By Omar Bah
In its new year message, the Gambia For All (GFA), criticised the government’s 2024 performance as being plagued by corruption and abuse of office. Allegations include misuse of public funds, slow implementation of anti-corruption measures, and self-dealing by officials under President Adama Barrow’s administration.
GFA said while democratic gains have been made since Yahya Jammeh’s rule ended in 2017, progress in addressing corruption and reforming governance remains uneven.
“The year 2024 only saw the ills of corruption and abuse of office fester; the nation continues to be suffocated with reported scandals of misuse or outright theft of public funds, reports which have become so rampant that they have ceased to attract headline news,” GFA said.
The party argued that critically needed measures to address these ills, such as civil service reform, overhaul of the beleaguered local government institutions, a streamlined re-organised foreign service, a dedicated anti-corruption Commission, security reform and other reforms, have yet to materialise much to the disillusionment of the Gambian people.
“These failures on the part of the present government, coming on top of deprivations and denial in other spheres of our rights as citizens, living in an avowedly democratic space, should not go unchallenged. We need to stand firm as a people and defend these rights as we have done in 2016,” it added.
Constitution
The GFA added that the recently published 2024 draft, now before parliament, contains very fundamental flaws which the rejected 2020 draft had bravely tried to correct.
“In so doing, the new draft excised critical, indeed fundamental, proposals that went in the direction of institutional adjustments founded on the basis of democratic principles and values that underpin accepted modern norms of good governance; adjustments which also clearly reflect the desires and aspirations of the Gambian people from the extensive consultations carried out at the time by the Constitutional Review Commission.
“GFA took good note of efforts presently being undertaken by esteemed actors, including the National Human Rights Commission, to canvass consensus in parliament on the need for restoring such fundamental provisions in the new 2924 draft in order save it from suffering the fate suffered by the 2020 draft.
“We support the initiative, even where we remain guarded in our expectations given the situation we have where a most retrograde party system sees to it that, on the ground, the autonomy and effectiveness of fundamental national institutions, such as parliament, are routinely undermined for reasons of partisan political expediency,” it concluded.
