Re: The Way Forward For Democratic Change

Modou Nyang

It is interesting to read addressed to emanate from a so-called UDP steering 
committee in the UK aimed at responding to an article published four months ago. 
However, the purpose and object of this far too much belated rejoinder is clear 
to any critical thinker. It is a PR attempt at presenting the UDP’s cowardly 
desire to lead at any cost. Unlike during the run up to the 2006 Presidential 
election in which the UDP leadership were not brave enough to put forward their 
ambition of having their partners in NADD to wily-nilly select it’s party leader 
as a presidential candidate, and backing out of the Alliance only after their 
'behind the scene cake sharing deals backfired; now they are at least bold 
enough to put their agenda forward, albeit through some so-called coordinators 
and steering committees. The objective of this so-called rejoinder is an attempt 
at selling the UDP’s ambition of having the opposition parties flocked together 
in whatever fashion but have Ousainou Darboe and the UDP as a front to support 
it’s feeble agenda to challenge Yahya Jammeh and his APRC. 
Whilst Ousainou Darboe, the UDP leader, continues to pay lip service to the 
desire of having a united opposition to contest the 2011 Presidential elections 
in interviews just to pretend that he and his party are open to genuine unity 
among the opposition parties, they set free their proxies to sell their true 
agenda to the public. Notwithstanding, the gang masquerading in a steering 
committee in the UK cannot just go by their game plan without engaging in a 
smear campaign. They needed a wall to lean on to to sell their nefarious agenda. 
And in Halifa Sallah and his work to promote the formation of a united front 
against the APRC they found a perfect position for marketeering. Hence it is now 
clear to every Gambian that all the noise is a simple PR job at presenting the 
UDP’s “rally behind a UDP led alliance” agenda to Halifa’s Agenda 2011's 
proposal geared towards exploring mechanisms to form a united front against the 
APRC. It is left to the Gambian people to decide which of the two agendas will 
better serve their interest. 
The fact that the so-called steering committee will pick up it’s argument 
immediately after letting us know their bone of contention with Halifa by 
telling us Halifa has a “longstanding reluctance to rally behind a UDP led 
alliance and/or candidate,” is enough to discern the chaff from the grain. Why 
should Halifa “rally behind the UDP? The so-called steering committee never told 
us. However, it is worth mentioning that there is enough to rally for in present 
day Gambia. The Gambian people who have been and continue to suffer so much 
under the APRC government are calling loud and clear for a 'rally behind' their 
call. It was one of such rallying calls by the Gambian people that Halifa 
responded to by demanding a stop to their humiliation during the APRC 
Governmetns’s “policy of screening of witches”saga. This is what every honest 
Gambian knows Halifa to be readily available to give his full support and 
service - not cake sharing deals. But let’s face it. Why rally behind a UDP led 
alliance or candidate? Since the so-called steering committee did not tell us 
why, but went on to argue that it’s party’s performance in the 2006 presidential 
election is due to a “lack of adequate prior preparation”in their attempt to 
situate the UDP and it’s leadership of being in a position to lead and bring 
about change in the Gambia, one may take this argument as an answer to the above 
question. However, this preposition is not only selfish and insensitive of the 
plight of the Gambian people, but far from the truth. If one may agree that the 
UDP did not have “adequate prior preparation” to execute their electoral agenda 
in the 2006 presidential election, one should also ask what was responsible for 
their equally poor performance in the National Assembly and the Local Government 
elections three months and seventeen months later respectively. I hope lack of 
enough “prior preparation” will not be the scapegoat again when out of 128,451 
registered voters in the KMC, the UDP Mayoral candidate pooled only 8,479 . And 
in Banjul the UDP managed only 1067 out of a voter register of 19,441. This was 
the trend in all the contested Local Councils throughout the remainder of the 
country. Was “adequate prior preparations” a cause to blame too, faceless 
steering committee members? Yes. The so-called UDP steering committee wants the 
Gambian people to believe their side of the story. They wrote: 

