By Baba Sillah
Pa Malick Ceesay, the propaganda secretary of the National Reconciliation Party (NRP), has rebutted allegations by Gambia Democratic Congress (GDC) leader that there was widespread fraud in the recent National Assembly election resulting in his party’s loss of at least 12 seats.
Speaking to The Standard yesterday at the party bureau, Mr Ceesay himself a former elected parliamentarian, challenged the GDC leader “to come up with proof in order to substantiate such allegation”.
According to the NRP propagandist, his party’s has not received any such allegation from their candidate or the regional electoral officials.
“I just want to shed light on the publication made on The Standard newspaper by the party leader of the Gambia Democratic Congress, Mamma Kandeh. He said that 73 votes of the NRP were added to the eleven votes of the United Democratic Party (UDP) in the recently parliamentary election in Sandu constituency in Upper River Region. Our party is not aware of such allegation but notwithstanding we have contacted our candidate, Ansumana Keita who contested on behalf of the party in Sandu and he also said he has never received any information of such information [and the party secretariat] has not received any such information from any of the candidates in the constituency. We even went further to contact the regional officer of IEC,
Faraba Janneh who did also confirm to me that they have not received such complaint. So being the case, as a party we are very much concerned with the allegation because we are a reconciliatory party and we respect the rule of law, the policy and the programme of all the political parties in this country. We will do all our findings and investigations on this allegation and once we are done, we will call a press conference and invite all the media houses and make our position very clear.”
Mr Ceesay said his party respects all the political parties, particularly the UDP which is the biggest party in the country, and noted that the NRP and the UDP share strong cordial relations not necessarily based on a coalition mode.
