Dear Dr Janneh,
I am thrilled by the technocratic conviction that motivated you to commence this inter-generational dialogue aptly coined as “Legacy, Transition, and a Blueprint for The Gambia’s Future.” This is providing the foundation for a high-grade discourse on issues that should preoccupy the minds of our thinkers at this decisive juncture of our history. Under normal circumstances I should not engage you in a debate on your opinion about me. You have a right to your opinion and it should be respected. It does not define me. I am sure our precious time could be better spent in exchanging views on how to build a freer, fairer, better and more prosperous Gambia. Hence, if your second intervention was just about me and PDOIS I would have brushed the debate aside, probably with a sarcastic remark to navigate away from what would have been a frivolous and fruitless discourse.
However, it stands to reason that conscience and no less so, the national interest have compelled me to engage you a little bit further because of your call for all to congregate and ensure that we build, in your own words, “Team Gambia 2026” in real terms rather than just rhetorical ones.” Suffice it to say, we cannot build a common ground on the fundamentals of a future compact until there is trust.
This is the reason why I would not want us to cut the umbilical cord of our dialogue until a qualitatively higher-grade of understanding of the points at issue is imbued and sealed in all our minds and hearts, as oath or affirmation, compelling us to say the whole ruth and nothing but the truth. It is such abiding commitment to truth that would engender the love, respect and sincerity we would need to maintain our compact as partners in the building of The Gambia that we deem fit to live in and further bequeath to our children and children’s children.
Your second intervention has raised three points at issue which I am compelled to address so that the chapter and verse of this constructive dialogue would come to a close. I intend to be precise and incisive in separating the grain from the chaff so that the decerning citizenry and other partners in truth beyond our borders would be able to distinguish facts from fiction and embrace the facts that give us the clarity we need to unite a people without any barrier and build a nation of sovereign citizens.
The first issue is one that refuses to die even though its roots are withering away under the blazing sun. In short, you are still insisting that you have addressed your letter to the right person alleging this time that my indecision merited the missive being sent to me. Allow me to state this for the last time as I stand before the court of public opinion with heart guarded from drifting into the wilderness of passion and mind, guided by the dictates of national interest, that I chose to declare not to stand again to seek any elective office in any public elections held in The Gambia, because of my conviction that I could better serve party, country, continent, the world and their peoples after doing my best in the domain of being an elected duty bearer. Since I made the statement, I have never indicated any word or initiated any action on my own volition that runs counter to my pronouncement. Where then lies the evidence of indecision?
Recently, calls have started to be received that I should come back because of trust in my leadership capacity and qualities. Is it indecision to open up a constructive conversation with people who wish to entrust me with the responsibility of managing the affairs of a country until we find a common ground on the route to take to build a freer, fairer, better and more prosperous Gambia? I have said without hesitation or prevarication that the call for me to come back is a demand for a given type of leadership, one that is committed to bring about system change. Would it be a display of love of nation and people and a show of commitment to vision and mission of building a country that is free from poverty, injustice and ignorance by simply telling them that I have retired from political activity just to nurse an egotistically motivated false sense of personal integrity at national expense? It is my humble decision not to make a monumental historical folly by telling people that their hope of my coming back is misplaced. My decision is to tell them that their call is well placed and that they have done it at the right time when the political situation in the Gambia is in a state of flux and people are desperately searching for a way forward. Hence if their hope could be kept alive by their call for me to come back, I have the duty to keep that hope alive and guide them to take the route that will lead to the change they want. This is precisely why “Team Gambia 2026” is looming in the horizon.
Hence, allow me to take leave of this first point by affirming with all the emphasis I could muster that my mission to participate in building a freer, fairer, better and more prosperous Gambia is a lifelong commitment that will never be betrayed. The issue of coming back is a demand from some people due to trust. You may write to them to ask them to change their mind. I have the duty to keep hope and mission alive by guiding those who made the call to achieve their aim of getting the appropriate leadership without sacrificing my integrity. Am I guided by indecision or a sense of mission by carefully crafting a response that will keep hope alive until the mission is safely guarded and eventually guided into the hands of Team Gambia 2026 without sacrificing integrity? If you cannot see the wisdom of my position then I would concede that you are focusing too much on the thick forest of baseless suspicion and have lost sight of the relevant tree that is serving as a beacon of hope for a better day. In that case, we could agree to disagree and let the future and history be the final judge of all.
