By Adama Makasuba
Essa Faal one of the contestants of the December 4 presidential election under an independent ticket, has backtracked from his joint decision made with other two contested parties – UDP and GDC, who had earlier on Sunday rejected President Adama Barrow’s landslide election victory, saying there is no sufficient evidence to challenge the Independent Electoral Commission’s verdict in court.
The former lead counsel of TRRC decision comes less than 24 hours after he had signed a joint statement with the leaders of United Democratic Party, Lawyer Ousainou Darboe and Gambia Democratic Congress party of Honorable Mamma Kandeh to reject the Saturday’s election result.
However, speaking at a news conference held at his residence in Kerr Sering, Mr Essa Faal said: “after signing the statement rejecting the election result, we had to come back to base and further review our materials and our evidence and our information (that) we have, and upon doing that, we come to the conclusion that, yes, there might be violations of the law here and there, but the evidence that we have, we believe was not sufficient to warrant going to court.”
“And for that simple reason, a lot of us were also involved in the same activity to varying the grace and he who comes to equity must come with clean hands, and because of the respect we have for the law: we said to ourselves look we cannot take this to court,” he added.
Meanwhile, he said: “We are Gambians, we would never and ever contemplate doing anything that’s unlawful or anything that would jeopardise the peace of this country,” adding “we will never do that and be rest assured of that, we are very decent and patriotic people who love our country above everything else.”
According to him, he and his team will never be found doing anything that would jeopardise the safety and security of people and bring the country into problems.
“We were the first candidates to have issued our own code of conduct which would guide us during the campaign and that’s also the reason why during the middle of the campaign, I left the campaign to come to town and sign the code of conduct,” he said