorly-paid workers.

The Government is too big to take a rap, so we must thank it for such
economic ingenuity that oversees increases in the cost of living but shuts
the door to any possible raise in the pay scale of workers. In a country
where some civil servants are paid as little as D600, (inclusive of the
newly announced shadowy living allowances). We will not be forgiven if we be
ungrateful to the Government that works so hard to keep its people out of
poverty.

Well, the natural tendency is that people will seek a way to keep out of
poverty, and when the right choices are not forthcoming, the wrong ones
sometimes seep in. One would love to hope that corruption would not be on
the increase just as the prices of everything on the market tray.

While we hope corruption will not rise, one thing is sure to grow. Whether
we love to say it or not, the poverty level in The Gambia will rise. The
Strategy for Poverty Alleviation Office, Spaco, revealed sometimes back that
about 67 per cent Gambians live below the poverty line, and you may expect
that figure to take a hike.

Just as we had a salvaging warrior to keep our bags of rice under control,
we will need another to keep poverty in check. Who that will be is anybody's
guess.







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