After three decades of public transportation, GPTC is on the verge
collapse.Today the corporation can hardly put out a half dozen buses out of
it's old and decrepit fleet resulting in a near fatal cashflow crunch. It is
not generating even a fraction of the revenue required for its operating
costs much less put itself on the kind of financial footing that  would
enable it to fullfill it's charter as an ongoing provider of public
transportation. Without an immediate infusion of cash and a thorough
restructuring neither of which is likely , there is simply no practical way
GPTC would survive. When I worked at the corporation between 1988 and 1990 we
had an average bus availabilty of 35 deployed throughout the system averaging
D120, 000 in  daily revenue. Even then GPTC was in a finacially precarious
situation in that nearly half of the routes it ran were unprofitable
including the Banjul /Serrekunda routes where private taxi, van and bus
operators saturated the route to the extent that our relative price advantage
disappeared entirely. Infact only the provincial routes (Banjul/ Soma and
Soma /Basse) and the Dakar services and some "sleepout" services such as
Gunjur , Gambiassara and Seliti were profitable.There were also some
politically motivated routes that made no financial or transportation sense
but came about because a particular constiuency succesfully lobbied a
minister to have a bus. At about the same time, GPTC was obliged to sign what
was referred to as a performance contract with the central government as part
of an overall economic restructuring strategy agreed with multilateral
lending institutions.It meant GPTC would forgo the relatively small gov't
subsidies it enjoyed and essentially operate like a business and expected to
meet certain performance criteria. While the government eagerly phased out
the token subsidies, it insisted on saddling the corporation  with the lousy
but costly school bus service knowing full well that they won't pay up once
invoices are submitted. GPTC management also never reconfigured the
organisation to correspond with their changed status from a moribund
government chartered transportation parastatal mandated to offer the Gambian
people with  affordable  public transportation, to a bus company that had to
find a way to survive the harsh realities of the transportation economy. With
essentially the same organisational structure in place, costs continued to
increase while revenue correspondingly declined . The problem was further
excerbated when Yahya and his gang came and like the rest of the government
the corporation became just another tool of their shananigans. They quickly
purged it of the one or two competent people and instituted a culture of
sychophancy replete with political hatchetmen. Jockeying and shameless
posturing from the MD and his cronies further sapped morale as employees
became consumed with saving their jobs. The APRC have transporattion bills
totallying nearly D8million  they have accrued from GPTC since
1994.Management is sitting on all these invioces fearful of collecting from
the APRC bureau after ferrying supporters of the regime all over the country
hundreds of times with the explicit understanding that the party would pay
the bill. Even today as the corporation lies in ruins and scrambling for it's
very survival, GPTC routinely leaves paying passengers on the lurch while it
yanks it's few buses off their routes to ferry APRC lackeys to events.Yet the
top management would rather continue the charade  that everything is fine and
dandy when they know fully well that they heading for a train wreck. They
will never admit to the disaster they are presiding over prefering to lie and
give excuses to the very end ensuring that GPTC would enter our sorry
contemporary  history as another enterprise Gambians ran to the ground.
Karamba

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