PDOIS Under Review, Which Party Is Next?
-The Beginning of The End of Distortions by Karamba Touray & Lamin Wariteh.

By Suwaibou Touray-Original PDOIS Member

The piece advanced by Tijan Nimaga is a very interesting one. Apparently, Mr. Nimaga was expressing his opinion on what PDOIS’ policy and programme means to him as an advocate of what he termed as Democratic Socialism. He has his own definition of democratic socialism and gave examples of Sekou Toure's Guinea, Modibo Keita's Mali and Nyerere's Tanzania as his model states.
There is absolutely no doubt that Tijan has not read PDOIS' analysis of the failure of economic nationalism in Guinea and Tanzania because of their inheritance of economies which neither had self reliant raw material base nor the industrial base to produce their own manufactured goods and services. Furthermore, he must not have been exposed to PDOIS’s description of one party monopoly of power, as a remnant of monarchical systems of government, which is at variance with the letter, and spirit of republicanism, which calls for the ownership of power by the sovereign people.
However, I will come to this later.
What happened to be of greater interest are the comments made by Karamba Touray and Lamin Wariteh. If both had read the recent interview by Halifa Sallah published in the Foroyaa newspaper they should have noticed a fundamental difference in the policies advocated for by Tijan and the ones stipulated by PDOIS.
The objective of writing is to inform all readers that I have been given the mandate as Desk Officer responsible for monitoring all relevant comments made about PDOIS in the media and respond to them accordingly to clarify issues.
My brother Ousman Sillah would be assisting me in this assignment to clarify all issues so that the Gambian people will be able to make informed choices. We hope that after PDOIS is subjected under fire, the Wariteh’s and Karamba’s will indicate the parties they support and explain the policies they have, if they have any, for empowering the people and putting an end to their poverty. We have four years before the next election to engage in constructive and open debate, on the principles, policies and programmes of political parties on the way forward for the country.
First and foremost, I would like to refer all readers to Halifa Sallah's recent interview on PDOIS' policies published by Foroyaa and issue no…   which deals with the arbitrary announcement of salary increase by the Gambian President. The reader should then ponder whether the minds which produce such ideas could harbour the crude notions attributed to PDOIS by Karamba and Wariteh
For the information of the reader, I have been associated with PDOIS since its inception and have been responsible for spreading its message(s) throughout the country especially, in the URR. I stood as a candidate in Wuli East in 2007 and scored 2691 votes, which is 42% of the votes cast. Sidia stood in Wuli East and Wuli West for the past 13 years and is still a seating MP. In the presidential election, the NADD had more votes in Wuli than UDP. How then can Lamin Wariteh claim "PDOIS to a large extent has failed to make any headway in The Gambia 's political landscape?”
Wariteh further claims that PDOIS' Sidia Jatta has been telling PDOIS militants to put political allegiance above family ties or neighborliness.
Interestingly enough section 60 subsection 2 of the constitution states that" No association shall be registered or remain registered as a political party if -
(a) it is formed or organized on an ethnic, sectional, religious or regional basis;"
However Wariteh is calling for politics based on nepotism and sectionalism even though the National Assembly makes laws and approve budgets for the whole country. Who is the real democrat? Is it  Sidia who is promoting the empowerment of each sovereign Gambian or Wariteh who is promoting nepotism in the name of "Badinyaa" and sectionalism in the name of "Sinyoyaa?"
Wariteh further indicated that Sidia was advocating for violence in Wuli against opponents when the coup d'etat took place. PDOIS leaders were offered ministerial posts but are known by the whole world that they would not be part of any government that does not derive its mandate from the people. Who then can associate PDOIS with violence in assuming political office? PDOIS is the most peaceful political entity in the Gambia.
Wariteh's notion of PDOIS policies as a manifestation of ” collectivized farms and state owned blacksmiths' workshops or.. Julas selling goods on behalf of the state”” reveals the same misconception which is also harbored by Karamba.
Karamba claimed that there are’’ fatal flaws in the philosophy, policies and general policy prescription of the party and its vision" as presented by Tijan but did not indicate that Tijan did not actually covey the policies of PDOIS.  Instead of taking PDOIS head on by stating its principles, policies and programmes and subject them to critical review, Karamba made general comments like, there is no history of collectivism as an economic model anywhere in Gambian society and that even if one were to design a well-researched policy proposal around the views Tijan espouses they are unlikely to succeed because they would be at profound variance with the very essence of what it means to be Gambian."
I would like to ask Karamba what his definition of collectivism is and where it is noted in PDOIS’ policy that the party intends to force people to adopt Karamba’s conception of collectivism.
What I know of PDOIS policy is that it intends to solve the problem of the farmers who have been afflicted with poor earnings, high cost of production inputs and poor marketing arrangements. PDOIS has always argued that the solution of Gambian farmer is not to take his or her land and give it to big capitalist landowners to produce with machines and turn them into landless peasants.
On the other hand, the problem of the farmers is not going to be solved by the state taking over the land of the farmers and turns them into agricultural workers.
We emphasized that in terms of marketing, the farmers would establish their own democratic cooperative union with elected representatives who would negotiate prices for them and create the infrastructure for the marketing of their produce.
Unlike Karamba, who wants to give the impression that Gambian villages operate on the basis of separate individual initiatives.
My experience as a person who was born and bred in the rural areas is that our extended family functions like a cooperative society where people work according to their abilities for the extended family to store the food and provide meals for the old, disabled and children who do not go to work so that every member is protected.
This is why people are not dying in the absence of a social security system as you have in the United States. I also know for a fact that there are many "Kafoos" (village associations) farms where women and youths combine and produce to finance their common village projects.
It is also very common in the Kombos where residential facilities have taken over all the land for certain areas to allocate for community farms for women gardeners such as Banjulunding, Sukuta, Bakau, just to name a few.
PDOIS has policies on how to help the extended family and community farms to ensure food security and sustainable development.
In fact, in the next article, I will send the PDOIS policies on this subject and I hope Karamba will also post the policy of his party instead of criticizing in the abstract.
Furthermore, Karamba raised the issue of private and public sector collection of solid and liquid waste and argued that the private sector approach is more efficient that public sector approaches to the collection of waste and just referred to the KMC as an example of failure of the local councils or the public sector in discharging its function.
What Karamba fails to recognize is that collection of waste was once put under the charge of Saihou Ceesay & Sons, a private company, without any better results.
The issue therefore, is to find out why there had been failures regardless of the public or private sector approaches to waste collection. Superficial discourse will not help us to address the problem of this country. We must move beyond sentiments to find out how other countries are solving such problems.
Furthermore, Karamba did take on Tijan on NTC and in fact made comments, which has been reflective of the PDOIS' position throughout, ie. The public enterprises are mismanaged under the PPP and the APRC. PDOIS' position on how public enterprises are to be managed will also be posted and I hope Karamba will also post how his party intends to handle public enterprises.
Finally, Karamba argued vehemently for a small government but did not explain what a small government means? What is however clear is that a government is elected to manage public resources and provide public services. The Gambia governments since the days of the PPP have not had policies, which promote private sector development to widen the tax base, generate more revenue and provide more services. They have also been mismanaging the public enterprises, which could generate dividends and provide revenue to ensure the availability of public services.
How to get the financial resources necessary to maintain schools, hospitals, and good roads is the fundamental issue. How PDOIS intends to do this will be posted and I hope Karamba will also post how his party intends to get the financial resources to maintain schools, etc by lowering taxes while eradicating any base for productive public enterprises.  
An elementary understanding of the Gambian budget would reveal that both the PPP and the APRC had been depending on private banking system to borrow money to finance their budget deficits which eventually transformed Gambia into a least developed and highly indebted poor country, (HIPC).
PDOIS has maintained that private sector financing should be invested to develop the private sector productive base in order to promote foreign exchange earnings, job creation; and more corporate and income tax maintain public services just as is done in states where social democratic policies exist. Secondly, public sector revenue will be invested to promote the development of public enterprises, which will generate dividends, which will be paid to the government as non-tax revenue to supplement tax income in the maintenance of public services.
I hope Karamba will explain what his party intends to do in that area.
The reason why in all states in the world today, the private and public sector are all economic players is clearly explained by PDOIS and i will post this explanation for the benefit of the readers and hope Karamba too will post his party's position.
Karamba’s conclusion reflects thinking, which is devoid of any reference to the current state of the Gambia. In a word, Karamba wrote "the Gambian people are best served by a government that is limited in size, focused on its prescribed roles and working diligently to provide the best enabling environment for individual Gambians to realize their maximum potential in the free enterprise system. This will require a government that would scrupulously adhere to the rule of law, be transparent, lessen taxation and regulation and certainly not enter into commerce".

