Just last week, our sources told us that there were so many deaths at the Brikama Health Center and Edward Francis Small Teaching Hospital that families were asked to “just take away” their dead free of charge. There is usually a fee paid to retrieve bodies. But space was an issue and people were dying, according to our health sources. A resident of Brikama told us that during Yahya Jammeh’s time, hospitals were supplied with Coartem, a combo drug of artemether and lumefantrine used not in preventive, but treatment interventions of the spread of parasites in the red blood cells of humans, a process malaria uses to kill its victims.
Gambia has numerous muddy and unkempt streets, sometimes just next to our “Ataaya” preparation (a very popular, addictive, and imported Chinese tea boiled over a portable heat along streets, corridors, pavements, courtyards, or even offices and military camps). Mosquitoes, the notorious and ubiquitous vectors of malaria love the uncovered gutters with years and months-old filth in Gambia’s urban areas. They carry the parasite that causes malaria to kill numerous Gambians every year.
As long as those streets aren’t cleaned and gutters covered, mosquitoes will maintain their citizenship and continue to kill Gambians. But since Jawara’s time, it has been a scriptural injunction not to worry about paving our streets with simple machinery. Gambia has plenty of sand. Yahya Jammeh’s government, at some point through corrupt ways used to sell our sand overseas, according to reported information years ago.
All we needed since Jawara, is a community motivation, if the government cannot do it alone in mixing concrete, sand, providing Sankung Sillah pipes for sewage plumbing, few trucks and little money. Yes, little money. But that little money is being spent on $300 per night per person for a thirty-member delegation in New York City for this year’s United Nation’s meeting. You ask yourself, what exactly is that meeting helping Gambia with?
Let’s do this math together. None of the delegates would travel in economy class. So, each ticket would cost nothing less than $2000.00. Two-thousand times thirty is sixty-thousand Dollars. The per diem for each delegate is at least $300 times nine days so far, which is $81,000.00 plus $60,000.00. The total so far is nothing less than $141,000.00 and counting. And this is not the real figure, but a gestimate.
Everytime our government officials travel outside, this is one of the reasons! And think of Barrow’s own number of delegates for those travels which is usually an entourage. Now, how many bags of cement, gravel, and other supplies for paving the streets of Banjul, Serrekunda, Brikama, Basse, Jarra Soma, etc are in $141,000.000? Its Dalasi conversion is D7,050,000 (seven million, fifty-thousand).
If just one trip can cost our tax payers the above sum, please think how much the Barrow adminisitration has spent so far since January 2017 on just travels! And we complain of poverty and malaria killing our poor every year? forGambia is not here because we love journalism. We are not interested in journalism! We are interested in humanity and its deserved equity!