“UDP’s drop in votes has to be put into the right perspective if one is 
to avoid misreading the result and distorting facts. The voter turn-out in 2001 
was almost 90% [89.71%]. This figure had dwindled down to 58.58% in 2006 
amounting to a registered drop of 31.1%, and this is notwithstanding the fact 
that the national voter register had been updated with 219,630 new voters. This 
is clearly a significant drop and has undoubtedly affected the general 
performance of the opposition in the 2006 presidential election. This is the 
conventional wisdom and it also explains why UDP had fewer votes in 2006 than in 
2001".
Dear steering committee, does it make any sense for 219,630 as you put it, to 
register to vote in an election only to decide to stay at home on election day? 
Sure it was not only for the pleasure of being in possession of a voters card 
that motivated them to queue out under the sun to get registered only to have a 
voter card for keeps. After all, one must posses a form of documentation first 
to get registered and the majority of them registered by presenting National ID 
cards. The question you raised by your own statistics which you knowingly 
refused to address is: 
WHY DIDN’T THEY VOTE? WHY DID THE UDP FAILED TO AT LEAST EQUAL THEIR 2001 
VOTES EVEN IF THEY COULD NOT ATTRACT THE NEW OR OLD VOTERS WHO WERE NOT WITH 
THEM FIVE YEARS AGO? 
It is this question that the authors of the so-called rejoinder decided to 
gloss over that Halifa tried to answer when he said: “Any careful observer could 
detect that the country is crying for a new democratic dispensation and 
political leadership which could inspire the people to take charge of their 
destiny. The victory of the Independent candidates confirms that a non partisan 
agenda is a way forward for political change at the executive, National Assembly 
and Council levels.”The people have rejected all the candidates that contested 
the 2006 elections. Nearly half of the registered voters did not bother to vote 
for any candidate because of dissatisfaction with the system, one way or the 
other. But yet still the steering committee is not done. They want us to believe 
that a Ousainou Darboe and UDP led coalition is capable and can deliver the 
goods in 2011. They continued: 

“It is therefore untenable to use this as some kind of empirical evidence 
to the suggestion that a party led alliance is unsellable. It wasn’t like if 
these votes were lost to another party[s]. These are votes which weren’t in the 
pond for any party to fish. In other words, they did not participate in the 
electoral process. There is no evidence to the suggestion that this is due to 
the type of alliance adopted by the UDP or some form of protest specifically 
directed against it. In fact Halifa’s own view was that the low voter turn-out 
was due to the NADD fall-out while the UDP blame it inter alia on the harassment 
and intimidation tactics employed by the incumbent. So 219,630 voters were never 
in the pond for any party to fish". 


Dear steering committee, I know you will not answer in the positive. Hence I 
will tell you this is one reason why we need a strategic alliance to fish out 
those 219,630 valuable voters among many others to rescue our country from it’s 
present predicament. It is not only putting forward a person backed by few 
people to contest as president, instead it is to convince the dissatisfied 
voters - those 219,630 and others who failed to register at all and even those 
innocent ones at the APRC, to vote for a program that will free them forever and 
put them on the track of prosperity. That is all. Nothing more, nothing less. 
After inspiring the people to change a rotten system, all and sundry can freely 
and openly call for the support of their program to guide the country forward. 
In this way there will be no lame duck blaming of harassment and intimidation to 
your misfortunes. After-all, the intimidation will always be there as long as 
Yahya Jammeh is in charge. Fabricating Lies:

“The lost of NRP leader’s Upper Saloum parliamentary seat in the 2005 
by-election which was by the way necessitated by Halifa’s clandestine 
registration of NADD as a political party against every sound legal advice, and 
in contravention of the Preamble and Part1[1] of the Memorandum of Understanding 
that explicitly established NADD as an alliance, has had a demoralising effect 
on the party’s base particularly in the Central River Division, and due to the 
dogmatic wrangling within NADD, they too have not had a chance to adequately 
prepare their base for the upcoming election.” 
I have heard this before. First, it was in Brikama when the UDP organised a 
rally together with the NRP few days after Ousainou Darboe announced his 
resignation from NADD. It was one of the senior members of the UDP - Dembo 
Bojang the chair of that meeting who was peddling the lie that the remnant 
parties in NADD then conspired to have Hamat lose his Upper Saloum seat. And 
again here comes the lie once more. And in order to effectively sell this lie to 
the people this time, lack of “adequately preparation” did not affect voter 
outcome in constituencies like Sami and Kiang West, but only “in the Central 
River Division” and then blame it on the registration of NADD and Halifa Sallah. 
The tactic here is to continue to appease Hamat and the people who may still be 
in support of him to believe that the UDP loves them so much that they are 
taking up their party’s and erstwhile leader’s fight. But why did Hamat not 
regain his seat in the 2007 NA elections? The steering committee still wants us 
to believe in the 'lack of adequate preparations' as the cause. Out of the four 
contested seats in the 2005 by-elections it was only the Upper Saloum seat that 
was lost. Before the by-elections non of the incumbents were engaged in any kind 
of preparation to maintain their seats. And for the argument that the 
registration of NADD was clandestine and failed to heed “sound legal advice” can 
be best addressed by the parties concerned. I, as any other ordinary Gambian, at 
least at the PDOIS level, were not privy to any internal happenings during the 
NADD negotiations despite having the coordinator and two Central committee 
members in the negotiating room. Most of what I know about the inner dealings 
within NADD was what was in the open through press releases and later in the 
newspapers. Here they come now:

