Thursday, July 5, 2007

Abject Poverty - Making of The Governments of The Gambia

By Burama FL Jammeh

Gambia in its natural state is not as poor as we are today. This is equally true for most of the nations in the African continent. Why then are we so poor? Even the oil giants such as Nigeria and Libya with a product arguably the world’s number one economic driver are not spared from this African Poverty Syndrome. The answer lies in governance arrangements that resulted into no management to mismanagement. It is hard to find good governance and management anywhere in Africa. In The Gambia Jawara was a poor manager and Yahya doesn’t even know what managers do. The result(s) are/is all bad, poor and despair.

Poverty is an illusive term because of its relativity. It is measured and perceived differently by different people in The Gambia. Equally its definitions are as dispersed as our diversity. The 1999-2002 National Participatory Poverty Assessment claimed it is perceived to be the inadequacies of basic needs such as shelter, food and clothing. This is certainly part of it and it clearly reflects the purpose/agenda of those who put it together and as well the expectation of those asked. The above does not seem to include the attainment of good state of health of the body and mind. Beyond this level poverty is the lack of/denial of natural rights to freely decide and determine your destiny. These conditions are not met in The Gambia over the past 40 years. Sadly though we have not yet made a deliberate move to set ourselves on that path.

The Gambia is about 11,000 square kilometers in area. At independence in 1965 we have a population somewhere between 250,000 – 300,000 people. The River Gambia, the main physical feature and other water surfaces accounts for a little more than 200,000 hectares. The forest cover was over 450,000 hectares. The rest of the land use was human inhabitants and subsistence agriculture (crop production and animal husbandry). The average annual rainfall was somewhere above 1,000 inches. There was a handful of educated Gambians, their number and quality good enough to take up the affairs of our nation. These were the productive variables at independence in 1965.

We will now break it down to where we are with a view to determine what is responsible for growth and/or failures. Please note that some of the variables are fixed/near fixed. Also notice that my figures are not exact as I would like for lack of accessing the sources, I relied on my memory and it has been awhile. Because I will be breaking down socio-cultural/economic issues my presentation may/may not go in linear sequence, hence spiraling and repetitions should be expected. Managing variables to produce a desired goal is what makes difference in managers.

Jawara became the first manager to produce and add value to the aforementioned resources so that Gambians can have improvement in the quality of life. Among others his tasks were the improvement of quality of life, ensure territorial integrity, unity of the nation, maintain peace and justice. We know planning and control are cornerstones of management. Jawara failed to keep track of the variables he was supposed to manage. The Gambia never maintained a true population records such as numbers, births, deaths, immigrations, etc. We don’t know what we are managing therefore we cannot plan, and if we do it was/is bogus. The five years plans of the 70s could not be implemented because they weren’t real in the first place and the growth claims in the later annual plan and budgets doubtful. The claimed macro level growth figures never resulted to micro-economic improvements. The population was never managed with negative effect on all other resources. The point is not to control birth but we should know how many are we, what is/are the sources and make informed decisions to service these numbers. Governments were surviving on people’s taxes and hardly providing anything in return. The increased in the number of people led to a quest for more land for settlement and agriculture. Groundnut being the main upland cash crop required opening up more lands resulting into the disappearance of forests. Here comes soil degradation, droughts of the 70s/80s, low fertility and food insecurity. Further efforts to boost production led to the introduction semi-mechanization with animal drawn farm implements and of course tractors here and there. Again the bare soils are exposed to agents of erosion. The low lying banks of the river were the most fertile lands of The Gambia. The activities uplands caused sedimentation and siltation in these valuable resources reducing rice production potentials to near extinction. Droughts limiting the flow of fresh water from “Futa-Jalon” highlands (sources of river Gambia) and mismanagement/uncontrolled utilization of this vital waterway have resulted into greater salt intrusion upstream from the ocean and eventual depositions on adjacent lowlands. Certainly some of these are natural phenomena but this is the basic purpose of planning and managing uncertainties. Where was the handful of educated men and women who demanded our independence from Britain to directly take charge of the management of the affairs of our people for the better?

