By Buba Gagigo
The Member of Parliament for Wuli East Suwaibou Touray has said that the addition of President Adama Barrow’s Advisors is “not reasonable” and a “waste”.
“We increased deputy advisors from two to three. We have four advisors, then we have three other deputy advisors making it seven advisors, plus your ministers. Is that reasonable? That’s not reasonable. That’s just a waste. Permanent secretaries from four to five under the office of the President. This is not reasonable. We said we should tell each other the truth, so that we address situations. But if we accept some of these things, if you add all the abnormalities together, it goes into billions. You could have solved a lot of problems from there,” he said.
He also expressed his frustration with some of the unnecessary allocations of ministries in the country.
“You look at the budget. If you come to see this budget, for example, you have the Ministry of Justice rehabilitating buildings, etc. That’s what all ministries will do. Whether they have buildings to repair or not. Who goes to see those buildings whether they are there, or not? And if you ask them which buildings are they repairing, they will tell you, ‘you know, when we put a satellite we cut some wires and we have to repair that.
The Wuli East MP requested the need to constitute a committee to update the claims of building construction or maintenance by the different ministries.
“But they will be asking for hundreds of thousands to do that. So we need a committee to update us as to the building constructions that different ministries are building because is too much. If we do that we can cut a lot of these and we can balance this budget. But unless we do that, we are just talking here for the shake of it,” he said.
Touray also called the increment of the remuneration of the National Assembly Members “not fair” to Gambians.
“National Assembly, our own National Assembly members went and proposed elephant allowances for themselves. I think that is not fair to the Gambian people. We should avoid that. Last year, we increased allowances. This year we increase 30%. Now we are also increasing allowances and salaries,” he concluded.