The Gambia’s Development Crisis-How Social Justice Becomes Another Political Illusion?
By ABDOUKARIM SANNEH, United Kingdom
The Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme 2007 has indicated that The Gambia and many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are the worst places to live on this planet. What another disheartening report of hopelessness, despair, hunger, poverty and development crisis? For many people who are worried with what is happening in The Gambia, this report is not a surprise. UNDP measures the global trend of development using indicators such as life expectancy, access to health and sanitation, literacy, safe drinking water, access to food and nutrition, clean environment, democracy and human rights. It is a fact that human development cannot prevail in an environment where there are continuing attacks on individual liberties and democracy and these are the prevailing realities in The Gambia.
Gambian women struggle for water from a local well
In about 12 years’ rule of Yahya Jammeh, this once peaceful country is quickly headed into social disintegration together with an economy, which is collapsing into Mafioso-style chaos. All the development arms of the government such as the Departments of Agriculture, Health, Water Resources, Community Development, Education, Forestry, Social Welfare etc which can diffuse and replicate development innovations to communities and grassroots organizations are in bankruptcy due to deficits in budgetary allocations to re-finance development programmes in the public sector.
Today, the majority of our people are wallowing in absolute poverty while the disparity between the rich and poor is much wider as ever before. The recent report as a follow-up to the 1992 International Labour Organization’s poverty survey indicated a massive increase in rural and urban poverty from 52 and 50 percent level in 1982 to 80 and 75 percent respectively. The report also figured an increase in both income and food poverty. This shows that the daily life of average Gambians is characterized by despair and hopelessness while there is no realistic political will in place to address the issues of their misery, a classical case of a nation living on the edge.
Looking into human development indicators such as safe drinking water, it is a fact that no life as we know is possible without water. Access to safe drinking water is a determinant of human development. Hailing from Brufut, I cannot imagine how blind this regime is in building hotels, estates, an African Union Village coupled with their self aggrandizement property accumulations in that area yet no corresponding efforts at hand to provide the inhabitants of that village with due access to pipe-borne water. Are expensive white elephant projects or monuments more important than the local people’s basic needs? This government will never be aware that access to drinking water as a social service is an indisputable right for her citizens. Spending money on flashy Pajeros, Mercedes and other high maintenance luxury vehicles while blindly forgetting priorities only exacerbates The Gambian people’s dismal plight added to their suffering from diseases like malaria and premature deaths- a scourge that takes a heavy toll among our people whom Jammeh the tyrant claims to have emancipated 12 years ago.
The APRC Government with its shortsighted and highly plagiarized Vision 2020 thinks that development is a quick fix solution and they have answers to all the development issues confronting our nation. Failing to realize that the PPP government with all its shortcomings have gone along way addressing the needs of Gambia’s farming community both in terms of input delivery, micro finance and agricultural marketing. The deterioration of quality of life in rural Gambia is beyond my imagination. I was privileged to work as a rural development agent after graduating with a Higher Diploma from The Gambia College. This gave me the opportunity to either work or trek all the Regions in that country. I know how much farming means to the communities from Kartong to Koina.
My interaction with many farmer communities, helped me to know and appreciate how innovative and determined many of these people are ready to adopt all types of technologies and taking all types of risks in order to increase their productivity year in year out. Gone are those days of glorious life in Rural Gambia when you can see smiles in the face of farmers during the trade season. Dissolving institutions such as The Gambia Cooperative Union, which was the nerve centre for farming, remains one of the worse policies of Jammeh’s criminal regime. For example, here in the United Kingdom, the Cooperative Movement with all its problems has gone a long way to overcome the challenge of the uncertain business environment.
Today, the United Kingdom Cooperative Movement is being transformed into business outlets in towns and cities promoting ethical trading, insurance, funeral services, travel shops, super markets and banking etc which could have been replicated in our situation. The Gambia Cooperative Union and its member cooperative societies were not only the marketing outlets for agricultural produces but also the main source for the provision of agricultural inputs, implements and also consumer Cooperative shops to the farming communities. With ill-fated advice AFPRC/APRC Government disbanded the Cooperative Movement, which significantly led to one of the sudden declines of The Gambia’s Agricultural sector.
The 12 years of APRC Government have destroyed efforts set to sight for food self-sufficiency. Many communities in Central River Division, which used to have some degree of food security with the coming of the Jahally-Pacharr Rice Project after the 1970 drought and also small-scale rice development project in Niamina are now confronted with food insecurity. Today, they are face with lack of high yielding improved variety of seeds, degrading tidal irrigation system and lack of pump and fuel to access fresh water from The River Gambia to irrigate their fields. It remains to be seen if the government will further look into the plight of these farmers to both put in place a viable and sustainable development policies and programmes and also, programmes to address their marginalisation and exclusion.
The Gambia’s communication system both tele-communications and roads are further deteriorating. Calling home from overseas is now a nightmare, which many of us in the Diaspora are facing. It takes more than 12 hours to travel from Banjul to Basse, which is a distance of about 360 kilometres. The economy is anaemic and with rising unemployment and a failing agricultural sector the tide of rural/urban migration is beyond the records of Gambian statistics.
There are enormous challenges facing development crisis in our country and all which cannot be addressed without looking into good governance, rule of law, democracy and human rights for external financing of development programmes. The Gambia’s development programme is partly financed by bilateral and multinational aid. In this age of embracing democracy as a universal value, development aid and debt cancellation are always linked to conditionalities such as rule of law, human rights and social justice.
In order to meet our development challenges such as combating environmental degradation, high population growth, hunger, malnutrition etc the only solution is putting in place a political system or government with a human face but not a government that is always involved in murky murders, illegal arrests and detention of its innocent people as a strategy to suppress their liberty and democratic rights.