Here is the answer to the question just asked above. Jawara was busy enjoying the rhythms of the police band at his frequent foreign travels. He was busy consolidating PPP through cross-carpeting all of United Party (UP) except Pierre Njie and Gibou Jagne. He has appointed Sheriff M. Dibba to Local Government Chief to up root and disgrace all chiefs known to be sympathetic to UP. Upon completion of setting the bases of the “Tesito” super structure comes the competition amongst themselves for higher placement in the hierarchy and control of its resources. We are at the birth of rivalry of the so called “Teri Kafo” and “Banjul Mafia”. They are truly not about tribal rivalry as portrait by many; it is about class and greater control of national resources. All of it culminates into flamboyancy of public sector officials with public resources. It is all business as usual for Jawara as long as you called him Sir and/or His Excellency (shorten to HE) to be followed by names (Kairaba) not given by Alimamy Jawara. They quickly went bankrupt and needed money and ask IMF/World Bank/EU/USAID and GTZ for support. The answers were you got to change.

This was phase two of PPP administration and probably the final. It was the time of happenings mainly encouraged by outside and/or the dictate of the state of the trend of development especially technologically all around the world. PPP hardly has a deliberately planned and implemented project to completion, maybe the Trans-Gambia Highway to Basse - never get to Fatoto.

While all this was going on in and around Banjul, people all over the Gambia continued their unregulated activities everywhere. The few services in and around Kombo and some regional centers became attractants for people still searching for the dreams of independent nationhood. Yet still what they got the opposite. Congestion, poor environment sanitation, degradation and crimes took over. We became prisoners of ourselves either from mosquitoes killing one in every five child, or get robbed of all your belongings overnight and/or avoid that with burglar proofing that trap you to dead in fire incidence.

Jawara befriend what became known as development partners. This was a marriage of mutual benefit and that is of course normal in any relationship I can think of. However it is more to their advantage. This is why we argue to both PPP and AFPRC/APRC that development has to come from within and complemented with outside support. We cannot wait for “Gam-Oi”l of Yahya for that to happen. He was asked to down/right size and reorganize the government, adopt structural adjustment program policies and objectives that where known by many as the Economic Recovery Program (ERP) that matured into Program for Sustainable development (PSD). These were real good times of PPP rule. Here was when nepotism was put to work. People were denied jobs because of the above just to keep it for someone to finish school in a year or two. The commonly called daily wages are send home at the expense of bunch of girls called secretaries/receptionist. Anyways teachers were hard hit than all as if education is not needed. All PPP was doing is to meet the target number set for them to receive the anticipated monies from the partners. On the other hand these partners were interested to maintain/establish political and economic influence for the good of their citizens and as well the interest of the agents to secure their jobs as will be justified by high level involvement.

Funds arrived in the form of balance of payments, privatization of certain departments into parastatals – Gamtel, GPTC, Ports, SSHFC, GUC, etc. Before them GPMB was already looted by Gaba Jallow and company, GCDB under Ousainou Njie gave un-appraised loans to noncreditworthy so called business tycoons like Saikou Ceesay, ADB came and gone without a single help to Gambian farmers, maybe Alhagie Sanjally Bojang and his Kembujeh Cashew Field (my small country). Fisco Conateh (OB) and Co. looted Sea Gull to put up NPE on their names. Every morning every Banjul resident can pick up fish money (“ndaawal”) from himself and Gaba Jallow sitting adjacent at one table. GRT/Ferries/Ports was Alhagie Ak-xi Gaye and company. Ministries and Dept. Heads were dispatching government oil from Shell Depot at Dobson Street (maybe that name no longer exist), at duty-free rates and selling it to private filling station owners yet at discount prices. Jawara promised wrong doers will dance to the tunes of their music instead it is the opposite he did. Saikou Sabally was promoted with three ministerial portfolios including Vice Presidency after proven dirty by a court and Mr. Taal get away with a light sentence after squandering the millions of donations collected for reconstruction after the Kukoi’s 1981 coup attempt. Such laissez-faire attitude encouraged looting and grapping of public resources by any means because the worse that could happen is forced retirement/resignation. We have seen people at customs collection positions refusing PMO promotions (should be a reason for eyebrow for a good manager, isn’t it).

