By Tabora Bojang
Bakary Bunja Dabo, vice president and minister of finance under the PPP government has said although President Jawara did not build a university mainly due to funding constraints, he laid the policy and blueprint that President Jammeh relied upon to establish the University of The Gambia.
The PPP dominated The Gambia’s post-independence politics until it was toppled by the AFPRC junta in 1994. The party was heavily criticised for glaring infrastructure deficit during its three decades in power including failure to build a university.
But Dabo who now heads the opposition Gambia For All party, said talks of PPP failing to build a university is one of the issues “unjustifiably” peddled by critics to “batter” the PPP’s legacy.
“The PPP government had no objection to providing university education. We saw the need for it and we were spending a lot of money but it was because of resource constraints. We had to approach it cautiously and we got to a stage where we thought we could start it on a basis which would be sustainable economically. So, we were considering the options and it was at that stage I left the ministry and shortly after [Yahya] Jammeh came to power. Jammeh found the policy blueprint there. And he jumped on it…” BB said in an interview with the Dialectic Space podcast.
He said the Jawara government “deeply” realised the need for highly trained personnel and was spending immensely by sending Gambians to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone and other tertiary institutions around the world.
“The PPP government placed the right priority on education. Our constraint has always been one of resources and that was why we adopted strategies that made use of what we had in the most rational manner…we had to go about it in a way which will be sustainable and solid,” Dabo stated.
He explained that policies were developed for partnerships with international partners such as St Mary’s University to develop programmes on tertiary education before a fully-fledged university would be established.
Mr Dabo said even though the University of The Gambia was established post-PPP, it went through a “very painful birth because it was done at a time when the resource base was not there and the cost of that was very high not only in terms of money but in terms of quality.”
He added: “I think the university is one thing which I think we get a lot of unjustified battering by critics. Sometimes they don’t know, sometimes they know but they only do it to suit their purpose. They even claim PPP never built a high school and that is not true in a sense. Apart from Gambia High and Armitage, it is true that most of the schools were missionary schools but as somebody who was minister of education, the funding of the system then was largely government through the grant-in-aid. Those missionary schools were relying on the government for their budget, recurrent and development budget. So it was just a mechanism of funding which was different from taking it up on ourselves to say we built the school.”
