It is indeed quite concerning that the Cabinet has expressed objection to the draft constitution on the issue of presidential term limit that it discriminates and targets Pres. Adama Barrow. That statement by the Cabinet is utterly false, irresponsible and a threat to peace. The Gambia does not belong to Adama Barrow or any other single citizen alone.

Hence when Gambians expressed that no Gambian should serve for more than 10 years as President that view must be respected and protected by all. For Gambians to allow a citizen to serve for even 24 hours as President of the Republic of the Gambia is an invaluable honour for which that citizen must be eternally grateful and thankful to Gambians. Hence it is utter greed for power and a gross display of irresponsibility for the Cabinet to insist that Pres. Barrow, a mere individual citizen to serve for more than 10 years in our country.

Therefore, let all Gambians defend this draft constitution and demand the President to act immediately to make it become the supreme law of the land. Until then Pres. Adama Barrow and his Cabinet have no authority to change even a comma in the draft constitution submitted to him by the Constitutional Review Commission. Let me repeat for purposes of clarity, the President and his Cabinet have no power whatsoever to add or subtract any letter, punctuation or format of the draft constitution submitted to him. The CRC Act has given him no such expressed powers in anyway.

Even if the CRC Act did not also expressly prevent him from touching the draft constitution, he cannot use his own discretion to change it as he wishes. Doing so would be to undermine the spirit and objective of the constitution building process and the sovereignty of Gambians. The draft constitution is the opinion of the people of the Gambia. Not only has CRC conducted a broad-based consultation with Gambians at home and abroad but the Commission also held consultations with specific institutions and constituencies such as the Executive, National Assembly, political parties and CSOs among others to obtain their opinion as well. Hence everyone had his or her say on this constitution already.

What is required now for the Barrow Government to do is to take this draft constitution before the National Assembly. Given that the 1997 Constitution requires that a bill to amend the constitution requires to be gazetted for at least 100 days, the time is now for the President to make the Minister of Justice to kickstart that process.

Here is the timeline the Government needs to follow: If the Gambia is to hold the next presidential election in December 2021, then it means the draft constitution should be gazetted not later than 1 June 2020 so that the bill for the tabling of the draft before the National Assembly can take place in September 2020. This will cater for the 100-day period required for the consideration of the bill before the National Assembly to approve the draft so that the Speaker can send it to the IEC for referendum.

A referendum should be held between October and December 2020 so that there is a new constitution by January 2021. With this new constitution, the necessary reforms of the Elections Act could also be done by March 2021 and in any case by the June 2021 National Assembly session latest. This is to ensure that we meet the six months’ requirement for electoral law reforms before the next election as required by the ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance. In between June and September 2020 the IEC should also carry out voter registration so as to update the voter roll in time for the referendum between October and December 2020.

This is the timeline that the Gambia has without which there cannot be a new constitution in time for the 2021 presidential elections. It must be clear to Pres. Adam Barrow that the country cannot afford to go to the 2021 presidential elections with the 1997 Constitution. Citizens are not prepared for that hence he has a duty to ensure that he upholds his own Government’s plan to ensure that there is a new constitution in 2021.

Failure to do so means not only is Barrow once again betraying the people of the Gambia but he would also be threatening the peace and stability of this country. I call on citizens not to accept Pres. Barrow and the National Assembly to either change any letter in the draft constitution nor to delay the passing of a new constitution. Any attempt to do any would be a betrayal and a threat to peace.

At the ceremony at State House where the CRC submitted the draft to the President in March 2020, the Justice Minister said Gambians will be updated on the state of affairs of the draft constitution given the COVID 19 pandemic. Yet it is more than one month now and Minister Tambedou is yet to tell Gambians what is their agenda for the draft constitution. Why is Minister Tambedou silent until now?

For the Gambia Our Homeland

…………………………………………….

Madi Jobarteh

Skype: madi.jobarteh

Twitter: @jobartehmadi

LinkedIn: Madi Jobarteh

Phone: +220 9995093

Honourable Minister and my dear brother,

I salute you in this 4th edition of a series of epistles I started sending your way more than a year ago.

Indeed you are a true son of this country; and as you proudly announced in the halls of our National Assembly, it is not only the case that you are our Minister of Finance and a very important pillar of our governance structure; your parents  were  also distinguished government officials who played critical roles in the administration of our nation dating back to the First Republic. 

Therefore, I was perplexed when the Honourable Sidia Jatta berated you in the National Assembly with some virulent words :”Virement is a fraud!”

With all due respect to the PDOIS NAM, I disagree with that statement; because if I should agree then I would have been doing a disservice to my own conscience. The fact is that you cannot implement a budget in the framework of the Gambia’s macroeconomic realities without doing virements. In other words, virement is a necessary evil in budget implementation.  