By now you may be wondering where all this is going. You may also be asking yourself where are the connections between my government and the production resources. Here we come. The loans and agreements contracted by your government are based on our worth and/or should be. These are the assets we possess against our liabilities. The total area is a fixed variable that constrained us in a lot of ways. Our size made us not an attractive place for industry and business, hence less global economic activity. Rainfall is the dictates of natural with little room to for us to influence. However we can do a number of things to put us were we want to be either directly influencing the amount of rainfall and/or harvesting water for future uses. The rest of the production variables are changeable to suit our needs. Government is broke down into ministries/departments/functionaries to be able to manage each of these production sectors to create value. Each area required some specialty skills and knowledge for that to happen and generalist like politicians bring it all together for meaning. Let’s review how Gambia governments went about these tasks.

Managing the human resources: Numbers – this is the base of all planning for the nation. We need to know how many we, where we and what are are we doing. I can remember only two censuses in our four decade of independent existence. In each case the accuracies are corrupted by people’s notion that more numbers means more food gift to that family, hence inflation of family size. The methodologies, timing and accessibility add up some accuracy problems. Accurate or not the figures are not used to inform development efforts resulting into ineffectiveness, inefficiency and lot of waste of needed resources. For instance there are empty hospital beds at Bwiam when 3 to 4 patients share a bed at Brikama, Bansang and elsewhere. There are empty classroom spaces at Kiang Kwinella and Brikama-Ba and Bansang next door has no enough rooms. Also noticed that all of us are using estimated 1.5 million people over the last 10 years or more as if we are static. Certainly we can use the estimated 4.2 annual growth rate to crunch the figure to estimate the current but that is hardly done. This is a structural cause of poverty that should have been solved long since without external help and at very reasonable cost to tax payers.

Quality – this is the improvement of skills and knowledge of the people. The fact is our literacy level should be higher than what it is today. Besides that there a decent number of educated Gambians who should be able to hold good the management of our affairs before the rest come on. However 40 years of inadequate access and limited flow of information (limited frequency of Radio Gambia/no TV for the most part) kept us back, hence caused poverty. The education department has no reliable plans of numbers needed at every level to meet our development needs and/or its acceleration. In fact the number of school going age is not known which is the basic data to inform the rest of that chain. Generally speaking, governments budgeting is pretty much adding certain percentage to the last year figures and Ministry of Finance finalize the figures based on what they have.

River Gambia – both an asset and liability. This is the main geographic feature of our great nation yet still no body seems care about it. It is a fresh water way accounting for about 200,000 hectares of surface areas. This agrarian economy can drive numerous benefits with proper management but we can equally loose everything out of poor/mismanagement. Basic statistics needed for its management are the volume of water coming in from the source, the seasonality of the volume, what is the magnitude force of salt water intrusion from the Atlantic Ocean, what factors influence that counter movement, where do we desire to stop salt water, and how much eroded upland material get deposit at its bed, etc. As complex as it may look, this is the basic function of the Water Dept and there were educated men and women who can do it. Why then is not done? The only answer I can think of is the cross inefficient and lack of discipline in government. The river naturally floods its banks and people mainly from Kaur (Saloum) to Bansang use it for tidal irrigation of low lying area. Below this point is usually salty in both seasons and above is deep below ground level. The late 1980/90s witnessed a number of small scale pumping irrigation schemes by private citizens. The white elephant project that uses the river was the famous Jahally-Pacharr Irrigation Project. It is governmental project between the named two villages at Brikama-Ba and Sapu areas. The water is pumped with machines through a 50 meter x 1.5 kilometer dug channel. Certainly producing more rice will increase availability and eventually derive prices down for greater affordability. The much talk-about Balenchorr Barrage/bridge to stop upstream salt intrusion never materializes. The cause of poverty in this undertaking is the fact that the capacity capabilities of this all important resource is not determined. What might have happened environmentally is hard to tell for lack of studies but visually we know salt intrusion was greater up stream and concentration of salt sedimentation increases causing looses of the mangrove vegetation along the banks and lost of low lying fields at Kombo East, Fonis, Kiangs, Jarras, Badibus, Saloums, and parts of Nianijas. Tell me how many might be negatively affected from Kombo to Nianija because of failure in planning. Again a costly management lapses. To cut the long story short this most important feature should be carefully manage while ripping its full potentials in agriculture, transportation, tourism and ecological/environmental protection.

