Dear Editor,
The Chairman of Kerewan Area Council, Papa Tunkara is a good man and political affiliation would not make him victimise anyone especially a mother who had been working at the council since Brother Papa was going to school.
I know Papa. He is always helpful and a supportive person. He inherited these character traits from his parents and politics will not transmogrify him into a wicked person. Papa was a member of another party which gave him the opportunity to become the chairman of KAC for another party and since he left that party, that party has been functioning.
He knows that as chairman, there will come a day when he will leave the position for someone else since someone else was there before him. So honestly, he should not let anyone use him as a political weapon. He should compromise with this woman who had worked there for 20 years. She deserves to be given consideration.
Ebrima Jobe
London
A challenge to Gambian intellectuals
Dear Editor,
Why don’t Gambian PhD holders and university graduates talk about changing the sordid democratic dispensation in the country and the irrational economic development policies?
There are too many lopsided PhD holders in The Gambia. The democratic narrative in The Gambia is broken down and we don’t have a rational development policy plan. They won’t talk about the bread and butter issues of good governance, democracy and how to develop the Gambian economy!
I have a degree in this and I have a degree in that! For Allah’s sake, can you at least for once say something that is not about your personal benefit and interest? You have a degree in this and you are a PhD holder in heck knows what! The Gambia is a dysfunctional democracy: the democratic narrative is stupid and we simply don’t have a national development policy plan. It’s not working out and we have no make The Gambia a functioning democracy under the rule of democratic laws and practices. And we definitely need a more thought through national development policy plan, not the prevailing narrative!
The democratic narrative vis-a-vis the interplay between politics and the law to govern The Gambia as a democracy is bonkers in its deliberations and dispositions.
And what’s the national development policy plan? Sell off everything, saddle the country with a mountain of debt, a mountain of national debt that the national economy could possibly service. And hence the valueless national currency, the dalasi, the hyperinflation: massive budget and trade deficits and a national economy gripped by debt deflation and stagflation.
Political instability, lawlessness and many more crazy people roaming the streets as can be seen in The Gambia are the only outcomes.
Why don’t Gambian PhD holders and university graduates talk about democracy in an educated and informed polished fashion?
Don’t Gambian academics and university graduates understand anything about economics and sustainable national development?
Why’s the democratic narrative in the country so misinformed and misguided?
Here’s something I want Gambians to be mindful of: Every time President Barrow builds something like a road and buys something like an ambulances, the exchange rate of the dalasi depreciates against the British pound, the euro and the dollar. Why don’t university graduates and PhD holders in The Gambia talk about things that really matter to changing the sordid standards of political and economic development governance in the country?
There’s no informed or serious political talk in The Gambia relevant to changing the diabolical democratic narrative and the shambolic economic development policy dispensation. Educated and informed people are supposed to inform and influence the governance of the political economy. To be educated means to know better and speak out on issues that are in the public and national interest.
But to claim to be educated and always talking nonsense and the irrelevant, that’s a shame!
Yusupha ‘ Major’ Bojang
Scotland