Secondly, I am amazed by your 180 degree-change of tone from seemingly holding Halifa Sallah and PDOIS in reverence to be a Halifa and PDOIS basher. Let me put context in view and then question whether you have any facts to back that we have failed to produce leaders who could be successors for 35 years.
Dr Janneh, I was the coordinator and spokesperson of NADD from 2005 up to its deregistration. Did that mean that there were no leaders who could become presidential candidates and manage the affairs of the country? In the same vein, I was the spokesperson of the United Front in 2011. Did that mean that the other members of the coalition were not qualified to be national leaders? It goes without saying that I was the spokesperson of the President and the coalition in 2016. I took centre stage. Did that mean that the other leaders could not lead a country?
Hence occupying centre stage in PDOIS does not mean that PDOIS does not have leaders who could lead a party or nation. You have got it all wrong by refusing to contextualise the content of my reasoning. I challenge the notion of generational monopoly of competence, commitment and innovation by affirming that the driving force of the three locomotives of development is the abiding love one has for country and people and the readiness one is prepared to discharge at a moment’s notice to answer to the call of duty to country and people. It is indeed the duty of all citizens, irrespective of age, to serve one’s people and country to the best of one’s ability, once capacity of mind and body is not diminished.
Having contextualised that some people are calling upon me to come back because of knowledge, experience and consistency I added that the only sure way of meeting their expectations without sacrificing integrity before the altar of patriotic expediency is to call upon any one who could perform my role to rise up to the occasion.
In this way, I would serve as the insurer that guarantees a transfer of leadership to those who have the attributes people claim to see in me. This constitutes sound tactics of maintaining grassroots support for system change as we endeavour to build Team Gambia 2026 to make it a reality.
The fact that people like you focused your attention on a tree and lost sight of the thick forest of PDOIS leaders, I am compelled to give an insight on what is not readily visible regarding this invincible party that no person on earth has the moral authority to discredit. I dare say that anybody who attempts to do so will end up in eternal pillory.
For your information PDOIS first participated in elections in 1987. We had five candidates namely, Sidia Jatta, Sam Sarr, Halifa Sallah, Dr Baboucarr Gaye and Abass Manneh.
We had three other medical doctors and a host of graduates at the tertiary level lined up for the next following elections. The 1987 elections served as the litmus test. It was evident from the results that patronage in Gambian elections was so entrenched that it would take a protracted struggle to uproot it.
Hence two teams emerged in PDOIS. Those who chose to be in the service of party for a lifetime to wage the protracted struggle to build its roots like the late Dr Omar Touray while others remained on the side line to monitor and take part in the development of the party as its goes through a political metamorphosis of coalition building for regime change and has now come back to its real mission of promoting system change with a leadership that would eventually emerge to form the core of Team Gambia 2026.
I have made it clear in my book “Nurturing Sovereign Citizens” that PDOIS had to pay the ultimate sacrifice to push the country forward to democratic constitutional rule after the coup of 1994. We kept the real PDOIS members waiting while we built coalition after coalition from 2004 – 2016 to ensure that change comes through the ballot box. They are sharpening their intellectual tools for the coming battle of ideas.
Finally, you did allege as follows: “for over 20 years, you have remained its de facto presidential candidate. This suggests not a democratic rotation of leadership, but a symbolic monopoly.” Your 20-year count of alleged monopoly of presidential candidature is fiction and not fact. There is no correlation between holding the position of Secretary General and presidential candidature. Since its inception PDOIS sponsored only four presidential candidates. I participated only once as a PDOIS Presidential candidate.
Every generation is obliged to prepare the next for national duty and PDOIS more than any party has performed its duty not only for party but for country, continent and the world contrary, to your unfounded allegations.
In fact, even the children who were nurtured in our nursery schools are now professors or PhD holders. They are performing in all works of life. Those adults who were trained in our night schools and women in our adult literacy classes are community leaders. PDOIS nurtured members could be found leading in all works of life.
Suffice it to say, the Central Committee is a working body of volunteers without remuneration and not a power house of pomp and privilege. In PDOIS, members decide everything. They decide who serves as candidate in all public elections. Its Secretary General is neither a signatory to its account or a comptroller of its funds. There is no personal gain. This is how matter stands.
