By Fatou Camara II
The nation’s security sector reform programme has seen the government embark on study tours that included Kosovo, the national security adviser said on Friday – as the nation’s security leaders engaged reporters on the tedious programme.
“We have done a lot of training regarding sexual and gender-based violence, collaborative policies, human rights and security institutions vetting, counter-terrorism etc. We have also had the opportunity to go on a study tour namely to Ghana, Sierra Leone and to Kosovo, and in each of those study tour, it was not restricted to members of the security institutions. We ensured that the oversight management were part of the tours, namely the ministry, the national assembly etc,” Momodou Badjie said during a news conference in Bijilo.
The President Adama Barrow-led government in 2017 rolled out a security sector reform programme that seeks to bring the country’s security institutions in line with democratic principles. But more than three years since the launch of the programme, analysts have said the process has been slow.
But according to NSA, the government of President Barrow has been trapped in a serious exercise to improve the country’s security landscape.
Mr Badjie said: “It is evident that the government of the Gambia under His Excellency President Adama Barrow has been engaged in a very serious and a rigorous exercise to improve a lot of our security landscape and terrain.
“While enormous progress has been registered in this endeavour, we are not oblivious of the remaining challenges and we are ever determined to tackle them [head] on, but these obviously will be done holistically and when I mean holistically I want to draw you to the fact that there is this saying, ‘security is everybody’s business’. So when we say we’re determined, I’m not restricting the scope to the security sector but every individual including obviously our partners here, the media fraternity.
“Considering the scale of the transitional risks and challenges, and the autocratic rule and the authoritative one and moving to democracy, we are resolved that security sector reform is a must if we are to progress as a peaceful, stable, secure and civilised nation in the 21st century.”