What Karamba should realize is, there are less than 16,000 civil servants. Since the time of Jawara retrenchment had taken place. How much leaner could the public service become?  Secondly, more than 88% of the development budget depends on grants and loans. Where will you get the money if you lessen taxation without a productive public base?
Few Gambians are getting access to bank loans to establish free enterprises, some of those who managed to get loans from micro-finance institutions such as IBAS in the past are finding it impossible to pay their loans and are having their properties seized. What is Karamba's party’s scheme for creating the free enterprise system which would be able to absorb or provide employment for 185,000 children in our primary schools, 67,000 children in our upper basic schools and 27,000 children in our high schools who would be leaving school in the next ten years.

Yes there is a lot of lip service paid to the rule of law and transparency. PDOIS calls for the creation of village committees elected by villages, which will have the power to receive all information on projects designed for villages and engage in social auditing to ensure that what is allocated in the budgets, are actually spent. The security officers will be required to meet these villagers and their committees to explain the laws, which govern their works. I will pot what PDOIS intends to do to ensure empowerment of the people from below so that we will go beyond lip service. I hope Karamba and Wariteh will do the same. To conclude, I would like to advise patriots like Tijan to contact me on this email people’s center Gambia so that I can send them all the information they need regarding PDOIS' policies so that they would not communicate views that are not quite accurate on PDOIS and give opportunity to PDOIS opponents to misinform the readers as they have been doing these past 20 years.