Alagi Yorro Jallow
“Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?” – Arundhati Roy (The Cost of Living).
Fatoumatta: How and when did President Adama Barrow succeeded to convince members of the National Assembly approved a multibillion dollar mega projects bridge construction between Banjul and Barra? President Adama Barrow cannot be asking donors for money and fail to sensitize electorates but forgetting that citizens are getting to know faster than his political empowerment positioning can help us. So, President Barrow should be creating linkages and spaces more than coming with already-made agendas and saying that we are sensitized.
Fatoumatta: President Barrow and government institutions need adjust to current times. The days you could make decisions and not expect a public discussion, or not expect the news to spread, are long gone. People need to adjust to these new realities. Our constitution entrenches public participation in government policy decisions.
Fatoumatta: You can’t even build a $1.5 billion bridge – I’m still scratching my head as to how a bridge costs $1.5 billion – Fatoumatta: You have no business promising the marble-mouthed developments from the National Development Plan blueprint 2018-2021. An incumbent government has no business promising new things when they can’t even show you HOW and WHERE they delivered what they promised in the last two years. Mr. President you promised before – ‘that no Gambian will ever die of hunger or famine again’. Mr. President, you should have added – if we can’t get you bread, we’ll give you cake.
Fatoumatta: If you can’t even afford 24 hours electricity and water supply that costs 1.2 billion, how many more dodgy projects are out there waiting to collapse? Even if you must put a monetary value to navigation of the terrain during construction – building of bridges, environmental considerations, etc. – there’s still enough left for a proper heist. You know what they say, a billion here, a billion there and soon you start talking about real money.
Fatoumatta: At the heart of the persistence of mass poverty in the country, despite low rates of economic growth, there is the misconception of the political elite that development is synonymous with western lifestyles and physical infrastructure, as opposed to solving the everyday problems that improve the lives of ordinary people — for example, building 60 mosques and mega-projects instead of sewers and shallow wells, unless and until the big stink wafts into the National Assembly.
Fatoumatta: The reality is that as Gambians we’ve been conditioned in certain ways. We’ve accepted mediocrity and incompetence from constitutional duty bearers as a way of life. We believe that we are not capable of finding solutions ourselves and we need interventions from foreign powers and benevolent people to survive in life. We prefer to entertain thieves and call them heroes and entrepreneurs. We don’t want to fight for what is rightfully our birth right. We want to get into quick fixes and a thuggish deal culture designed for that “get rich quick” mentality. It’s a man eat dog society where we don’t give a damn or respect the value of community wealth and health and the conventional wisdom that if the community around you is prospering, then it works out that you will also prosper.
Fatoumatta: Gambians want saviors to come from abroad but refuse to take individual and collective responsibility to shape our well-being as a community. We need a paradigm shift in how we think about development and our individual and collective roles in them. If I was to give advice to Adama Barrow, I’d tell him to take the time to understand what the people he’s trying to help need, what is important for them. Don’t assume you know and laud it over people as if you were the god of development and have all the answers. Development is not a linear process that has a theoretical answer that can be imposed on a community. There are complex multi-dimensional reasons why we’re in the situation we’re in, and proclamations before the world media of what you will and will not do are unhelpful.
Fatoumatta: President Barrow’s electoral victory horse power will for sure bring the millions of dollars and euros from around the world, but those millions will never facilitate sustainable change if you don’t’ engage and involve the stakeholders you purport to support. The most important thing you can do in that process is to stop believing you have all the answers even before talking to the electorates.
Fatoumatta: The misguided self-righteousness of development in deciding our destiny to build mega projects was and still is palpable. You get to experience the sheer level of the ignorance when you’re in executive management and you realize the development industry has only one purpose. To perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy to guarantee that poverty will continue to exist. People in the industry have mortgages to pay, kids to take to private school, lifestyles to maintain, fat SUVs to drive. There is an arrogance when you consider that there is a white privileged elite enabled by local wanna be yes people believing that 1.9 million people in the Gambia cannot figure out what’s good for them and it is only they who can save the Gambia.
Fatoumatta: Government and other institutional heads should know that blasting public voices by calling them “activists” doesn’t work anymore. If you are a leader in an institution and you don’t anticipate being held by the public to account for your decisions, or if you expect no one to publicize what you’re doing, you should not be in that position in the first place. Telling people that they shouldn’t ask questions or report what is happening belongs to the Yahya’s era.
Fatoumatta: Social media and internet makes news travel fast, so people can question decisions in real time before they are implemented. Information is also easily available, and people can google to research the strength of your decisions, and they can find out where else in the world similar decisions have worked or not worked. At independence, the number of educated people within institutions was more than the number of educated people outside them. So, you could decide, and the public doesn’t question them. But now, the educated citizens outnumber the educated employees. So, the days when your decisions were not subjected to informed scrutiny are long gone.
