By: Nyima Sillah
The National Assembly Member for Serrekunda West Constituency, Hon Madi Ceesay, recently warned the government over D116 million taxpayers’ money which was wastefully spent on the draft constitution.
In an interview with this medium, Hon Ceesay said “What I would want to tell this government is that they need to be very careful because a lot of taxpayers’ money was spent on the draft constitution. Over D116 million was spent, and for that document to go wasted like that will be a clear manifestation of the Gambia Government’s carelessness under President Barrow’s leadership.”
He stressed that the draft constitution failed in the first place because it was killed at Barrow’s Cabinet, adding when the CRS submitted the report to him (Barrow) there was a bone of contention there they all looked at the clause which says the term limit of 2yrs including at the time, the current term of the president.
He explained that after the bone of contention, the close associates of President Barrow came to the media making all sorts of comments saying they will make sure it fails, noting it failed because they manipulated it with the number of votes in the parliament.
Hon Ceesay suggested that in order not to waste the taxpayer’s money, the ideal thing the government could have done is to work on it after the elections.
“But they have wasted the whole of 2021 and 2022, and now we are left with only 3 years to go for elections. It is clearly stated in the constitution that 6 months before elections you cannot touch major electoral laws so if nothing is done about it this year, there is no way the draft will come back to parliament. That is going to be disastrous,” he argued.
Meanwhile, Hon Ceesay expressed a lack of confidence in the bounce back of the draft constitution arguing that he used to be very hopeful that the President Barrow-led administration, after the 2021 election victory promised to bring back the draft constitution.
“I took it very seriously; in September, during his SONA speech, he repeated the same thing. Now in 2023, I no longer trusted this government. I don’t think they are committed to bringing back the draft constitution, especially with regards to the Justice Minister’s reaction to a parliamentary question.”
He further said the 1997 constitution is not as bad as some people thought but the draft constitution is the modern one, adding that to be wasted like that is a blatant waste of taxpayers’ money by the government.