By Mama A. Touray
Floricultures along the Bartil Harding Highway have called on the government to help them with a new land for farming flowers as they fear the OIC extension project will massively affect their farming businesses.
Speaking to The Voice exclusively on behalf of the flower farmers, Musa Sanneh, said: “expanding the highway is a development and development is what every citizen of this nation wants. Expansion of the Bartil Harding Highway is our concern as flower sellers along the highway.”
According to him, if government allocate a land for them and help them with boreholes, it will help them a lot to effectively farm their flowers, but lamenting that “how things are today as we were told by the authorities that we should move our flowers, if proper work should commence it will cause a lot of destructions to us if we are not compensated.”
“We heard it from radios that people selling along the highway should move and we the floricultures are part of those people along the highway, if you asked me to move and behind me the land there is owned by someone so if I am to move my plants, I should head towards somewhere so if that place is not available it will bring the same destruction,” he said.
He went on that “if government want to remove floricultures and trees here without allocating a land for them, is like you entering in a particular society, take a cutlass and kill the human beings as the plants are living beings as well. But if there is a plan for them, we will also know how to remove these flowers here for transplanting in anywhere giving to us.”
The government of the Gambia, he said, knows that the youth are ready to work so in that case they should encourage the youth instead of discouraging them because this place is our source of living,” he cried out on behalf of other floricultures in the area.
