By M. Sajo Jallow
Cost-of-living or living-space crisis may well be a crisis of trust, given a private sector regime so keen to praise itself. Or is it a hopeless future, with the youth risking death in faraway deserts and high seas?
Cooperation, not just competition, is one instrument to address this crisis of existence, and therefore trust. African history from ancient times has taught us how it can be done, in a cooperative way. From the pre-dynastic days in Egyptian and Nubian lands of north-eastern Africa to the banks of our great Niger and Senegambian rivers in the west, we have learned to cooperate for human progress. It is a historical lesson also highlighted in The Way of Companions – Myth, History, Philosophy, and Literature: The African Record by Elder AyiKwei Armah, citing the work done by elders Sheikh Anta Diop and Amilcar Cabral, among others.
In periods of great distress due to pandemics and wars, or enslavement and colonial plunder, the human spirit has prevailed through cooperation and solidarity. Once again, we are at a crossroads. It is a choice between cut-throat competition leading to mass misery, or the cooperative way of osusos and kafos out of mass poverty. In The Gambia, a new national policy of cooperative development has recently been adopted. However, typical of government bureaucracy, it is slowly being implemented. There is hardly any significant impact on the current crisis of living!
What shall we do? The talented musician, elder Oliver Mtukudzi from Zimbabwe, was worried about a deadly disease in the song Todii, just as we are about mass poverty. That is up to a million people or a significant part of the population in The Gambia. With about half of the workforce in the so-called informal service sector, the poverty level is uncertain. He or shewho lives in poverty, knows it, regardless of survey figures.
To eradicate such poverty, or artist ST Gambia’s Fuwareya, a bank is urgently needed and long overdue; a national development bank, or a cooperative one, whichever comes first. Small, medium- or large-scale production on farms, workshops, and factories; trading in markets and Lumos (local trading hubs); and transportation in multi-modal ways; all these socio-economic activities need access to affordable financing.
Commercial banks have increased in their number and value, without solving the strategic objectives of affordable financing for the productive sector and full employment. For 2021, the Central Bank and World Bank Group cited financial assets worth about 88.5 billion Dalasis, representing about 85 percent of the country’s annual output value, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for comparison. The share of a dozen commercial banks out of this amount was about 76.2 billion Dalasis, being about 86 percent, or three-quarters if compared to the GDP value of about 104 billion Dalasis. Which activities are these funds concentrated in few hands financing?
We are told that dominant commercial banks lend mostly to Government securities, or the so-called national domestic debt, at about two-thirds; and for private-sector credit, it is more to finance consumption than investment in the productive sector. “Moreover, financial inclusion is low, with only 29 percent of Gambian adults having access to a transaction account and only 2 percent using mobile money ….”
In their unintended capacity as rating agencies, studies carried out by the Bretton Woods institutions indicate that the real economic growth rate for the country stagnated at about 3 percent under three decades (1990-2020). Our development bank, for a cooperative way out of mass poverty, is credible and the right thing to do, given all the billions of Dalasis floating out there. That is, not just from tax revenue, but also from expropriations of assets of previous regimes.