Having said that, Honourable Minister, Hon. Sidia Jatta still has a point because the necessity of virement is understood as a last resort when there is a genuine and urgent case for it. But as the honourable gentleman from Wulli rightly observed, what you did was to “butcher the budget” and that constitutes an alarming travesty of justice because the budget is law.

And if you do not agree with me on the above contention as advanced by Honourable Jatta, then consider the words of the brilliant nominated member, the learned Ya Kumba Jaiteh. Certainly, the young lady has spoken the truth and nothing but the truth because beyond the letter of our statutes, we must also breath the spirit of the law if justice is to have any real chance of prevailing in our performance of duties of office.

Therefore I totally concur with Honourable Jaiteh as she lucidly argued regarding your fiscal malfeasance: “When we appropriate, there is a reason why we go through the budget line by line and that whole purpose would be defeated if you have powers to do whatever you want with the money. We appropriate for a specific purpose for the services required so if you want to change it you must come to us for approval,”

Therefore the member for Banjul South took the right courageous stance by asking the relevant committee of the National Assembly  to hold your ministry in contempt since you  keep insisting that what you are not doing anything wrong by reallocating more than a billion Dalasis in the 2020 budget without approval from the authority that legislated that budget.

Honourable Minister, I never wanted to get to a fourth edition of this series because I thought that the old trite saying  “a word to the wise is enough” would have kicked into your mind by now. But it looks like you have further doubled down in your open defiance of, not only the laws of our country, but also the makers of that law, our National Assembly.

Even when the learned honourable lady in the Assembly tried to respectfully explain to you that your butchering of the budget is illegal, you remained defiant with chutzpah: we are guided by the Public Finance act and we heavily rely on it. and up to this minute, we will continue to rely on it! 

What flagrant bravado you continue to demonstrate in the face of the representatives of the tax payers whose resources you are playing with in the budget.

You did try to browbeat the majority leader of the Aseembly the last time with your melodramatic performance of the “I will not resign” chorus. And this time around you further advanced your personal ethos of the typical ‘ndongo’ attitude of ‘maa tei’ with a transgression of legal import when you said again at the Assembly

“We stand by what we did and we are convinced that it is the right thing to do!”

Therefore, since you are hell bent on the ‘ndongo’ recalcitrance, is it not about time that we invited you to the bushy corners of Sukuta Sabiji and implement the metaphorical suggestion of the savvy social media commentator Natta Mass “At some point, someone’s gotta make the call; “alaa daa fix.” 

I do not know what gimmicks you are going to play in the corridors of the National Assembly to do what you are best at: leverage network to get your way out of every mess you concoct. But there is a critical mass of patriots armed with legal bludgeons ready to confront you head-on. Even if our National Assembly members fail to reach consensus at the voting floor due to your connections in the higher echelons of that body, the clarion call for you to be censored is already too high to be muted.

As I finalise this letter, information has been released from your Ministry about the expenditures made, so far, from the more than 1 billion Dalasis, set aside for COVID related spending through your butchering of the budget. It is sad and disappointing to realise that Out of D41 million spent by the Ministry of Health, 75% was spent on non-essential stuff, being vehicle purchases, allowances and hotel bills; meanwhile,  equipment gets less than 1 percent of the total amount spent by Dr. Samateh and his team.

Honourable Minister, is this your idea of fiscal prudence in these trying times? 

Yours Faithfully 

Momodou Sabally 

Former research economist and National Budget Director, Momodou Sabally has undergone extensive professional training in macroeconomics and public financial management at the IMF Institute, the Central Bank of England’s Center for Central Banking Studies, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and holds a masters degree in Economics from Georgia State University in the US. 

Before getting into my main subject today, I would like to say this: Believing in everything you are told will not make you knowledgeable but only gullible. I was last night forwarded a link where a disgraced convict or tactless-wannabe mercenary was sniping at me to boost the serotonin and dopamine level of his low I.Q. skeletal fan base. Quite an antidepressant shot to a bored and depressed group, easily entertained by any ant-Sam Sarr rhetoric no matter how foolish. His opening lines indicating that I shot myself in September 1990 to avoid deployment by ECOMOG to fight in Liberia was enough to delete the whole rubbish. For I must have had in my possession the record-breaking crystal ball to know that if I shot myself on May 4, 1988, it will protect me from going to fight in Liberia on September 20, 1990. Yet still, the absurdity triggered amazing amusement among his moronic acolytes. It’s about time I started blocking these backbiters.

However, my topic today is all about Communist China again and why or how African nations must never be left out in the global campaign to hold the Mongoloids responsible for the genocidal-coronavirus pandemic. An action to be taken in unison by the AU and not by individual states for uttermost consequence.

