Mr. Gassama,

Thank you once again.  I have to admit that your series of questions are complex and there was no way I can be faithful to you without the kind of response I gave earlier. In essence what I tried to say in brief is that NADD is not a legitimate political party but an institutionalized faction within the context of the Gambian Constitution and the electoral laws.  This became a self-evident fact the very moment NADD registered as a party with the IEC.  The IEC is the only authority in the Gambia that grants any association the status function of a political party..and not the National Assembly, the Executive nor the Supreme Court.  However, the legitimacy of a political party can only take place within a context of constitutive rules ( In this case the Electoral laws and the Gambian Constitution).  Now this is what the Gambian laws say about the registration of political parties and mergers:

The Constitution of the Gambia: Chap.V

PART 7: POLITICAL PARTIES

(5) Every association seeking to be registered as a political party

    shall submit to the Independent Electoral Commission -



(a) a copy of the association’s constitution;

(b) the association’s name and full address and the names and addresses

    of all its officers;

(c) the full address of its secretariat, and symbol.

 The Electoral Laws regulates mergers as follows:


Agreements in Principle:



i. Where parties agree verbally, in writing, or in any other form known and unbeknown to the IEC; to consolidate, support, andencourage each other in the contest of elections and in the pursuit of mutual interests.

ii. The IEC shall take due cognizance of such agreement if known, but shall deem all such agreements to have been made in private and limited to administrative arrangements and to mutual understanding between the parties concerned.



iii. The Commission shall recognize parties to such an agreement as individually separate entities and shall give no special consideration to any or all members of the agreement.


iv. Any or all parties to such an agreement may nominate candidates to contest elections on the basis of their arrangement, which candidates shall be recognized as candidates of the party in whose name they are nominated.



(b) Agreement in Law



Agreement in Law :



i. Where parties wish to formally register their convergence with the Commission, such convergence if approved, shall be binding under of the provisions of these rules and the Elections Decree 1996,



ii. Two or more registered Political Parties shall be deemed to have legally merged on approval by the Commission in accordance with the Elections Decree 1996 and any other law, following a formal request presented to the

Commission by the Political Parties for that purpose. PROVIDED that there shall at no time be less than three political parties registered in the country.



iii. The constitutions of the Political Parties wishing to merge shall make provisions for the authorization of merger.



iv. Political parties intending to merge shall give the Commission 30 days notice of their desire to do so, and the notice shall be accompanied by -



(a)  a special resolution passed by the National Executive of each of the parties proposing to merge, approving the merger;



(b) the proposed full name and acronym, constitution, manifesto, symbol or logo of the party, together with the address of the National Office of the merged party;




It is an established self-evident fact that NADD never contested the IEC public notice of the coalition's merger into a political party called NADD.  NADD never submitted a party constitution to the IEC but a Memorandum of Understanding which is a loose association of parties that agreed to form a merger in principle.  If NADD wanted to create only an alliance it could have stopped short of registering their association with the IEC because the latter registers only legitimate political parties and NOT alliances or "party of parties".  However, Mr. Roberts for reasons best known to himself overlooked the stipulations of the constitution that requires a party CONSTITUTION and not MOU for registration purposes.  There is a world of difference between a constitution that codifies a merger of political parties in law into one party on one hand; and a memorandum of understanding which expresses the non-binding wishes of parties into a merger in principle.  Thus NADD is neither a
 legitimate political party nor an alliance but a subterfuge at best and a fraud at worst.  NADD is neither legitimate nor constitutional.

Now once we are clear with this issue I will proceed to clarify a subtext of my previous posting concerning the Gambian voting scheme and how NADD intends to manipulate it into a binary-choice function in order to undermine the natural order and stability of the political establishment.

Regards,

Ebou


(Momodou Buharry Gassama <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Mr. Jallow!
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my enquiries. However, I must confess that I really failed to understand what you were trying to say. The more I read your post, the more confused I got as to the relationship between the answers and the questions I asked. For example, I asked: " are you saying that NADD is not a legitimate political party?". A simple answer such as "I am saying that NADD is a legitimate / illegitimate political party" would have sufficed. I also asked: "what do base your statement .... Do you have any proof to back such a statement?". A simple answer such as "the proof I have is ..." or "I don't have any proof" would also have sufficed. The same applies to the rest of the questions and issues I raised. Since the issues need "to digested and thoroughly debated before we can further proceed", it would be very helpful if you revisit the questions and issues I raised and give simple, straightforward answers so we can proceed. I thank you once again and look
 forward to your reply. Have a good evening.
Buharry.
----- Original Message -----
From: Ebou Jallow
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 4:55 AM
Subject: Re: [>-<] PENDING BYE-ELECTION FRAUD


Mr. Gassama,

I thank you for your questions because it has somehow urged me to reflect in dept the current electoral problems facing the Gambia, and the consequent effects of NADD's existence in the Gambian political system.

