OJ, as he is widely known, said only an opposition coalition could remove the Jammeh administration from power through the ballot.
“It is only through a coalition that we can remove President Jammeh out of State House,” he said. “We have to organise ourselves as opposition parties and form a coalition to salvage this country from two decades of misrule,” he said.
He made this call at his party’s mass rally on Saturday in Brikama.
The event was a belated commemoration of The Gambia’s 50 years of independence for the party that led the country to political independence.
OJ said: “The APRC leadership refused to invite the opposition to the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence due, largely, to their political miscalculations. When the PPP is celebrating independence, we invite all the parties because we know that independence is a national event and must not therefore be politicised.”
For the veteran politician, the PPP deserves much more than the credit it is getting for achieving independence for The Gambia.
He added: “The Gambia would have been either part of Senegal or denied its independence had it not been for the solid political stance of our leadership, Sir Dawda Jawara and his colleague politicians. The PPP breathed life in The Gambia when no one thought the country could survive as a sovereign state.
“And, when The Gambia attained independence in 1965, there were one-party states and dictatorships all over Africa, but Sir Dawda refused all temptations and became a democrat. Despite the massive propaganda machinery of the APRC, they cannot counter the fact that all the relevant economic and political institutions were built by the PPP.
“We built economic institutions that today drive the economy of this country. We established the Central Bank and introduced and maintained the value of Dalasi; established the Gambia Ports Authority; Social Security; Gamtel; Gambia Technical Training Institute; Management Development Institute; the Gambia International Airport; Gambia College; Gambia Agricultural Research Institute and many other relevant institutions.”
The PPP leader lamented the current state of the country’s economy, decrying the depreciation of the dalasi and high youth unemployment.
He said: “Let the APRC explain why it can’t give the young people jobs after destroying all the institutions that the PPP established and sinking the economy. Their most cherished mantra being spread about is that “for young people, the sky is the limit” but this is not what we have seen because that has come to mean, “For the young people, ‘back way’ is the limit and not the sky”. The young people are seeing ‘back way’ as a better alternative route out of the economic mess they have found themselves in as was instituted by the APRC. Is that the reason why they are going to Europe through the ‘back way’?”
]]>