“Halifa’s claim that he had proposed a party-led alliance before is not 
strictly true. What happened was that PDOIS like all other parties knew very 
well that UDP’s position was to have a party- led alliance with the rest of the 
parties. They also knew that none of the parties including the NRP were at the 
time ready to support this proposal. As the chairperson of the meeting that was 
convened to discuss possible proposals for the creation of a coalition/alliance 
of all opposition parties, Halifa then felt obliged to put this proposal to the 
meeting alongside his own, the NADD option. At the end, the UDP position could 
not earn support from the other parties and that is how the NADD option ended up 
being adopted.”
So “none of the parties including the NRP were at the time ready to support” 
your UDP party led agenda and in the end the UDP position could not earn support 
from the other parties. And that is including the NRP as you just told us, 
steering committee members? Could this be due to all the parties well publicised 
claims that only a united front was capable of dislodging Jammeh and the APRC 
from power? Yes, all the parties have said this over and over again. But now the 
UDP through it’s so-called steering committee in the UK wants us to believe that 
they are equipped to do the job single-handedly. And to go further that Halifa 
has a history of opposition of a party led alliance and to use the 2001 example 
as evidence is a continuation of the attempt of smearing of the image of Halifa 
further. Every keen follower of Gambian politics in the second republic can tell 
what exactly transpired in 2001 at YMCA or Girl Guides. The events of that 
meeting which even the NRP that is now being pampered by the UDP for it’s own 
interest, was not in attendance, [and therefore] cannot be called a genuine 
attempt at forming a united opposition. Both PDOIS and NRP were not in 
attendance at that meeting which was hastily convened. What it in-fact revealed 
was the internal differences among the original founders and supporters of the 
UDP, which resulted to the split of Sheriff Dibba and his NCP from the UDP. 
Hence 2001 was only the UDP as it was, with the exception of only the die-hard 
NCP supporters who followed Dibba. So it is not true when the UDP wants to blame 
Halifa for what happened in 2001. He was not at the meeting neither the party he 
belonged to as a result of the manner in which the meeting was organised. If 
there will be a response from PDOIS or Halifa, I am sure this would be more 
adequately addressed. This so-called steering committee’s malicious attempt at 
reinventing facts tells well of the character of the authors of this rejoinder. 
They want us to believe that the UDP ended it’s boycott by contesting the Bakau 
council and Jarra West by-elections. Yes it is true the elections were contested 
before the signing of the NADD MoU in 2005. But it is being economical with the 
truth not to add that the elections came at a time when negotiations for a 
united front were already in progress, and in fact, all the opposition parties 
took part in the campaign to get both Rambo and Kemeseng elected. 
The Jarra West seat was more critical. The people there were made to believe 
that there was no need contesting elections due to the problems in the system to 
justify the UDP’s boycott in 2002. Time and resources from all the opposition 
parties were expended to campaign for the two candidates as it served as test 
for the ground for the emerging alliance/coalition that was being negotiated. I 
was in Bakau at the time; from nominations to the counting of the votes - I only 
missed the trip to Jarra but watched the tapes and know the input of the 
different parties and Halifa in particular. So it is a lie to project that 
Halifa opposed a party led alliance. The fact of the matter is that the UDP 
never tabled it’s wishes. All they did was to try and broker 'cake sharing 
deals' with some of the negotiating parties at NADD. This may tell us why Hamat 
and his NRP, whom this so-called steering committee confirmed were not in favour 
of a party led alliance in the beginning, later ganged up with them and try to 
fool the Gambian people that they needed only 5% of the votes to add up to their 
2001 votes to win the election. It is this 'cake sharing deals' which later 
crumbled, and it tells the UDP’s level of despise of OJ for daring to contest 
the flag-bearer-ship of NADD. 
The steering committee would not even tell us why Hamat was not present 
during the first meeting to nominate candidates for the position of flag-bearer 
of NADD and why the other representative of the NRP, Dulo Bah, did not vote or 
seconded Yaya Jallow’s nomination of Ousainou Darboe for NADD flag-bearer. 
Instead of honestly and openly negotiating with their partners, the UDP opted 
for other tactics at the back of their other partners. I hope they learn from 
that lesson and bravely and honestly negotiate for the support of their 
position. 
In concluding, I will state that figures presented by Halifa were an attempt 
to prove that larger majority of registered voters and non registered eligible 
voters are yearning for a new leaf in Gambian politics and one option that will 
make that possible is giving the task to the people themselves to choose who is 
to lead them. I will deal with that issue in another article.




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