Agriculture – source of food no matter where you live in the world. Produced it and/or buy it must come from agriculture. The government did not properly account the number of people she is managing, how can she establish the food requirement and plan accordingly. Jawara told his people pick up your hoes and axes I will be with you all the way instead he was helping looter get richer. Yahya with Libyan assisted tractors said back to the land instead dishing out monies to praise singer that should support the productive sector. Pretty much all the land was cleared to meet the increasing food need of the increasing number of people. Proper planning informed by data could have balance the need of people with the environment but no. Ultimately we are now in a vicious circle of no beginning and/or ending. Foods produced from the degraded fields are not enough and there is no environment to support such recovery. They have send extension workers to tell the people to apply NPK chemical fertilizers without a complete look at everything at stake. I hope and pray down the road the river and other water ways are not polluted with chemical residues to kill our people. The problem is beyond production. We could not create market for what we produce, nor do we add value, nor is it preserved for future consumption. The result is complete lost for the nation and its people, hence another making of the government.

Health and health care service provision – the life expectancy is reportedly somewhere mid to late forties. The basic problem is lack of good environmental sanitation resulting into encouraging disease breeding agents. Gambians are dying daily from preventable communicable disease that can be control through planning and proper personal hygiene. Improper management and distribution of the limited services has created congestion at one end and emptiness at other places. Both bear only negative effect for our well being. Except with the externally supported child immunization program we are at a very poor state of health when the rest of the world is thinking of stopping natural death from just ordinary decay of body cells. Well we are struggling to hit 50 years (the jackpot age)

Forestry – this one was not even in the equation that it needed management. The position was it is a god given resources that has been and will always be there to take what you can at anytime. Until when after putting up a mud building and everyone is counting on the arrival of the first rains but there is nowhere near to find a single palm tree for roofing. Firewood that our mothers could pick behind the yard fences are now kilometers away. Erosion has swept away enormous amount of fertile top soil to low lying areas with negative effect on where they are moved from and where they are deposited. Government had a Dept. but their focuses were mainly revenue collection and managing some selected areas that were cleared and silvicultured with exotic fast growing species (mainly Gmelina). The idea was quick returns and it was funded by USAID. This is of course not the right direction and we are fortunate to realize that rather quickly. The bilateral agreement between Germany/Gambia resulted to a Technical Assistant with GGFP, CRD-FP and URD-FP in a period spanning somewhere 20-30 years. Training local staff on forest management, management of local stands and dead wood utilization for cost recovery was the main goals. As all other areas there was no data to begin with, hence the projects had to pay for satellite photographing to map out all the forest areas and interpret the changes over the years. This is not a money making area but has effect on many other money sources, hence need some deserved attention. They were at one point in good shape but the phasing out of projects, lack of adequate government funds and over all awareness of the general public on forest matters are threats to watch for. The later phase of the projects attempts to transfer legal ownership of forests to surrounding village communities to encourage local participation in proper forest management but it is too early to know how that will work out.