It is incontrovertible that a person who does not have any grip on power cannot feel threatened by anyone who is seeking for power. The power dynamics you mentioned is a byproduct of the figment of your own imagination. What is not in doubt is our commitment to country and people and a determination to keep the bar high for those who aspire to lead so that we will not repeat the same trend of changing faces instead of changing systems. We are still occupying centre stage to enable those who truly wish to save The Gambia to measure their state of preparedness against the standard we have set.
As the old mythology holds it, a python must continue to measure its length against the palm tree and take over the ocean when it becomes a dragon that is longer than the palm tree. We are training such leaders who will not feel to be lesser persons or be prone to be bullied by leaders in the east or west of the world. That is the task history has assigned to us; to make Africa shine as a star among the world constellation of nations.
Allow me now to move to your proposals to determine whether they will stand the test of objective review.
I have noticed that as a technocrat you have hastily done your homework to justify your high-sounding appellation. A careful review of your proposals would reveal that they are sketchy jottings on priority programmes on education, health, energy and youth employment. It contains management schemes to promote public financial discipline and the strengthening of institutional framework. You ended by teasing out the possible sources of funding through development cooperation, private sector inflows, bonds, remittances and other schemes that are already in the books of existing governments.
First and foremost, I must assert that no single Gambian would read your proposals and nurse any glimpse of hope that their implementation could lead to the eradication of poverty, injustice and ignorance of what constitutes the fundamentals of sovereign nationhood and sovereign citizenship, which is the primary objective of PDOIS.
You have teased out programmatic blue prints without even the usual attempts by technocrats to outline the vision, mission, policy directives and strategic plans that should underlie or engender the sectoral programmes and activities aimed at attaining tangible outcomes that are monitorable, assessable and evaluable to determine the degree of successfulness of performance, underperformance or mal performance. This however is beside the point. I should not make pretence of being a lecturer presiding over your dissertation.
We, by virtue of the vicissitude of history are the sovereign citizens of a sovereign Republic whose duty it is to rely on mind, heart, hand, will and conscience to ensure that we utilise our collective intelligence to be the architects of our own destiny. Since each citizen must contribute his or her quota to enable us to craft a destiny that is fit for all of us, it is timely to initiate a national conversation on how to build a future.
However, I must caution that looking at the current trend of technocratic intervention there is the danger of relying on prescriptive development models and management tools that aim to suit all economies that has transformed some of our technocrats in to copycats who rely on SWOT analysis to look at the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of systems only to give prescriptions that are applied and assessed to deliver a high level of growth rate only to end up having the country listed among the least developed and heavily indebted poor countries of the world .
You also did identify certain programmes in Senegal, Rwanda and Kenya, which to you “are realistic, actionable, and grounded in approaches that have been proven to work” and are therefore worth emulating. I am sure that all these countries do have more than a quarter and even up to a half of their populations wallowing in abject poverty. Hence what is worth emulating to you is not worth emulating by our standard. Your technocratic attempt to convince me that Gambia will be safe in the hands of those who think like you has to be subjected to a litmus test. It cannot be taken for its face value.
Before subjecting your proposals into careful review allow me to divide technocrats and policy makers into three categories.
Development models and management tools may elude the first category of technocrats and policy makers who are copycats who simply extract the latest fashionable international and continental programmatic policy documents like the sustainable development goals and Agenda 2063 and coin them in such a way that they reflect national goals or development plans. They sing the tune of these goals ad infinitum while the indicators continue to show the growth of national debt and national poverty due to the incapacity of impoverished minds to harness abundant sovereign national wealth.
Hence despite the growth of the number of technocrats and policy makers they only succeed in sustaining policies which lead to the impoverishment of their nations and peoples while they develop a thousand and one ways of enriching themselves at national expense.
There is the second category of technocrats and policy makers who make serious effort to apprehend development models and management and management tools to promote effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, transparency and probity in the undertakings of government. However, in the absence of a system that could enable them to eradicate poverty they would just become functionaries who run a country on the basis of galloping taxation, surging domestic and international borrowing and indebtedness and heavy reliance on balance of payments support, loans and grants without being able to put an end to systemic poverty, injustice and ignorance.
Such technocrats are required to operate under IMF and World Bank managed programmes in order to get balance of payments and project support for their countries and people to subsist in poverty.
