By Olimatou Coker
Yaya Tamba, the leader of the rival APRC faction loyal to former president Yahya Jammeh, has said he totally disagrees with Yankuba Colley, a senior member of the faction loyal to Fabakary Tombong Jata which backed President Barrow’s NPP.
Mr Colley has claimed that the FTJ-led faction helped achieve Barrow’s victory in the Dec 4 election.
Responding to Colley, Yaya Tamba whose faction allied with Mamma Kandeh’s GDC in the last election, said Yankuba and his colleagues do not even have anything to boast of because the majority of the genuine APRC followers are not with them. “All what they have is a group of people they mobilised in the name of APRC to mortgage to Barrow for their self-interest. They do not have any majority. We have the majority. I just took over this position as interim leader and within one month I was able to pull over 100,000 people from their camp,” Mr Tamba said. He alleged that even the people who supported FTJ did so not because they trust them but because they were bribed and induced to back Barrow.
According to Mr Tamba, if the FTJ-led faction ever helped Barrow with anything at all, then that must be a contribution to one of the ‘corrupt ways the election was stolen’. “I am not even sure if Barrow has won the election because a petition has been forwarded to the court challenging its credibility,” he said. Asked if he and his group would ever consider rejoining the FTJ-led faction, Tamba said that question should be put to the ‘rebels’ and not the true APRC members. “We are the true faithful members of the APRC loyal to the party and its founder. There is nowhere in our constitution which states that the party can go into an alliance with any party. The party was supposed to contest on its own. But before we know it, FTJ and his people had already mortgaged the party to Barrow for their own interest. So because of this and because he is not here, that’s why Jammeh advised us to work with GDC,” Tamba said. He said it is the FTJ-led faction who are the defectors.
Returning to the election, Tamba alleged that the NPP has repeatedly violated election rules. “I can attest to many incidents when we had to call the IEC to complain about Barrow’s unfair methods by overstaying at towns just to block and deny our campaign team from reaching there on time. These are some of the evidences that indicated that Barrow did not observe fair play,” Tamba alleged.