Land administration – there are basically too distinct laws governing land in The Gambia. The statutory laws declaring pretty much every land in Kombo St Mary’s state land and provincial land act that recognizes customary ownerships. Although the later pretty much starts at Lamin there are now exceptions in Western Division. We know how the Physical Planning and Land’s Office demarcated Kanifings, Kairaba Ave areas, Bakau Kunkus, and so on and allocated them to the members and friends of the “tesito” class. Besides the wrongful and nepotism allocations declared reserves where encroached by the same people everywhere. What beat my imagination is putting up structures and claiming ownership is one thing but how is it documented and put in the system when the same system has it as a reserved zone. There is more than enough evidence that there was/is little serious work in Governments of The Gambia for over 40 years. Yahya is now grapping in the Kiangs and god knows where he will stop. All I want to say about the provincial land act is that there are many inadequacies for our future development needs, therefore a need for review to balance the interests of all stakeholders. Mismanagement is insignificant now compared to GBA/Kombos because they are of lesser economic value for current use.

Foreign relations – good humus and smiles will always pay. Arguably the best of Jawara government is putting Gambia at respect in the international community of nations by adopting the non-alliance stand and respect for all. In turn Gambia was able to secure loans at better rates and as well attract lot of other assistance. Those projects kept civil servants at level with inflation and send handsome amounts of resources into the villages. Except for the excessive squandering of our officials this area was well handled. Bravo Lamin Kiti Jabang (PPP fine boy) and the good humus of Jawara himself (loved by all including myself).

Among others and besides natural constraints these are the main causes of abject poverty of our people. Tilapia fish (“chaloo/koboo”) that used to cost 10 - 4 for a dalais is now 1 for D5/D10 depending on where you are. An orange or mango is selling at D10/fruit, soft drinks D15/can, rice is somewhere from D750 – D1000/bag excluding Kanilai, when incomes are stagnant at an average of D500 – D1000/employee/month. The civil service is not more than 15,000 employees while 85% are farmers without market for groundnut for the pass 5 years or little more. A kilogram of boneless beef is D 110 or D120/kg and D90/kg for mixed steak. Dependency rates are 1:12 for an average size family. Over forty years today we still import office furniture, import school furniture (wait a minute – parents are now buying from local carpenters) – free education is not true, hospital furniture is equally imported and even the hanger to hold a drip bag is imported (heavenly god help us). Who can tell me we cannot fabricate cubicles even in the workshops of numerous handy-men in Serekunda, more importantly what happened to GTTI, Technical High Schools, ATC at Farafenni, Public Works Dept. or even use the army’s engineering unit if there is one or create it. Banjul/Basse is now a 2/3 days struggle in vehicles not fit for livestock. Besides all the above we cannot express ourselves freely and openly what we want or not. Turn around we can choose different religious believes while we are almost entirely in agreement of oneness of god yet still we can choose different ways to get his blessing but no freedom of choice over Gambia. Therefore lack of freedom and ability to independently express ones consciences is an element of poverty and that is the making of Yahya’s autocracy. The Gambia government’s development efforts are “filling a bottom-less bag”. Contrary to the negativity of the general picture I just attempted to show, government has a different statistics on most or all these indicators. Then someone is right and the other wrong for both cannot be right, though both can be wrong. Accessing data from government establishments is hell for the most part (not in existence and/or cover-ups of misdeeds). Few things worth mentioning here is that report writing takes almost half of the year and in fact some 12 months or sometimes a little more to put up the report of the previous year. This tells me that there exist no data otherwise it should not take more than a month to write and compile progress and variance reports of a year. It is also true that the report is not used because it should have been a learning tool to inform the planning and implementation of the succeeding year. Other doubts exist over official macro level progress indicators such as GDP claims of 20-30% when the drivers such as agriculture and tourism has collapsed, the annual inflation figure of about 6/7% is not supported by the price sky-rocketing mentioned above. All of those figures suggest annual average inflation to sit in double (above 10% at the least) digits. The state of the Dalasis against major currencies are said to be stable but we know too well that government imposed its desired exchange rates which does not help businesses at the markets outside their control. Someone must be pay that difference and eventually it is the economy.