Upon the confirmation of the ongoing investigation that the novel coronavirus originated from a laboratory in the communist Chinese city of Wuhan instead of from bat caves, as earlier believed, I think the world including the African Union should no longer be hesitant in calling  the Chinese communist government to pay for the colossal damage. The idea of the virus emerging from horseshoe-bat caves in China indeed came from their scientists when preliminary reports accused the government of accidentally or incidentally releasing the pathogen from a lab.

It is now confirmed beyond doubt that Chinese virologists had been fiddling with the 2002 SARS virus in their labs that had infected 8000 people in China and Vietnam but luckily killed only 800 before its containment. One person killed by an avoidable disease is way too many, much more eight hundred that, proverbially, was a dodged bullet that could have been equally deadly or deadlier than COVID-19.

It is however baffling to learn that the SARS virus, discovered 18 years ago and known to have the potentiality of causing a global pandemic was since being kept in a lab for science games and still has no vaccine or a cure for the disease it causes.

What then were the Chinese “studying” about the SARS virus for that long other than to perhaps weaponize it for war that some experts believe was exactly what they did in this mysterious novel coronavirus.

It is nonetheless doubtful that Xi Jinping’s government will be that stupid or suicidal to deliberately release a “weaponized virus” into their atmosphere with no definitive knowledge of a containment mechanism; but the very reason that the world has been so vigilant to prevent terrorists from acquiring and detonating a portable dirty bomb for maximum casualty came to my mind as a probable reason for a frustrated and angry trusted Chinese scientist having access to the germ-laced virus in the Wuhan lab who, getting fed up with the communist system of government resorts into terrorism by deliberately release it. He or she could even do it suicidally like most fanatical believers would with the hope of maximizing the sabotage.

The Chinese only accepted responsibility when matters got out of hand and are still intransigent to allow international inquisition from foreign scientists to exactly determine the source  of this coronavirus and its similarity to any of the 5000 strains they have reported to exist in their bat caves or to simply determine its homogeneity to the SARS virus.

Why still hide the number of Chinese killed that now jumps exponentially from 4600 to 700,000 according to defectors escaping the despotic regime?

New symptoms of COVID-19 are emerging and is no longer limited to affecting human respiratory systems but is now disturbing the human neurological systems. Infected children in particular have been showing serious nervous problems, psychological complications and sudden deaths. It all goes to corroborate a possible dirty virus engineered for war.

When or how we will put this pandemic behind us is still speculative, but the damage it has caused globally so far in terms of lost lives, broken families, traumatized persons and financial deprivation is yet to be quantified. And trust me, the next one will kill us all unless China is finally stopped.

In either way, if the virus was from their bat caves or from one of their weapon labs, I think all parents genuinely faithful to maintaining the safety and security of the planet for their offsprings should rally behind governments including African regimes campaigning to punish China deservedly.

While Kenyans started with plans to evacuate their nationals from China and the Nigerian House of Representative reported to have unanimously passed a motion on “Maltreatment and Institutional Racial Discrimination against Nigerians living in China by the Chinese government”, I think such piecemeal approach by individual African states will not yield anything significant.

A Gambian student recently interviewed online called on African leaders to solve the plight of all black people in China in a common front because the brutal discrimination they faced was on all Africans and not based on nationality. The persecution of blacks is said to be more prevalent in the provincial capital city of Guangzhou considered an immigrant hub for Africans and where blacks are still precluded from local MaDonald, shopping malls, restaurants, public bus services and from going to other places frequented by blacks.

Even the US State Department issued a warning to African Americans to avoid traveling in certain Chinese cities.

Typically, despite the videos sent across the world by the suffering Africans the Chinese are nevertheless still in denial to our leaders describing the evidence as hearsay and a “misunderstanding” spread by Western countries. As a matter of fact measures taken by the Chinese government to outlaw the pervasive discrimination is rather ineffective for there are no penalties enacted for violators.

Africans should therefore not only come together to ensure the safety of our people in China but should above all start drawing the Restitution Bill for the communist government to pay for this calamity and genocide.

Globally, the death toll has gone far beyond quarter of a million with the likelihood of that number reaching a million before a vaccine or cure is found.

Over a hundred vaccines are reported to be under trial although recent discoveries show unusual mutation of the strain which is raising concerns over whether by the time one is found, the virus may not mutate stronger to resist to the antigens being currently developed. If that happens with the strength of the strain remaining the same or stronger than its current infection rate and killing ability, then I believe the world would be in this predicament for a  longer haul.  Anyway according to scientists, if we are lucky, it could also get weaker and less potent.

No matter what, I will continue to advocate the need for the authoritarian communist regime to pay for this genocidal crime and to urge African governments to seriously work together on this one. In terms of monetary aggregate, the destruction caused in Africa has now far eclipsed the debt owed to them. They might even end up owing us, if we know how to go about it.

Thanks for reading.

Samsudeen Sarr

New York City