Joe,
Thanks for the information at this crucial time. Onething i know forsure is that today we cannot look at The Gambia as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration with current discouraging and degrading symbols. Our politics, religion, news, education and commerce have transformed in to such a congenial adjuncts of selfishness, tyranny, greed and brutality that no conscious Gambian will ever have faith and trust in an APRC controlled IEE.
All those who have written vigourously on the matter tell us that what is happening is the tasteless fruit of the maturing of capitalism which all come from the old stand-bys, greed and ambition. However, there is an argument here that presumes a clearer grasp of the matter than many have come before.The value and the competence of such an IEE resides in the unjust role it played in the past elections. It is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human converstions, and postulates that how we as Gambians are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. Ant the ideas we can conveniently express, inevitably become the important content of our culture.
The emergence of an image-manager in the Gambian Political arena and the concomitant decline of the freedom of speech, press, opinion clearly manifests a mal-fucntioning on any such IEE in The Gambia. What is therefore the use of an IEE in a country without any rule of law? Why should people even bother to participate in an election under such a government? What Gambians need to do is to boycott any form of elections? The more elections, the more we even legitimizethe APRC under Jammeh.
Binneh s Minteh
----- Original Message -----
From: Joe Sambou <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, March 27, 2004 5:32 pm
Subject: IEC Raises Hopes of Diaspora Gambians But -
> D.A., thanks for this piece. It is quite clear to all that the
> IEC is
> bought and paid for by the APRC. Thus, they should not be
> expected to
> enfranchise Gambians abroad for obvious reasons. The Alternative
> should be
> ready to do battle with the APRC, IEC, and the Justice System,
> since they
> all work in unison in their effort to steal elections. They
> cannot fall
> asleep like the last time and then cry foul after the fact. The
> Alternativewill not be forgiven by Gambians if they sleep at the
> switch, this time
> around. However, we on the outside need to step up to the plate
> and not
> just stop at lip service. So, the ball is in our court. Please
> read on.
>
>
> IEC Raises Hopes of Diaspora Gambians But -
>
> The Independent (Banjul)
>
> March 22, 2004
> Posted to the web March 26, 2004
>
> D.a. Jawo
> Banjul
>
> 'To See What is Right And Do It is Want of Courage'- Confucius
>
> There is no doubt that most Gambians in the Diaspora were happy to
> hear the
> Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) announce that they were
> exploring the
> possibilities of extending the franchise to them.
>
>
> That indeed would be a positive element in our democratisation
> process,which no doubt would go quite a long way in bringing us at
> par with our
> neighbours. One would however cannot help but wonder why it has
> taken this
> long for the IEC to start such a process. If a country like Guinea
> Bissau,with less developed facilities than The Gambia can afford
> to extend such a
> facility to its citizens living in this country and in other
> countries as
> well, it is hard to understand why our people living outside this
> countrycould not still participate in our electoral process.
>
> There is absolutely no doubt that to implement such a scheme would
> requirequite a lot of planning and logistics. It is a well known
> fact that the
> thousands of Gambians in the Diaspora are quite scattered all over
> the world
> and it would not be quite easy to mobilise them to cat their votes,
> particularly with our peculiar electoral system which requires
> voters to
> physically drop marbles into a box.
>
> While that is almost an impossible system to implement abroad, but
> there is
> no reason why a more practical method cannot be devised in order
> to help
> enfranchise the thousands of Gambians living outside this country
> but who
> also have a stake in its development. If indeed the IEC has not
> got the
> resources and the means to reach everyone of them, then they
> should at least
> start from somewhere. It is a well-known fact that there is a
> relativelylarger concentration of Gambians in certain countries
> such as Senegal,
> United States and the United Kingdom and may be the IEC should
> start the
> process in those countries, at least on a pilot scheme to see how
> it would
> work.
>
> Indeed, while all these plans are going on, there are some people
> who are
> quite skeptical about the will, particularly on the part of the
> regime to
> see this scheme succeed. There are clear indications that a
> majority of
> those living abroad tend to sympathise with the opposition and if
> given the
> chance, they are likely to vote for the opposition rather than the
> APRC.This fact is quite well known to the regime and for that
> reason alone, they
> are not ever likely to help facilitate the process of extending
> the vote to
> those in the Diaspora.