The third category of technocrats and policy makers go beyond idealistic development models guided by sustainable development goals that do not show how to build a productive base to attain them. They also appreciate the irrelevance of using administrative and management tools such as SWOT analysis to know the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a system that needs to be overhauled. Hence, they seek guidance from the fundamentals of development economics requiring the application of the law of balanced and proportionate development of society to ensure self-reliant and self-determined development.
Such people would seek to rely on the law of sovereign citizenship and sovereign statehood to eradicate the coercive nature of the state and any drift towards impunity to ensure that government exists for the eradication of injustice and for the promotion of the liberty and prosperity of the people.
Thirdly, such technocrats and policy makers would seek to eradicate ignorance of the essence and values of sovereign nationhood and sovereign citizenship by building a system of education for self-reliant and self-determined development that would focus on national language development, acquisition of basic scientific knowledge of nature and society, technical and service skills for domestic use and for employment, values and conduct of sovereign nationhood and sovereign citizenship, the translation of such knowledge into the nurturing of a mindset and the building of a new culture or way of life of the sovereign citizen and community of citizens.
You may wish to read the PDOIS Manifesto to know what make thinkers, innovators and builders of a new Gambia different from copycats and why I insist on handing over a legacy to a team of thinkers, innovators and builders of a self-reliant and self-determined civilisation, Team Gambia 2026, instead of a Team of copycats.
Now you may allow me to interrogate your proposals in detail and then conclude on a more respectful and positive note to march your call for consultative dialogue to shape the future.
PROPOSALS and ANALYSES
Education
• “Align school curricula to labour market realities.
• Integrate digital literacy, vocational training, and entrepreneurship skills from primary through tertiary levels.”
Dr Janneh, you propose that we should align the school curricula to labour market realities. I dare say that you made the proposal without relying on any study on the current realities of the labour market in the Gambia. Before making such a proposal you should have undertaken a study of the realities of the Gambia labour market. This would have convinced you why we have a transformative agenda to overhaul such a market and save many impoverished Gambians who are currently classified by GBoS as the “underutilised population.”
Allow me to give a clear picture of the labour market that you wish to rely on as a base for curricula alignment.
First and foremost, the 2023 Gambia Labour Force Survey by GBoS indicates that,
“On average less than half of the working-age population is actively participating in the labour market (44%). The level of labour force participation is primarily dependent on the employment opportunities. “That is the first point.
Secondly, it adds that “nearly one third of the working-age population is underutilized, in other words in a situation of unemployment.” This is the second point.
Thirdly the report highlights that “Job quality remains an issue, more than six out of ten employed work in informal employment.” In short, the survey reveals that “63 percent of the labour force is working in the informal sector and 33 percent in the formal sector and 4 percent in households.
The labour market is therefore erratic and dysfunctional. The education system would also be erratic and dysfunctional if its curricula are aligned to such a market. The economic system needs to be transformed in order to overhaul the current labour market to ensure universal access to means of production and quality livelihood. The innovative policies that could engender a major transformation of the dysfunctional labour market to ensure access to means of production and quality livelihood, as a matter of right to all sovereign citizens, is provided by the PDOIS electoral manifesto.
Suffice it to say, your second proposal suffers the same fate. You propose that the country should
“Integrate digital literacy, vocational training, and entrepreneurship skills from primary through tertiary levels” to align the curricula to the labour market.
You also added the following proposal for Youth Employment:
• “Launch a national digital upskilling programme for young people.
• Develop green-economy jobs and provide start-up subsidies for youth-led enterprises.”
It is important to point out that as consumers instead of producers of digital hardware and software most technocrats promote the consumption of digital products without considering sustainability issues and how to maximize gain to offset cost through continental integration and cooperation in manufacturing or half way – housing digital industries. Digital solutions must address sustainability issues, otherwise the dependency syndrome will persist while digital industries elsewhere cash in on purchases of digital, hardware and software, at our expense. We must bridge the digital divide not only in literacy terms but also in production terms.
There is sufficient motivation for most, if not all governments in Africa to engage in the drive for digital literacy and marching grants are being provided for agriculture and processing. However, there is no production, processing and marketing grid that pulls all the products from marching grants and hubs into a sustainable system of production, processing and marketing or distribution to ensure food security, the promotion of export and quality livelihood of small-scale producers.
