By Adama Makasuba
Honourable Madi Ceesay, who has retained his parliamentary seat for Serrekunda West, has unveiled that the government as at this year spent a billion dalasis on keeping its embassies functional across the world.
According to him, if the government is committed to address the high cost of living in the country, they should place an embargo on opening new embassies and limit travelling of the state officials.
“If they are really serious about addressing the high cost of commodities then they must reduce the extravagant travel of government officials and the executive, starting with the ministers and even the National Assembly. Those travelling must be limited and the size of the delegation has to be reduced as well if they are travelling.
“For example, if the president has to attend an international meeting with a high-powered delegation, they just limit it to technical. That’s where we can do a lot of saving and we should limit our diplomatic services,” too, he said.
Also, “we should look into our foreign service, The Gambia has a lot of diplomatic services across the world. But in my view, it does not worth it. A small country like The Gambia to have an embassy everywhere and it costs a lot of resources to keep an embassy. This current year, we are spending more than a billion dalasis on taking care of our foreign services. So, those are areas we should limit to help address the high cost of basic commodities.
“However, it would not be ideal to close all the embassies, but the government can place an embargo on opening new embassies. And it can keep closing the embassies one after one (another). This is the only way to address high food cost and living,” he added.
Meanwhile, he continued: “I want to see living standards of Gambians smooth and this can happen by passing legislative law and I will push a promulgation of laws that will stabilize the prices of basic commodities like rice and oil and other food stuff. So that high cost of living will be addressed. If I say this, the government has to come in and do what we call subsidies in order to stabilize the prices of commodities in the country. That’s why I said we would have a legislature that will stabilize the price of commodities for three years before we reach a lasting solution.