By Buba Gagigo
Hon. Halifa Sallah, the Party Leader and Secretary General of The People’s Democratic Organisation for Independence and Socialism (PDOIS), has criticized both the Central Government and local councils for their lack of performance in the Gambia.
Speaking on the “For The People By The People” show on Sunday, Mr. Sallah expressed his concerns:
“If you listen to President Barrow, especially in China, he’s saying that the role of the government is simply to create a space, but it is the private sector that would actually build Gambia. You look at foreign direct investment in the Gambia 2023, the minister is saying it’s about $37 million, but the remittance is over $737 million. So the remittances in a year, compared to $37 million foreign direct investment. Where is the private sector investing? What are we doing with those remittances that are coming into the country? Why is it going in the productive base?” the PDOIS leader asked.
Addressing the banking sector, Hon. Sallah highlighted the significant amount of money being exchanged annually:
“If you are going to the banking system now, you will discover that annually, like last year, the exchange, foreign exchange, the currency buying, $1.1 billion and $1 billion for the sales. So you can see that about almost $2.1 billion is being exchanged, and we are talking about dollars. We are not talking about dalasis. It is being exchanged in foreign currency in our banking system. Where is that money going? So the country will need resources to be built, and that’s why you have to have policy initiating. That should be our discussion now. What policies do we need? You talk about the health sector, look at global funds, $17 million for malaria, and $23 million for HIV, so you find out all these contributions, and you must look at our health system. How do you organize it? So what we really need is to sit down and interrogate what we need to develop our country, where we put a framework,” Hon. Sallah said.
Hon. Sallah also criticized the Gambia’s budgetary system, arguing that it will never lead to the country’s development:
“Fundamentally, even the way we conduct our budgetary system will never lead to the development of our country. I repeatedly tell people to come to my home, and get out of my home, and you see what is in the street. Hundreds of women, if not 1000s. No market, that’s where they are selling. Four o’clock in the morning, that’s where they come to assemble. Some even go all the way from Sanjal with their tomatoes.
“So essentially, that is a microcosm of the failure of what is happening in terms of economics, failure of the councils and failure of the central government. None of them is actually performing. Why? Because they don’t know how to run those institutions. We have said from the very beginning, we cannot take the colonial direction of managing a country, because they created an urban rural dichotomy, and therefore created the uses for urban rural drift. And eventually, the country, to the Diaspora drift because we are not building the productive base,” Hon. Sallah said.