From The Point Thursday, August 23, 2001 Good Morning Mr. President Is The APRC A Party, A Movement Or What? Mr. President, since the inception of the APRC, we seldom hear about the activities of your party. We never heard of meetings convened by organs of the party at ward, constituency, regional or national levels. Does the APRC in fact have machinery? Save the holding of a full congress and a mini one at Kanilai, people never heard of meetings of your leading organs (if they exist). We never heard of the APRC's Executive Committee or Central Committee or National Executive, for between congresses, a party's life must go on. How do you politically educate your militants? How are they inducted on the ideology of policy objectives of the party? For that is what parties are all about.. An ideology, a project, a programme for society's upliftment is developed, enriched through discussions, analysis at party level and later sold to the people. It would seem that both your party and government are satisfied with the utopian Vision 2020 as your mantra for development. As we told members of the think tank that developed it, the Vision is just wishful thinking. How can a development plan be developed without serious projections based on scientific data? The objectives are vague and more importantly they do not have determinants such as policies devised to attain certain goals in a specific time frame. It is of course illusory to believe that a development plan could span for a 20-year period at a go. What is needed is to aim at Objective X and lay down the plan that would enable its attainment. This implies recognising of each sectors' framework of operation in terms of infrastructure, investment, projection comprising dates and possible success and failure for future adjustments. As far as Vision 2020 is concerned, all that is relied upon is mere guesswork centred on possibilities without any regard to the laws of probabilities. Trade, Tourism, Agriculture, Health, Industry etc. have had setbacks from the day the vision was developed. This simply means that if the vision's objectives were scientifically worked out in consonance with the parameters indicated above, the rescheduling of the year 2020 should have been high on your agenda long time ago. This is so true that since the predicament in the trade, agriculture, health and tourism sectors, only Yankuba Touray talks about the vision. He seems to forget that many travel agencies have indicated that they were suspending or reducing their activities for this coming season. But back to your party, the APRC. The substitution of "councils of elders" and " action groups"(former July 22nd Movement) to real party structures cannot make the APRC a modern day party as it has no machinery. A very serious thing for a ruling party which aspires to secure the confidence of the electorate. In our last editorial, we said that your selection as the APRC candidate by "council of elders" had no democratic basis as only the congress of your party can do so. Will your party's congress select you as its presidential candidate or would you still rely on the "councils of elders" who claimed to have already selected you during your meetings with them at State House? If the nomination of the "councils of elders" prevails, then you have no party. It is as simple as that. Parties have membership who take part in the decision making processes of their party so that they feel that they belong. Of course all of them cannot be at all meetings hence the sub-division in various organs for various attributes to respect the notion of representation. A party's membership elects at various levels representatives to the leading organs to partake in their name in decision making processes. Any party that ignores this is neither a natural party nor a democratic one. Good day Mr. President _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------