By Omar Bah
The opposition Gambia Democratic Congress (GDC) has not still legally challenged last month’s National Assembly election results, but the party leader Mamma Kandeh, has renewed the party’s allegations of malpractices during the polls. Speaking at a recent rally in his home constituency Jimara, Kandeh alleged that some IEC staff were spotted filling UDP ballots with marbles at some polling stations.
“We have proof of that because we confiscated some marbles from some of their polling staff,” the GDC leader alleged.
Kandeh said his party agents detected these malpractices but due to their lack of technical knowhow on the issue, they couldn’t act on the spot.
The GDC leader alleged that, while the UDP and its party leader might be celebrating their victory but they cannot fail to know that the election was rigged in their favour.
“The way and manner the election was held was not fair neither was it transparent. Most of the malpractices we detected unfortunately were on the sides of the IEC polling agents, because the rigging was well planned,” he said.
He alleged that the GDC would have won 17 seats in the National Assembly election, but everything was manipulated in favour of the UDP. “We knew very well that the UDP victory was pre-destined well before the election and it is not a surprise to us,” he said.
He added: “I will take the last polling station to be counted in Sandu as an example, where they took NRP’s 73 votes and added them to UDP’s 11 votes and that was repeated in many places,” Kandeh alleged.
He said if that was not the case, GDC would have won in Sandu with over 46 votes. “We are aware of all these, but we will not cause any problem; all we will do is to talk about it for the whole world to know.”
On the issue of tribalism, the GDC leader said no tribe in the country can stand alone, and whosoever is trying to entertain tribalism will never succeed. “Since from the beginning of Gambia’s history all we know as Gambians is unity and no individual can change that,” Kandeh said.
He called on Gambians to always put the country first, before any individual interest.
The GDC leader also took time to criticise the new government, saying “I told Gambians well before the presidential election that if they vote for either the Coalition or Yahya Jammeh, they will regret it but they never listened. Yahya Jammeh is gone but nothing has changed.”
