Mr. Gassama,

I thank you for your questions because it has somehow urged me to reflect in depth 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.  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  the 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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