By Tabora Bojang
Opposition United Democratic Party Brikama Area Council chairman, Yankuba Darboe, has revealed that his party’s defeat in the 2021 polls was influenced by a number of factors including the participation and registration of ineligible voters, inflation of the voter register, widespread vote buying and other irregularities, allegedly perpetrated by the ruling NPP.
Chairman Darboe also attributed the loss to some internal loopholes in the UDP including its use of uneducated persons as polling agents.
“Our messaging too was very poor in 2021 and our polling agents were mainly concerned about the registration of non-Gambians at the registration centres and not the number of people that were being registered. The NPP knows very well that the UDP was not taking up those figures and after closure of official registration every day, ‘they will go to Majum Estate and register more and more people’. That is why they were able to register thousands of ineligible people. So we did not get any data to challenge the IEC about the 900,000 plus people that they claimed to have registered,” Darboe told members of the UDP diaspora at a meeting in Brikama.
Yanks further alleged that the NPP also resorted to negative and divisive political campaigning making use of ethnic rhetoric to sway the voters, while the UDP adopted the PDOIS style of campaigning- focusing on policies and on “our 5- point agenda”. So, people were waiting to see how and what UDP’s response would be to those tribal rhetorics spewed by the NPP but the election ended without the UDP coming out to clarify those bigotries and that really affected us. They have used so many strategies to win the elections and we must confront and counter those devices and close them up before we can get what we want,” Darboe said.
He went on: “Before the elections, I told a meeting at the party leader’s office that I got intelligence that the IEC will wait until two days before they will declare the election because they will want the plan to go as they put it. But in 2026 we will take a different approach,” he said.