It is clear that as long as the labour market, informal or formal cannot deliver quality work and livelihood, training would only promote the development of the individual but would not save him or her from being pushed into the camp of the underutilised population.
In fact, parents have been paying hundreds of millions of dalasi towards the training of their children in digital literacy and technology and other vocational and entrepreneurial skills only to leave the entrepreneur without money to establish an enterprise or an employer to hire them.
Let me take leave of this portion of your evidence starved, unrealistic and unsubstantiated proposal by affirming that the only curricula worth producing where the economic system, of a least developed or heavily indebted impoverished country, could only cater for an underutilised population is to depend on the idealistic agenda of providing universal and compulsory education and training at the primary, secondary level and universal and voluntary education and technical training at tertiary level at public expense. This education should not be about employment alone but more about nurturing the principles of sovereign nationhood, self– reliance and self-determined development as well the values of sovereign citizenship. Such curricula may even prepare the people for a transformed Gambia of the future that would provide them with access to the means of production and quality livelihood.
Your second proposal deals with
Agriculture & Agro-Industrialisation
According to you the country should
• “Establish regional processing hubs for staples and cash crops (cassava, rice, mangoes, groundnuts).”
You did not indicate who will produce the rice, cassava, groundnuts and how, but proceeded to propose the establishment of hubs for the processing of the produce mentioned. Here too nothing is said about ownership of the processing hubs and the marketing – grid that would
“• Link agricultural value chains to export corridors under the AfCFTA (African Continental Free Trade Area).”
You would agree that all previous administrations had promised to ensure self-reliance in food production. We are still importing two billion dalasis worth of rice. The problem is the system of agricultural production, which prevents the impoverished farmer or horticultural gardener from having appropriate seeds, fertiliser and farm implement to produce. GBOS has indicated that:
“One in ten persons of working-age performs subsistence farming, this proportion is more than twice higher among the underutilized population.”
How to prevent the land for gardening from falling into the hands of investors and subsistence gardeners transformed into their workers instead of being given seed money to do the gardening themselves has not been addressed by you. In the same vein, you have not shown how family farms could be moved from subsistence agriculture and provided with the resources to purchase, seeds, fertiliser and farm implements to produce on a larger scale, to eradicate poverty and guarantee quality living has not been addressed by you but has been addressed by our manifesto. In short, your proposals have not teased out any path to eradicate poverty in agriculture.
Energy:
On energy you simply indicated that the country should
“• Target 40% of energy generation from renewable sources by 2035.”
According to you this is to be done by ensuring that we
“• Leverage European and Chinese solar technologies to electrify rural Gambia through public-private partnerships.”
You have not indicated the current generation, transmission and distribution capacity and how we almost lost our energy sovereignty by relying on the type of recommendation you are making. Services are consumer driven and consumer maintained. There are commercial and non-commercial consumers.
You have not said a word on how to guarantee energy accessibility, affordability, sustainability and sovereignty.
In three months, Gambia had to pay SENELEC over a billion dalasi. SENELEC is known to generate only 25 percent of its capacity and relies on Private purchases to meet 75 percent of its generation requirements. How could any country leave the prime mover of its economy in unpredictable and uncontrollable hands?
Many of our countries are becoming outlets for archaic energy generation equipment that are not environmentally friendly but are utilised to generate and sell energy to countries experiencing deficits in generation capacity. Sometimes the same type of generators countries leave in a state of disrepair is what is utilised by a private company to generate electricity for sale to the state. Power purchase agreements are making electricity to be more expensive to the consumer.
You are yet to identify our energy challenges nor proffer any realistic solutions that would ensure availability, accessibility, affordability and further prevent any derogation to our energy sovereignty. Allow me to move to the next topic
Your proposal on health is as follows:
Health
• “Launch a national health insurance scheme through public-private partnerships.
• Digitise health referral systems and incentivise medical professionals to serve in rural areas.”
Insurance schemes are either designed to register the people who are to be catered for by a state financed health delivery system to facilitate adequate budgetary allocation of resources to the health sector in the national budget or to introduce cost recovery in health delivery by the back door. It is not clear where you want to take the Gambia.
PDOIS certainly does not wish to take the Gambia towards cost recovery for impoverished farmers, youth and women. We envisage the introduction of a health insurance scheme that would register every beneficiary of the health service either on the basis of residence or workplace to ensure effective and efficient planning in basic health delivery to all.
