I want to present Fabakary's notes in their entirety first. I will come back to share some ideas with Fabakary of Baddibu Salikene on his malignant reliance on a NO-PLAN. I encourage Fabakary to read AGENDA 2020 again in order that he can appreciate the vacuous nature of the NO-PLAN plan. I want him to pay particular attention to the GOAL of the AGENDA if all Gambia were to adopt AGENDA 2020. You can try this experiment with your family members at home and see where you end up. Pretend one of you is Yahya, with a banana and he's sitting on the sack containing the rest of the bananas. The rest of the family is hungry and he killed one of your brothers who last tried to lick the banana peel he threw away. Now you design AGENDA 2020 in order to unseat/remove him given that in 2006, your neighbors refrained from assisting your family to unseat Yahya the monkey and let's say the reason your neighbors abstained was because they determined your family disunited in unseating Yahya. Try to apply AGENDA 2020 and see where you get.

I admire Fabakary's sobriety and I commend his integrity. I merely intend to bring him to the finish line. With AGENDA 2020, he'll never get to the finish line. It will be sad if such a fine gentleman, full of passion and sentiment, expires in the desert for lack of vision and a poor grasp of political engineering.

I'll be back later. Haruna. 

Courtesy: Maafanta.com

A VOICE FROM SALIKENE;
WE ARE NOT WORSE OFF THAN THE REST OF THE COUNTRY.

The president on his meet the people’s tour stated ,“Election is very important because it reduces responsibility. 
What do I mean by this is that the forthcoming election will not be about whether Yahya Jammeh will win or 
not, but it is about voting for progress and continuous development, or voting for retrogression. If you 
want to understand what I mean, go and ask the people of Kiang West, or even nearer the people of 
Salikene. "

Now what is it that the president wants the people of the Gambia to know from us in Salikene and Kiang West which 
they did not already knew or are not experiencing in their lives? Any person with true conscience who follows the tour 
must acknowledge that the whole of Gambia is going through the same hardship. They are all experiencing high cost of 
living, high unemployment everywhere, lack of health facilities, lack of fertilizer, farming implements and markets for the 
produce of farmers and women gardeners, poor roads, lack of public transport service, high cost of education, lack of 
drugs and equipments in the health centers and hospitals, lack of electricity in most part of the country and problem of 
unstable supply where it existed, lack of safe drinking water etc. These are the complaints that people have lodged to 
Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh in 1994 when he came to power, and these are the same complaints being lodge to 
Professor MMB Jammeh today during his recent tour. After been in power for seventeen years abject poverty is 
still the lot of over 62% of Gambians.

We the people of Salikene and Kiang West are not worse off than the rest. We are all feeling the same hardship in the 
country. This is why it is really mind boggling to hear the president say ‘God has said in the Quran that if you are 
not grateful to a human being, then you cannot be grateful to God. North Bank [region] should be very 
grateful to my government due to the developments executed in the region.’ What should we be grateful to 
him for? For keeping us in the hardships already mentioned for seventeen years? Then we must be fools to do that.

Every human being wants progress in order to live in comfort. Is that not the reason why he has transformed himself 
from a poor boy we all know in 1994 to a multimillionaire today which is perhaps his only success story in the past 
seventeen years, which now enables him to be throwing biscuits to the hungry masses. We have been entrusting this 
man with thousands of millions of dalasis every year for the past seventeen years for him to manage it to better our lives 
but still we are suffering, going through the same old hardships and he is damn rich yet he is accusing us or implying 
that we are ungrateful. How incredible this is? Where in the Quran did God say that we should be grateful to such a 
person in this kind of situation? Jammeh and his so called religious leaders or scholars shall never show us that 
anywhere in the Quran. That is nowhere in the Quran. If that existed in the Quran which is the bases of the Islamic 
religion, then there will be no muslim in the whole wide world today. But Islam is a just religion and will not teach or 
condone injustice. This is injustice pure and simple.

