Press release
We regret to announce that our region, the West Coast Region has been inundated with floods in Brikama and many urban areas of the region and I want to seize this opportunity as the Chairman of the region to extend our sincere apologies and sympathise with all our people affected by the floods. Due to many years of neglect and lack of sufficient investment in our infrastructure, has resulted in poor drainage systems in our region, which are partly responsible for the recent floods being experienced by our people. This is not just limited to the failures of the local council, BAC, but extended to the central government as well, who have been constructing primary roads or highways in the region without catering for primary drainages along those roads to enable local councils to connect our secondary drainages to the same. The physical planning has also not assisted the situation with some of its plot allocations that have catered for no water reservoirs to local authorities to enable effective water management in settlements. These failures have yielded to our current predicament, where any amount of downpours of rain experienced would result in floodings in our urban areas, due to lack of effective drains and waterways to enable unhindered passage of water from our settlement areas. Since coming to office, we have awoken to these challenges and have catered D10 million to mitigate such drainage issues in the region, but due to lack of funds, the project could not commence yet. Without Central Government interventions to provide primary drainages along the primary roads, it would take the local authorities long time to address these drainage issues within our region, due to our budgetary constraints. We further had to give priority to the solid waste management project, which is an all-year-round problem for many of our households in the region. Our hope is once, we mitigate that challenge of lack of waste collection from our households, we would direct all our efforts to this perennial issue of lack of effective drainages in our region. The challenges facing our council, Brikama Area Council, is enormous but with your support in paying your taxes and in time, we can and will overcome many of these challenges. We further urge the Central Government to pay their land rates to BAC, which they have failed to pay for the last 2 years. They should further pay their legally mandated subvention of 25% of our BAC development budget to BAC annually, which should have been D40 million this year. If they had given us that amount rather than sharing it to the media houses, we would have had funds to fix our drainage system around our region of West Coast Region. We put our people first and politics last, so let’s unite to develop our little Gambia.