>
> In view of such a possible scenario therefore, the very fact that
> the task
> force put in place by the IEC to look into that possibility comprises
> entirely of representatives of government institutions, the
> chances of the
> scheme being implemented are quite slim. It would have been
> expected that as
> the most important stakeholders, the political parties and other civil
> society organisations should have been included in the process
> rather than
> leaving it all to the government institutions. It has even made
> some people
> to express the suspicion that the IEC just wanted to use that as
> an easy
> escape route because they are almost fully convinced that the
> governmentwould never facilitate its implementation.
>
> At the same press briefing that the IEC disclosed their intention to
> enfranchise the Gambians in the Diaspora, they also vehemently
> rebuttedallegations of biasness in favour of the ruling party. I
> however wonder
> whether they were able to give a satisfactory justification for
> the decision
> of their chairman Gabriel Roberts to apparently succumb to
> pressure from the
> APRC a few minutes before the commencement of the last presidential
> elections to allow people with voters' cards but whose names were
> not on the
> voters' list to vote. That decision was indeed very suspicious
> consideringthe allegations that registration of voters was going
> on well after the end
> of the official registration period.
>
> Indeed even the IEC at one time acknowledged that they conducted some
> registration at some military barracks after the end of the official
> registration exercise. That was certainly incompatible with the
> independenceand impartibility of the IEC.
>
> Another area of contention, which was touched by James Abraham
> during the
> press briefing, was the relationship between the IEC and the media.
>
> While everyone expects the IEC to have its own media guidelines during
> elections, but no one expects them to interfere with the
> legitimate rights
> of journalists to report on issues of public interest. That was
> what seems
> to have happened during the last presidential elections. A good
> case in
> point was the harassment by the police of Baboucarr Gaye, the
> proprietor of
> Citizen FM when he decided to announce the results of the
> elections directly
> from the counting centres, which apparently was in contravention
> of the
> directive given by the then Secretary of State for the Interior Ousman
> Badjie that no one should announce the results before the chairman
> of the
> IEC.
>
> Indeed any journalist worthy of his/her salt should have ignored
> such a
> directive because in the first place, it should not have been
> issued by
> Ousman Badjie as he was not in charge of the elections but the
> IEC. It also
> did not make sense as those results were already certified and
> verified by
> all the representatives of the various political parties and the
> electionobservers present at the country centres. Therefore unless
> if Mr. Badjie had
> an ulterior motive for doing something else with the results,
> there was no
> basis to prevent those results from being reported by journalist.
> It was
> indeed a shame on the pat of the IEC that Mr.
>
> Badjie has to order the police to close down citizen FM,
> apparently with the
> connivance of the IEC. That was quite a clear indication that the
> governmentnever left the conduct of the elections entirely to the IEC.
>
> We hope and pray that the media expert coming from the
> Commonwealth would
> help the IEC to correct some of those anomalies.
>
> It is for instance quite the norm in all the countries in the sub-
> region,including Guinea Bissau for journalist to report the
> results directly from
> the polling stations. It is therefore quite hard to see why it
> should not be
> the case in this country. Everyone therefore experts the IEC to
> henceforthtake full charge of the entire electoral process and not
> to allow any other
> person or institution to poke their partisan noses into the process.
>
> Two other issues that the IEC cannot afford to ignore any longer
> are the
> urgent need to re-demarcate the constituencies and to adopt the
> counting of
> votes at the polling stations.
>
> Relevant Links
>
> West Africa
> Gambia
>
>
>
> It certainly does not make any sense to anyone with even the most
> rudimentary democratic credentials that this country should
> continue to
> maintain constituencies with such demographic disparities. How can
> anyonejustify giving equal weight to the views of the
> representative of
> Janjanbureh for example with a voter population of less than 2000
> to that of
> Kombo North with more than 43, 000 voters? There is absolutely no
> discernible reason for the continuous existence for such a system
> except may
> be to entrench the gerrymandering tactics of the APRC regime as
> well as the
> apparent weakness of the IEC to do the correct thing.
>
> It is indeed a shame that while we are fastly approaching the next
> elections, the IEC seems to be treating the issue as a non-event.
> There is
> no way that the IEC commissioners can justify their continuous
> occupation of
> their positions if they fail to address these pertinent issues.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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