With the thousands of millions of dalasis we are entrusting him with every year and all the loans he has taken on our 
behalf [which has now amounted to over sixteen thousand million dalasis despite the debt relief] which we are now 
paying with huge interest .President Jammeh and his stone age regime over the past seventeen years are unable to 
provide us with a viable tarmac road stretching from Barra to Wuli pasamas and from Kartong to Koina; almost all our 
feeder roads in the country are in a deplorable condition and near been impossible for vehicles to ply. Agriculture, 
Education and Health Sectors which he claims are his priorities are dying; for farmers still lack fertizer and farming 
implements even though the money accrued from the sale of thousands of tonnes of rice being given to us by Japan is 
meant to provide them with those things at low affordable cost, teachers are demotivated because of poor 
earnings in the face of high cost of living and lack of teaching materials resulting to poor quality education being given 
to our children which is why he wouldn’t want his children to attend our public schools. The same thing applies to the 
health sector and all other sectors in the country; poor pay and lack of equipments, drugs etc. people are living in 
immense hardship in this country. Many people cannot afford three meals a day even in the capital city of the country, 
Banjul. Did the president not noticed that on Fridays people are traveling from far places to attend prayers at state 
house mosque hoping to receive a bag of rice from him to return home with. Can’t he notice elderly people wrestling 
over the biscuits he threw at the crowd when passing. Many of those elderly people are picking those biscuits he threw 
and then sell it to shopkeepers to get fish money for their families. We all know that is not easy. That is immense 
hardship; and this is after seventeen years of his administration. Is this something to be proud of? I did not think so.

The projects this regime is boasting of are the few roads, the three empty hospitals which without the required trained 
staffs, drugs and equipments and schools all of them funded with loans taken on our behalf which we are paying.

Instead of asking people to be grateful to him by keeping him in power forever, he should rather show them respect by 
rendering account for what he was entrusted with over the past seventeen years. He should tell the people how much he 
was given every year in the form of taxes and other revenues, how much was accrued from the crude oil given to the 
country by Nigeria, how much was acquired from the sand and other minerals being mined since 1997, how much loans 
was taken in the name of the people over the past seventeen years and how all these billions of dalasis were utilized to 
better their lives. This is what honesty requires and that is what the people expected of him. Even if he wanted to be in 
power for a thousand years he should not lose sight of this fact.

Secondly honesty requires that he utilized the tour for what it is intended. We are told that the National Assembly has 
allocated Three Million and Five Hundred Thousand Dalasis [D3, 500,000] for the tour. This is not small money. If he is 
embarking on a political campaign, this money should not be used to fund that. Instead it should be funded by his party. 
But who can say that what we have witnessed during this tour is not a political campaign. It is said that charity begins at 
home, if he is to make any headway in his drive to fight corruption in this country as the head of state, he should be a 
shining model for others to follow.

He is reported to have pledged that any region with the highest voter percentage for the APRC in the election will 
receive a historic reward. He further stressed that it will be an exemplary reward that no president has ever done for his 
people. The people are not fools they know that this is a desperate attempt to throw dust in their eyes. If the 
president thinks he has much support among the people he should not be afraid. He should simply open the public 
media [GRTS Radio and Television] to divergent views as required by the constitution which he swore to uphold. He 
should allow all the opposition parties in the country to have equal access to the public media particularly those 
interested in enlightening the people to do so. That is what the people need. He will not be able to give that a better 
reward than enlarging their liberty and dignity, and alleviating their poverty. These he has failed miserably over the past 
seventeen years. Even the sycophants around him know this as a fact, but because of their selfish interests they will not 
tell him that. They only tell him what he always wants to hear. Those are his real enemies. The one who tells you the 
truth is not your enemy.

Since Jammeh has failed to lift the people from abject poverty which is the lot of 62% of Gambians despite all his efforts 
over seventeen years it is clear that even in the next hundred years he cannot do much. Therefore it is time for us to 
open our arms to change in November 24th 2011 if we are not to be cursed by the future generations for 
failing to take up responsibility. Agenda 2011 offered us the best chance so far to carry out that 
responsibility. If any Gambian has an option which is better than this Agenda, he/she should put it on the table for 
consideration. We stand a better chance to bring about change if we want. In 2006 presidential election, there were 
670336 registered voters. 264,404 voted for Jammeh and 128,281 voted for the opposition. 277,651 abstained from 
voting. If we add the opposition vote with those who abstained, it almost doubles that of Jammeh. This shows that he is 
the least popular. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of those who abstained are those who 
were disgruntled about the unexpected fragmentation of the opposition. If there was unity, they were likely to vote for change. Jammeh is more unpopular today than in 2006. Yes if will, we can bring about change and give our country a fresh start. Let’s do it now.

Forward with The Gambia.

By Fabakary Trawalley
Baddibou Salikene

 




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