By MariamaNjie
Gambia Postal Services Corporation has said it revenue has slightly gone down as a result of restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Gampost which doesn’t lay off staff limited and restricted the number of staff that come to work on daily basis as they group them into different working hours to observe a working safety measures to curb the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, some other working places already lay-off staff without proper assessment of the situation as soon as The Gambia registered its first Covid-19 case in March.
Speaking in an interview with The Voice, Phoday Muhammed Jaiteh, Managing Director of Gampost said “the international and national lockdowns have slash our revenue immensely, it affects operations, investment in importance areas such as board of development, trainings and obviously revenue, money and income is the life blood of an institution.”
He quickly noted that his institution already taken actions to control payments, as they are only paying what is absolutely necessary.
“There are areas in the country where there are no banks, commercial banks will not venture in those areas because of the profitability, but we are always there to serve the people and now that we facing such a difficult moment government should eventually come in if this continues,” he said.
He pointed out that they are actually self-sustaining and haven’t been receiving any subvention from government since 2007 and they totally rely on their own internally with the generated revenue.
According to him, they don’t have much loan commitment as they always pay salaries even though the revenue is not coming but they have a reserve bank account “which we are utilizing to pay salaries and some of the necessary expenses, but that cannot continue,” he said.
Having taken permission from the Ministry, he disclosed that he wrote a letter to the government that with this trend they will not be able to continue to pay salaries and take care of personal expenditures and investment in necessary areas without an improvement in the revenue stream. With the letter they therefore request from government a budget support from next month.”