It was in the light of these failures development partners came but with a different approach this time around. The approach is to take development to the people. Also during the same time we witness the proliferation of NGOs, local or international, small or big all over the place. The goals are to bridge the gap/void between government and the people. I will only mention the giants who have come and gone. Note that in most of these cases the funds are controlled by technical experts working along side Gambian counterparts. LADEP was a multimillion Dalasi project that aimed to reclaim low lying fields from salt and other problems to increase rice production. The sister and earlier project was SWMU – aimed to control erosion and preserve soil and water regimes. Before then was a big US supported mixed farming project. Health has projects and assistance on almost everything they do – immunization, nutrition, family planning, primary health care, sanitation, HIV/AIDS, research, you name them. Don’t forget about MRC. Until recently Gambians earned tertiary education through the support of Sierra Leone and other friends. Construction of both primary and secondary schools are mainly funded by partrners. ActionAid along almost entirely foot the bills of constructing primary schools in LRD, north of CRD and they also provided the learning and teaching aids and recruit and pay the teachers. Note worthy of mention here is the additions of over 50 NGOs, local or international, big or small running the length and breath of the country engaged on some effort. Whether all these efforts resulted into the improvement of quality of life and whether such an improvement and/or otherwise commensurate to the inputs and by extension was it improvement for those employed by these projects is for all to make your own value judgments.

Clearly, at least to me, we heard more than enough for 11,000 square kilometers and 250,000 people – 1.5 million in 40 years to make a striking development in the quality of life. Whatever side of the fence you might sit, life in The Gambia is not impressive and is not what most of us want to live. Do we want to remain so? I guess no. What do we do? First we have to re-establish control over our own affairs? How do we do it? We could need to establish civility hence people-power. How do we establish people-power on the face of autocracy? He may seem powerful but we are both with our authority and numbers. We will start to organize ourselves into civil society organizations and reinforce the role of the already existing ones. We can solicit international awareness on issues on the ground and influence the use of many international laws/protocols Gambia is committed to. We can for instance support the Bar Association to demand for the judiciary independence, transparency and speedy justice administration, application of due processes to the letter. The legislature can be informed and push to assume their rightful legislative role thereafter deletes decrees in a republican constitution and go for ethical law making processes. Political parties as divisive as governments try to portrait are good civil organization to play a fundamental role in the political dispensation process, especially the management of electoral processes. Others can be created such as labor organizations to demand better work conditions and pay and serve as watch dogs/whistle blowers. Cooperative societies will be strong to have a better bargaining position in determining produce prices. The numerous dormant women groups need strengthen to ask for the realization of the potential of women in the national table. Governance decentralized for every tribal unit/unique groups are represented at one point or the other. Can we put together such an effort with mediocrity among educated population and sycophancy to Yahya? Certainly it will be hard especial the start, it will take time but surely it will pick up and surely the dictator will yield. Dictators use force and threat because that is what they fear and anytime it is turned to their direction they will be running to seek refuge behind a spider web in a mice hole. There should be no complacency to the fact that some will go to jail at the start and others may even pay the ultimate price but victory is ours in the horizon. Anyways people are already hired/fired, jailed and killed so what’s difference. If we do not take this call to duty then we are sure to hand over a Gambia less than what we received from our forefathers to our children. This is not the wish of any parent. It is behind this civil resolute I conceived a Blue Print for a New Nation – The Gambia 2020

Apology – noticed that this piece has a lot of names of our people dead/or alive. Although I tried as much as I could to refrain from mentioning names, but would not avoid it to drive some points home. Hence no personal hard feeling, vendetta and/or grudge on any of these people individually and/or groups they belong. My effort was to inform people of what gets us to where we are against where we come from. I therefore apologize to these people, their families and friends if they are negatively affected in anyways because of this writing. In addition I want to say I loved this people to my guts, I emulated them in many ways back in the day and enjoyed their helps in my efforts to identify and establish myself. Therefore I equal feel bad some corrupted the nation. Certainly the actualization of the conceived Blue Print for a New Nation – Gambia 2020 will need their valuable insights. We shall pay you a visit on arrival for the new nation. Please be there and may the dead rest in peace.

Contact for sharing, agreed or not: bjammeh@emich.edu or bjammeh@comcast.net and/or on skype Bfl Jammeh

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