By Omar Bah
The opposition APRC is set to contest all the mayoral and local government seats, the party’s spokesperson Seedy Njie told The Standard yesterday.
“We started our own nominations in all the regions and since then, we have received lots of candidates showing interest to contest on the APRC ticket,” Mr. Njie said.
As for the mayoral election, Njie said the APRC will unveil their candidates for KMC and Banjul in the coming days.
He said the growing interest among candidates suggests that the party has regained its strength.
“The last parliamentary election was very difficult for us with the new government exhuming dead bodies and displaying them on television, telling Gambians that Jammeh and APRC are corrupt, this and that so that many people were very scared to come out openly to associate themselves with the APRC and the former president,” he said.
He said although the party did not win any seat in the KMC, the percentage of the votes cast for APRC was impressive under the circumstances despite all those smear campaigns.
Mr Njie predicted that the APRC will retain the KMC mayoral seat as APRC still remains the most organised political party in the country.
He said Gambians who thought that Jammeh has done tremendously well over the past 22-years are beginning to believe that the way and manner the current government wants to treat the former President and the APRC is not fair.
Reconciliation
Mr Njie said if Ghana and South Africa were able to reconcile after apartheid and the fall of former Ghanaian President Jerry John Rawlings, there is nothing stopping Gambia from reconciling.
He said nobody can compare what happened in South Africa during apartheid and Ghana under JJ Rawlings to Jammeh’s 22-year rule, “but it is up to President Barrow and his colleagues to know that they are also going to be former governments.”
