According to Halifa Sallah, there can be no country without citizens. Citizens must have national documents for their identification. Every citizen of a republic has a right to a birth certificate and that birth certificate should be issued soon after a person is born.
Hence at independence all villages in the rural area and wards in the urban area should have had registers of birth, marriage, divorce and death. The base information in such registers should have been converted into district, regional and national registers of birth, marriage, divorce and death. Consequently, every person whose name is entered in such register should have access to birth, marriage and divorce certificates and family members should have access to death certificates. Such birth certificates should have been converted into national identity cards that would be issued free of charge to all citizens as a matter of right. It would have been reasonable and justifiable to make it a legal requirement to always have one’s ID card in one’s possession to ensure that a person is always identifiable whether alive and well or in coma or is found dead.
The fact that the country has failed to put such a system in place for sixty years confirms that citizens are yet to matter in the eyes of those who have or are still governed. Hence the major challenge of the Immigration Department is stagnation in nation building. A nation cannot be built without putting the citizen centre stage. People centred development requires a balanced and proportionate development of both rural and urban areas.
Such development should have started by creating village and ward administrative structures to meet the requirement of what is now provided by section 26 of the constitution. It states that,
“Every citizen of The Gambia of full age and capacity shall have the right, without unreasonable restrictions-
(c) to have access, on general terms of equality, to public service in The Gambia.”
All the village and ward administrative structures should have provided sectors dealing with health, registration, marriage, divorce, education, death, agriculture and community development at large. There should have been village and ward self-raised funds and subvention from central governments to provide ID cards, death certificates and so on and so forth. In that way, universal access to birth certificate, national ID, health, education and other services could have been guaranteed.
The major challenge now is the creation of a bureaucracy for the issuing of ID cards without taking into consideration the remoteness of our villages and their inaccessibility to banking facilities without incurring additional cost.
Those who want ID cards must pay the fees required in a bank account and take their receipt to the office issuing ID cards. Such monies should have been utilised to empower the Immigration Department to decentralize on an annual basis while Gampost is encouraged to be present in each village to receive money and issue receipts so that what is a national right will be an entirely public sector activity that will facilitate the growth and development of national institutions so that they render national service with efficiency, effectiveness, transparentcy, accountability and probity in all their undertakings.