The other areas of intervention by you deals with Institutional Reform, Governance, Financial Discipline and Funding
In terms of Institutional Reform, you propose the digitalisation of all public services to improve efficiency and transparency, introduce annual government performance scorecards for each ministry and create real-time public budget and audit tracking systems.
You propose Digital Governance to enable citizens to rely on portals to pay taxes or driver’s licence.
The operation of institutions requires human material and financial resources. You are focusing on trendy notions that once a system is digitalised all the rest shall fall in place. This constitutes a romanticisation of digitalisation. Digitalisation of institutions does not make them immune to cybercrime and hacking of all sorts.
The key challenge in the operation of institutions in the Gambia is the starvation wages, which create a clientele relation between managers and employees, who augment their income or receive promotions by running errands for their seniors in administration. You have not said a single word on staff remuneration based on the quantity and quality of work they do.
You have not mentioned how the staff are to be trained and nurtured to put country and people first in all their undertakings as servants of the people through public servant retreats to assess and evaluate performance or public hearings to get the public view on performance audit results.
You intend to fight corruption without putting just and fair remuneration system in place, which is improved in accordance with the scale of improvement of the results of the outcome of quality service delivery.
Your blue print departs entirely from our proposal to overhaul a sectoral approach to allocation of resources and introduce a holistic approach based on the application of the law of the balanced and proportionate development to the country. This calls for budgeting for development to start with the village in the rural and the ward in the urban area which must retain their self-raised funds to plough them into their own development projects.
They will be required to prepare projects for onward transmission by the Regional Councils and municipalities to the Central Government for funding on an annual basis. When villagers and residents of wards know what belongs to them no one will be able to take it from them.
It goes without saying that if mining and other enterprising activities in a village or ward are taking place royalties must be paid based on the cost of remedying environmental damage and the share that the village or ward is entitled to for development purposes. If this was applied to Batakunku, Sanyang and Kartong, millions would have accrued the mining of zircon, ilmenite and rutile.
This is the way forward. People must take part in project and budget preparation and their execution at the village and ward levels by commencing with their own village and ward self-raised funds and then take part in preparing and requesting or allocations or being awarded equalisation grants from Central Government, through the Regional Councils and Municipalities for their active participation in and supervision of the execution process.
Corruption is genuinely contained through fair staff remuneration to deter the temptation for taking bribes that may be motivated by starvation wages. Staff participation in budget preparation as well as assessment and evaluation of performance in budget execution and service delivery by introducing annual performance audit of all state institutions, followed by public hearing on performance audit results is the way to go to curb corruption. This system that puts the people in the front line as the final social auditors enables them to nip corruption in the bud in the most innovative manner, in contrast to the methods of bureaucratic, politically motivated and witch-hunting like, anti-corruption agencies that generally leave the executive immune and amenable to intervention to save allies and hardly ever saves money for public investments.
You also raised sources of public finance which are currently being utilised by the government such as Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs): In fact, a whole bridge has been recycled for 100 million dollars by ceding management of the bridge to Africa50 for 25 years, which period will lessen if they earn 15 million dollars on top of their original investment. There is also a 20 million euro investment by a Turkish company to take over management of the ports, which should be followed by investment of 1 billion dollar investment to construct a deep-sea port at Sanyang and its control by the investors for a period of 30 years. You have not said a single word how to make Public Private partnership favourable to the country.
It is obvious that Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) are financing many projects in the Gambia, Your mention of such sources of financing, including the Global Fund for Health, does not add any innovative solution to public finance challenges.
Utilising Diaspora Bonds and other sources of loans without building a productive public finance base would only lead to the creation of a honey comb to enlarge state appetite for domestic indebtedness that paves the way to financial doom if a country defaults in debt servicing because pf inability to maintain foreign reserves to merit balance of payment support or lack any assets to recycle or mortgage.
You have not mentioned a single statement on how to build a productive public base to generate and sustain sovereign National wealth to ensure sustainable sources of public finance and generate sustainable pool of income to finance sustainable development. You have not mentioned how debts must serve as stimulus packages for the type of development and income generation that would lead to their repayment without sacrificing our sovereign assets. Our development model is the one fit for the Gambia, Africa and the World. I hope this will humble you to join Team Gambia 2026 to unlearn the models that is leading our countries into the abyss of poverty and our people into the concentration camp of the wretched of the earth.
