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WHATEVER MONEY GAMBIA MAKES, 72.95% IS SPENT ON PAYING DEBT; DID WE EVER OWE SENEGAL ANY MONEY BEFORE BARROW CAME TO POWER?
There are those Gambians that choose stupidity over basic consciousness. They are those that hate intelligent questions or questioning. They detest thinking or using their brain cells to better themselves. It’s no use trying to reason with stupid. Let stupid find out on its own that it’s quite expensive to be stupid. We are not here, today, to gloat!
That will be very stupid of us! But as painful as it has been, we now see what we warned Gambians years ago on Freedom Radio that Macky Sall was seeking to fulfil the long-held Senegalese fantasy of control and manipulation in The Gambia—something both Jawara and Jammeh refused. When Jawara first saw it on the horizon and rejected it to the chagrin of Abdou Diouf, the Senegambia Confederation evaporated.
We warned that the Senelec deal was a pure Senegalese exploitative chess move! This was in the July of 2017 when the deal was being anastomosed to our financial epithelium and I was the canary in the coal mine! Senegal still has more rural areas without access to electricity and clean water than The Gambia’s entire geometry. Why wouldn’t they power up those impoverished villages in their own backyard?
I received invectives from some Macky Sall henchmen live on air while some ignorant Gambians cheered foreign nationals attacking a Gambian on a Gambian show about Gambian matters. How more stupid could it get? Today, Senegal is saying Gambia owes her D100 million for electric bills.
Remember years ago when Barrow’s Trades minister said it was blissful for The Gambia to be using the Dakar port to clear goods? Instead of helping our GPA, this was one of the short-sighted rhetorics coming out of the low-IQ Gambian government.
The next days, our women in market stalls who never understood basic geo-economics would complain, “CFA is expensive today…CFA this! CFA that! And that’s why we are suffering.” Is Gambia a CFA country?
Is the Dalasi pegged to the French neo-colonial currency? No! But with deals like Senelec or killing our GPA in broad daylight as brandished in the utterances of Barrow’s former Trades minister, Gambia’s trade indices would plummet against Senegal, ushering in the current deficit.
Why should any gov’t in its sane mind kill off its ports authority for any neighbouring country’s? Why would any gov’t whose cabinet isn’t on any crack-pipe kill off its Nawec for some predatory Senegalese Senelec with its pathetic supplies and inefficiencies?
Worse, any incoming gov’t of The Gambia has to deal with how to pay off this Senelec debt besides the $1.6 billion Barrow has added in his few years. And the debt possibly goes with interest payments like most capitalist debts, another reason our debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 72.95 currently. This means whatever money we have, almost 73% of it is spent on paying off debt. You see why I was screaming my tonsils out on Freedom Radio from 2017 to 2019?
Today, Seedy Keita, our Finance skipper is finally correlating national growth to accessible universal electricity supply! Duh, Mr. Keita! It took you and your boss’ brain cells almost ten years to sense that? Otherwise, why did they mortgage Nawec’s birthright and prosperity to Senegal’s Senelec? Are you guys possessed or what? Is there anything algebraic in understanding that whatever has been spent on Senelec could have been reinvigorating our national power company? What is cerebral about this simple recognition?
