By: Mariama Njie
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has revealed that the reasons for the delay of 2020 voter registration is lack of the nation’s demographics, migration in and out as well as deaths and attainment of age and diaspora participation in the anticipated 2020 draft constitution.
The nation’s electoral body explanation comes after it was summoned by the national assembly select committee over the delay in the voter’s registration which supposed to start on 14 January 2021.
“This is due to the fact that existing register of voters was compiled in 2011 and only updated in 2016 and another the reason for general voter’s registration is the change in the demographics of The Gambia such as migration into, out of and within The Gambia, deaths, attainment of age requirement, diaspora participation and much anticipated Referendum on the 2020 draft constitution,” Samboujang Njie, Chief Electoral Officer of IEC told lawmakers.
“The IEC did an assessment of its voter registration infrastructure and came up with needs requirements to conduct a general registration of voters. In May IEC decided that despite pandemic it could still continue to prepare for the 2021 electoral cycle and decided not to apply for single sourcing again but to do an open tender for both local and international companies to participate.”
“Consultation then began between IEC and GPPA on biding documents preparation, so on July 14, 2020 we submitted our bidding documents to GPPA requesting for approval of international and local competitive bidding using an open tendering method to be published in the media,” he added.
According to him, after the submission of the bidding document, GPPA send them some observations which they take care of and the GPPA further demanded that the GPPA- form 100 must be provided to them.
He said: “The form that contains list of all materials, equipment and service with quality required and their estimated prices was provided to them on 6th August 2020 as demanded with required quantities which totals to D153,000,000.”
“We also wrote to GPPA enquiring request for approval on evaluation submission since they did not have the luxury of time, on October 12th they wrote back to us two letters. One saying that “GPPA was taking time to review the IEC’s submission while the other indicated that Derma-log was fully compliant since it responded to the ToR and that this procurement has a service component and therefore its key to have Terms and Reference responded to. We wrote to them again regarding the issue invoking section 43 of the 1997 constitution of The Gambia which stated that IEC must not be subjected to any control or direction by any authority,” he said
“They also wrote back citing section 12 of the GPPA Act 2018 that requires approval from GPPA for such procurement and categorically stated that GPPA cannot approve the recommendation of IEC unless the TOR responses. We provide all the information with the technical specification evaluation documents to them but still now no breakthrough as GPPA insisted on response to ToR by the entire firm.”