CONCLUSION
Your conclusion makes reference to the presentation of an outline on fundamental needs and actionable pathway that would serve as a starting point for the formulation of a comprehensive national policy that reflects the lived realities and aspirations of the Gambian people. The readers are now free to assess whether you have achieved your goal. My humble opinion is that your jottings are neither an innovative blueprint nor pathway for national renewal but a pompous display of platitudes that could be mistaken for intellectual profundity by a generation in search of a ay forward.
Dr Janneh, just as you wished, you have indeed provoked, to use your own words, a “serious, evidence-based dialogue about leadership, succession, and national renewal.
However, your conclusion that the sketchy blueprint you presented is grounded in global best practices is at best an exercise in fiction writing and at its worst state, an attempt to deceive a whole generation in presenting as a way forward what cannot stand the test of objective review.
You said that “there is no shortage of expertise within The Gambia or across our diaspora, and there is no lack of willingness to serve. What has been missing is a platform where principled collaboration can replace personality politics.”
We do not want to repeat the tragedy of the empty barrel that makes a lot of sound but is hollow in the middle. This is why expertise must not be assumed. It must be proven at the crucible of public dialogue. This public discourse on the future of the country is more essential now than ever before.
However, before a national dialogue becomes desirable, we must distinguish those who want to save The Gambia from those who want to share the Gambia like a cake. Those who are led either by their egos or their minds are easy to detect when they speak and act. Those who move with their egos are demagogues who are loud but offer no solution that reasonable minds would accept. Those who speak as they practice and practice as they speak are always ready to deliver both in action and words to the satisfaction of all those who love truth and are ready to accept it when they see it.
I thank you for drawing my attention to the need to transit from legacy to relevance and your contention that legacy without transition inevitably leads to stagnation.
Your advice that Mentorship must replace martyrdom and that elders must open space and must not see the young as a threat speaks volume of the assumption that has misled the trajectory of your conclusion.
Allow me to make it clear that a sovereign Republic is not a monarchy. Leaders do not have hires and successors. They do not need to be mentor or indoctrinate their followers. They should be committed in sharing knowledge that makes others to be fit to lead. Leaders are mere duty bearers and the young and the old could be duty bearers as their knowledge, condition of mind and body and commitment dictate. They should all be ready to give country and people more than they would ever want to receive for national service. They must take from country what quality life requires and take no more and give to country more than what its development requires and give nothing less.
I personally have never been threatened and will never be threatened by any generation, young or old. It should be made clear that I have never possessed executive power to warrant seeing any one as a threat. The legislative position I held is already in the hands of a younger person. Hence any talk of seeing the young as a threat is grossly misplaced. In the same vein, your clever move to justify your impression that someone is trying to cling on to power by insinuating the existence of a threat, is misleading. In my case I have gone up to the goal post in 2016 to easily become a Minister or jockey for the position of Vice President and stay in waiting for the incumbent to shift and take the position. It would be fool hardy of me to have hunger for power and then take the ball back to the other goal post just to dribble back to score a goal. That would be grossly ingenious.
Our contact is with country and people. Our task is to put an end to poverty, injustice and ignorance. Each lover of country and people among our generation, has one foot grounded at the gate of the past so that we could collectively prevent the nation from moving backwards and another foot at the gate between the present and the future to prevent anyone from misleading the people, especially the young.
This is why everyone who stands to ask for the mantle of leadership must justify his or her knowledge base, experience and sincerity before the judgment seat of public opinion. Our duty is to be back stoppers and insurance to ensure that system change is a reality in 2026. We are ready to share knowledge and experience with those who want it just as others shared knowledge and experience with us in the study groups of our younger years.
People should ignore all these notions of inter-generational contest for leadership. Those with the values of the Republic and not that of a monarch would know that no sovereign citizen should have hunger for power that belongs to all. One should only have the mission to serve and give the best for country and people wherever they deem it fit and whenever they deem it fit, in accordance with the dictates of one’s time and circumstances.
Dr Janneh, if you agree that the development model I have presented to you is the way forward for the future you may contact me so that we will explore more details for more encyclopaedic exploration on the possibilities of the country for sovereign nationhood and sovereign citizenship for self-reliant and self-determined development for country so all our people will live in liberty, dignity and prosperity.
Team Gambia 2026 will prevail.
Uncle Halifa
THE END
