By Omar Bah
President Adama Barrow has called on the newly sworn-in Interior Minister, Secretary General and Secretary to Cabinet to serve the interest of the country with professionalism
The Gambian leader made this remark yesterday while presiding over the swearing-in of Interior Minister Ebrima Mballow, Secretary General Habib Drammeh and Secretary to Cabinet Ebrima Ceesay at the State House.
“I urge you to serve our people with professionalism, without fear or favour. Individually, we can change our attitude towards work and take positive steps towards making differences in our institutions,” he exhorted.
President Barrow said: “I have confidence in all of you that we will work together towards the realisation of our National Development Plan 2018 -2021 to make this country a signing example of development, democracy, rule of law and peaceful co-existence in the sub-region and beyond.
“Together we can commit ourselves to serve our national interest in our engagements, our individual interest is embedded in the national interest,” he said.
He said the government under his leadership has the commitment to take concrete and necessary steps to build institutions to consolidate the country’s democracy. “We pledge to engage in institutional reforms therefore I urged you to work hard for us to achieve our goal as government and to live a legacy of sustain institutions, laws and precedence that will transform our country into a fully fledged democracy to facilitate social economic and political development for our people in the new Gambia,” he added.
Secretary general and head of the Civil Service, Mr Habib Drammeh said The Gambia is witnessing the beginning of transition into a new phace of transformation and in this regard, “it cannot be business as usual”.
He said since it cannot be business as usual the civil service needs to respond by sweating the assets of government, “by doing that last mile in other for us to be able to achieve our priority areas”.
“In this regard, we would develop different scorecards by the civil service that cabinet could finally agree on as a way in which we could measure output and performance of the civil service. I believe if we do this, we would be in a better position to attain our goals in the shortest time possible,” he said.
That, SG Drammeh added, is a commitment he wanted to undertake with the support of the vice president and the cabinet.
“I believe in not problem solving but embracing solutions, because problems are negative; they would only give you negative energy,” he concluded.