In my earlier posting, I have tried to make a clear distinction between APRC a legitimate political party, and NADD which is an institutionalized faction of convenience with very dubious credentials of a political party. What makes NADD an institutional fact ? In our world as human beings there are two kinds of facts that are either observer relative or observer independent, e.g., a one Dalasi money note or atoms respectively. Observer relative facts like NADD and a Dalasi note are created by human society by assigning them status functions according to some constitutive rules...For example, NADD can only count as a legitimate party within a context of rules...X counts as Y in context C.. This means that only the National Assembly can make legislation within the context of the Gambian constitution to establish an institutional fact such as a political party, citizenship and any piece of paper as a legal tender called money.&nb! sp; The process of making X count as Y is a legislative
 procedure that generates constitutive rules. The constitution of The Gambia allows only the National Assembly to make provisions for the purposes of the IEC and electoral laws by an act of parliament. As such the IEC is the only authority in the Gambia that registers political parties, and the ruling of the Supreme Court just reinforced that institutional fact. The Supreme Court decision did not establish NADD as a political party as you and Halifa constantly claim...it just upheld an already established fact which even the NADD politicians contested and argued against. Why did NADD contest its legitimacy as a political party before the highest court of the land is still a mystery that only Ousainou Darboe can explain. Mr. Roberts the former IEC chairman overlooked a fundamental constitutional requirement that any association that intends to register with the ! IEC as a political party must submit a valid party constitution. NADD did never fulfill that requirement but instead
 submitted a Memorandum of Understanding which never made any codification of a merger in law but a loose subterfuge of a faction which is neither a political party nor an alliance.
Since the fateful July decision of the Supreme Court, the NADD leadership has been on the overdrive to rationalize its fatal errors to the party faithfuls. Amongst its many excuses it has offered so far nothing is more dubious than the assertion that their dysfunctional individual parties where "forced" to form an alliance because Yaya has "manipulated" the constitution in order to eliminate the second rounds of voting. I find this particularly interesting because only the National Assembly can effect changes in the constitution, and the very same opposition parties boycotted the NA assembly elections that gave Jammeh an overwhelming majority to rule the Gambia. As a result the legitimate government of the Gambia saw it just to constitute a multi-party political system that encourages the general constituency to form multiple districts, constitutionally recognized political parties and allows each party to compete! for votes from the enfranchised constituents. This system empowers
 the electorates to exercise their right to weigh, however distorted, the performance of government and the promises of the opposition parties. This system also enhances individual choice between something and something and not something and nothing. NADD has absolutely nothing to offer to the Gambian people besides self-righteous theatrics and an insatiable personal desire to liquidate one man and one man only- Yaya Jammeh.
Voting systems are algorithms for individual citizens to select one candidate from a "menu" or an opportunity set based on individual preference. As such it is a process and it is menu dependent. In the current multi-party voting scheme in the Gambia, the act of voting for any party X is a function of menu-dependent behavior from an opportunity set of diverse parties (X, Y, Z, etc). The apparent rationale is that the presence of diversity enables more choices for the Gambian voter in order to prevent strategic voting ( i.e. voting for X in order to eliminate Y) based on a binary choice function since the choice of voting for party X in a choice menu of (X,Y,Z) does not imply that an individual shall choose party X over part Y in a two-way contest since preferring X/(X, Y) over Y/(X, Y) is NOT the same as preferring X(X, Y, Z) over Y(X, Y, Z). This illustrates essentially the subterfuge that NADD is engineering in order to circumvent th! e voting scheme established by law, and thus
 undermine the natural order and stability of the Gambian political establishment.
I would beg to adjourn for now the issue of UDP's shadow politics of tribalism that is clearly manifest in the last electoral results. I have covered a lot of ground which I think needs to digested and thoroughly debated before we can further proceed.

Once again I appreciate your questions and the challenge.

Ebou Jallow





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