By Omar Bah
The Citizens’ Alliance chairman, Dominic Mendy, has accused PDOIS leadership of being “bureaucratic” alleging that they refused to take part in the just-concluded alliance talks despite being officially notified.
CA had issued a statement last week saying PDOIS were invited for coalition talks but they never responded.
However, the PDOIS leader Halifa Sallah stated: “It is important for the sake of transparency and accountability to explain to all of you that prior to my ailment, I have been approached by people who felt that CA and PDOIS should form a coalition. Whether those people were sent by their leaders or not, what we were told was that CA is a young party and would want to support PDOIS in this presidential election, so that through this association it would build itself. They said the CA was also talking with other parties and they wanted PDOIS to engage in that. We told them that coalition building is very sensitive. You need to talk to each party to know their interest. Because we do not want to sit and each party will say select my presidential candidate otherwise I will not be part of the coalition,” Sallah told journalists on Thursday.
However, on Friday, CA’s Mendy said: “We sent our people to the PDOIS leadership but it was very difficult to meet them because the party is very bureaucratic. They requested for us to write to them officially,” Mendy told journalists.
Mendy alleged that a few days later he drove to the PDOIS leader’s house to talk to him about the initiative.
“I didn’t find him there but I found the wife and spent time chatting with her. Four days after I left his house, this man didn’t even call me. I called him up and all he said was he heard that I was at his house but I said to him it is not only that I went to his house but I also went to the office. He then said to me that they were going to process the request we sent to them so that they could meet our team,” he added.
Mendy added: “When he met our team he told them he was not interested in any alliance, that probably after the nominations, and even if he is going to go into any alliance he will have to lead it.”
Mendy said despite that they continued pursuing PDOIS and at some point Halifa got sick.
“However, after he was able to re-engage with the public he came through our delegation to say again PDOIS will not engage in an alliance that they will not lead. In fact, he said they are interested in working with only CA and if CA is interested in bringing other people to the alliance it must be people who are ready to support PDOIS as flag-bearers. He said PDOIS was the first party CA reached out to for alliance.
The CA has since signed an alliance with GMC and All People’s Party.
“We have done our best and the time and energy we have now is for the nomination and election. I want to take this opportunity to inform you all that we are going to nominate our presidential candidate on Tuesday,” he said.
