By Adama Makasuba
Alhaji Mamadi Kurang has urged President Adama Barrow to explain to Gambians how the Banjul project was implemented.
Mr Kurang’s call comes after a destructive flood that happened across the country and submerged houses and displaced dozens of families.
“We have seen the flood and when they say Ebo Town and Bundung flooded one can understand that there was no city planning, but if they say Banjul is still flooding after they invested taxpayers’ money according to sources up to $40 million which will be equivalent to up to D2 billion to build the roads.
“We all know Banjul’s problem is drainage and in fact, the drainage problem comes before the road problem, and if you go spend $40 million on Banjul Road without proper drainage system to allow the flow of waters into the rivers then it is not a project,” he said.
So, if they call for an investigation “it will surprise me because the President has seen how the project was implemented and knows how much money has been spent on the project. He should take a bold step and tell us what happened and what he thinks should be done on it because we cannot waste these loaned monies like that.”
Alhaji Kurang argued that the state of the economy is faced with lots of problems and it needs an emergency solution. The economy is not growing and there is no means so far to move up the growth of the economy, he added.
Meanwhile, he continued: “you cannot only say salaries have been increased but what you should ask yourself is how long have salaries been increased because many of the government workers are low-salary earners. If you want to help the country, you should take up a salary structure that will favour the low-earners. In fact, there are some sections of the society where you don’t need to increase their salary because you take the taxpayers’ money to increase government workers’ salaries.