Bakary Bunja Darbo, Secretary General and Party Leader Gambia For All
Comrades, Members of Gambia For All,
Party Sympathizers,
Fellow Gambians both at home and abroad,
As we prepare to welcome the New Year 2025, I take this opportunity to extend to you and your families and to Gambians everywhere, our very warm greetings, on behalf of our party’s Central Committee as well as in my own name. Looking back over the year 2024, a year which brought along its own lot of trials and challenges to add to a world already beset with multiple and complex crises, we must first return thanks to God for sparing our nation and for all other mercies bestowed on us.
For GFA, the year has witnessed appreciable progress in strengthening our organization through review and re-organisation of our field structures, in line with directives given at the last Congress of the party. This programme sought to re-organise and re-energise party structures especially at the grassroots level, to render them more effective as well as better representative of the party’s base following. I am glad to say that the review component has been successfully completed and the focus of efforts now is on effecting the recommended changes on the ground. In that regard, it is pleasing for me to report that as at now, six out of the party’s twelve federated Area organizations have been satisfactorily covered. They are the Area parties of the Niumis, Banjul, Kanifing Municipality,Kombo Santoo in the West Coast Region, as well as URR South and URR North. We have to recognise and to salute the efforts to ensure the success, so far, of the operation put in by the party’s National Organising Committee, {NOC] and the Area coordination teams in the affected Area parties.
For the coming year, 2025, priority will be in completing the re-organisation programme, to be followed with the convening of an ordinary Congress of the party to review and endorse the revised structures to emerge from the on-going exercise. I count on the party’s other operational structures, as well as party workers, militants and activists to work closely with the re-organised and rejuvenated field structures to help them progressively expand the party’s membership and support base.
I will also want to refer to the training of our Party’s cadres which, in the coming year, will be pursued with vigour; the objective remains to enhance the political awareness of party members in general, as well as the progressive development of skills and critical capacity in party workers, cadres as well as foot soldiers.
In terms of external relations, the party remained consistent in policy of collaborating with other progressive forces, both local and foreign. We continued to nurture the party’s links with the regional, as well as global, liberal democracy movement. GFAhas now earned confirmation and recognition as an active and valued member of the African Liberal Network; we regularly attended and participated in the Network’s meetings, the last of which was held in Morocco in October this year. It will be recalled that in the course of the year 2023 the party sent out a team of senior party workers to Ghana to participate in the dedicated training course for English-speaking liberal parties designed help broaden the horizon and understanding of our young cadres. For the future, the party intends to similarly continue to seek opportunities for capacity building.
Looking beyond the party, at the nation, the year 2024 has witnessed grave and worrisome deterioration in the socio-economic condition of the people. Their purchasing power has suffered unprecedented continuous decline due in large measure to the misguided priorities pursued by the national authorities,all that against the backdrop of declining fiscal discipline and generally reckless mismanagement of state resources. The country continues to suffer from the effects of poor economic governance which, in turn, translates to overwhelming difficulties for our people in meeting basic necessities of life, such as food, decent healthcare and housing. Unemployment,especially among the youth, continued to rise phenomenally to give the lie to earlier lofty promises by the Government to alleviate the situation. The youthful population, who appear to know better than believing in such empty electoral promises by unscrupulous politicians, continued to resort to desperate irregular emigration. The depressingly calamitous “backway” option, as the only way left to try to escape poverty and squalor, continued to prosper with its ever increasing loss of life in the desert or high seas.
This is an appropriate point to pause and express the heartfelt condolences of GFA to bereaved families and the nation as a whole for such great a loss; a loss made all the more difficult to accept as the primary victims are all in their prime, and merely out in search of economic opportunities that their state failed to provide for them here at home.
On another front, the Gambian people continue to wait anxiously for a new constitution eight years after the brutal dictatorship was kicked out in a popular uprising. The recently published 2024 draft, now before Parliament, contains very fundamental flaws which the rejected 2020 draft had bravely tried to correct. In so doing, the new draft excised critical, indeed fundamental, proposals that went in the direction of institutional adjustments founded on the basis of democratic principles and values that underpin accepted modern norms of good governance; adjustments which also clearly reflect the desires and aspirations of the Gambian people from the extensive consultations carried out at the time by the Constitutional Review Commission [CRC]. GFA took good note of efforts presently being undertaken by esteemed actors, including the National Human Rights Commission, to canvass consensus in Parliament on the need for restoring such fundamental provisions in the new 2924 draft in order save itfrom suffering the fate suffered by the 2020 draft. We support the initiative, even where we remain guarded in our expectations given the situation we have where a most retrograde “party system” sees to it that, on the ground, the autonomy and effectiveness of fundamental national institutions, such as parliament, are routinely undermined for reasons of partisan political expediency.
Meanwhile, in other governance sectors, the year 2024 only saw the ills of corruption and abuse of office fester; the nation continues to be suffocated with reported scandals of misuse oroutright theft of public funds, reports which have become so rampant that they have ceased to attract headline news.Critically needed measures to address these ills, such as civil service reform, overhaul of the beleaguered local government institutions, a streamlined re-organised foreign service, a dedicated anti-corruption Commission, security reform and other reforms, have yet to materialize much to the disillusionment of the Gambian people.
These failures on the part of the present government, coming on top of deprivations and denial in other spheres of our rights as citizens, living in an avowedly democratic space, should not go unchallenged. We need to stand firm as a people and defend these rights as we have done in 2016. For GFA, we remain committed to the party’s objective of rebuilding our nation from the ruins brought about by 30 years of misrule and abuse; committed to restoring to Gambians their rights to democracy, good governance, security and inclusive economic opportunities to improve their lives.
Once again, I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year!
Long Live The Gambia! Long live GFA!
DEWENATI!
Bakary Dabo
Secretary General & Party Leader
December 31, 2024.