NEWS UDP/NRP alliance responds to concerned Gambians By AllGambian.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- May 26, 2006 The UDP/NRP alliance has maintained that any arrangements with NADD must take into consideration the candidacies of Ousainou Darboe and Hamat Bah as presidential and running mate respectively. The newly formed opposition alliance was responding to a proposal from a group of Concerned Gambians to bring the fractured Gambian opposition to forge a unified front to contest the October 2006 presidential election. While maintaining that it is open to collaboration with other parties, the alliance hinted that the NRP's performance as the second largest opposition party in the last presidential election cannot be ignored. We reproduce below an e-mail exchange between Ebraima Manneh, senior Administrative Secretary of the UDP/NRP alliance and Dr. Abdoulie Saine on behalf of the Committee of Concerned Gambians. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Dr. Saine, We thank you for your email dated April 11th 2006 but which we received on Saturday, 20th April. We appreciate your interest in brokering a rapprochement between the UDP/NRP Alliance and the NADD. Ideally, having a unified opposition would help in our bid to defeat the APRC in the forthcoming elections. We have studied carefully your ideas and it is apparent that you have not exhausted all the possible options. You have for example, left out Hamat Bah and the NRP which is the second largest opposition party and which came out third in the last presidential elections. We cannot ignore this fact in any arrangement that has to be worked out within the opposition ranks. You will appreciate that we already have established the UDP/NRP Alliance and our two parties have chosen Ousainou Darbo as the presidential candidate for the Alliance and Mr. Hamat Bah as the running mate. Any arrangement with other parties would therefore start from that position. We would like to confirm our earlier position that we are open to cooperation and collaboration with all other opposition parties that share whose objective is to defeat the APRC in the presidential and national Assembly elections. We thank you for your proposal and we hope that our own reaction could engender more ideas in this regard. Best regards Ebraima Manneh Senior Administrative Secretary 18th May. 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Mr. Manneh: Many thanks for your email and the response to the proposals I sent on behalf of the "Committee of Concerned Gambians." Also, thank you for sharing your reaction(s) to the proposal with the NADD executive. We are very pleased that the UDP/NRP executive took the time to carefully consider the proposals. We sincerely agree that the proposals I delivered to you for your executive's consideration, were not exhaustive. In fact, the proposals were never intended to be exhaustive but were to instead serve as a skeletal foundation upon which the two political entities UDP/NRP and NADD could build on and possibly begin talks. That you shared the UDP/NRP executive's response to the proposals with NADD's could, in the end, open important lines of communication. This was our primary objective. With regard to the specific party decisions and intricate party positions, these can be made clear when talks/ negotiations begin in earnest with NADD. I am sure you are aware of the many proposals being floated around both in The Gambia and the Diaspora following the Kombo East by-election outcome. The call for unity from all political quarters has grown even louder. The precise character/modality for unity will be left to you, the politicians to spell out precisely. It is clear, however, that a UDP/NRP/NADD alliance could have easily clinched the seat in Kombo East. As in all negotiations, some positions are not negotiable. I suspect Hamat Bah's selection as Ousainou's running-mate is one such position. Not withstanding, it is our belief that other strategies/ modes of alliance formation can be explored amongst your ranks. We will leave the details to those of you on the ground. Again, on behalf of the "Committee of Concerned Gambians" I thank the UDP/ NRP executive for its thoughtful response to our proposal and hope that the NADD's executive will seize the opportunity to respond to your response to our proposal in order to begin talks soon. I will share this response to your email with the NADD executive as well. Kind regards, Abdoulaye Saine Go To Top -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2004 AllGambian.Net. All Rights Reserved. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask] ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