To  be candid, Pa modou, Haruna and Rene, you lot are wasting your time with
Hamjatta. If Hamjatta was really sincere and wanted to understand PDOIS'S
economic agenda as he pretends or he wanted serious polemics on this issue
he would have taken the opportunity to meet with Halifa Sallah when he came
to London and Mr Mbodge took the initiative the effort and time to arrange
such a forum at the school of Oriental and Arican Studies. Mr Hamjatta never
turned up to engage Halifa, that is why I believe that he is not sincere to
discuss PDOIS'S agenda. This was the best opportunity accorded to him, for
him to confront the bull by the horn, to the dissapointment of all those
that came to wittness this historical polemic, Hamjatta never turned
up.Further on to that he never explained why he failed to come, my belief is
that he chickened out.

On this basis alone, I feel it is futile to try to explain to him because
this  attempt will  not yield any fruit, you will just be going in circles,
whiles he comes with purile extrapolations that does not have any head or
tail.
>From: Hamjatta Kanteh <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Response To Brother Buharry - My opinion
>Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 09:29:16 EDT
>
>Pa Modou,
>
>Am i surprised that you will continue - as ever - to muddle issues time and
>again??!! In your chimerical attempt to throw a blow at my assertion that i
>have only expressed disquietude and or scepticism on the overall impact of
>cooperative economics to ameliorate the legion of Gambian poor and
>unemployed, you commented:
>
><< With all due respect Hamjatta, the above you claim to be a disclaimer is
>infact not a disclaimer. You CANNOT disclaim three powerful indictments of
>PDOIS's economic policy from THREE DIFFERENT POSTS with the above
>disclaimer
>without withdrawing the former three. Your disclaimer above is in DIRECT
>CONFLICT with your earlier posts and seem to another view that DOES NOT
>CATEGORICALLY STATE which of the two applies to PDOIS's economic policy.
>The
>onus is on you to either withdraw the former and stick to the latter or
>vise
>versa. This, I guess is Buharry's contention and I stand to be corrected.
> >>
>
>What the heck are you trying to say here? You see the problem with you ...
>you obfuscate stuff that have always been straightened out with mumbo jumbo
>that leaves folks tearing at their hair as to what you are on about. I'm
>sure
>you must have read my original essay on PDOIS' economic programme, where i
>commented, amongst others, that:
>
>"Needless to say that such weasel- words as "cooperatives" are nothing but
>State contrived collectivisation at the expense individual enterprise and
>initiatives. Don't get me wrong. Free market liberals might be reluctant to
>use the weasel-word "cooperatives" but they see nothing wrong with
>voluntary
>and spontaneous civil cooperation or association between individuals in a
>market place or social entity. Liberals only object when the association or
>cooperation is State/gov't contrived as opposed to being a spontaneous and
>voluntary civil association between individuals."
>
>From the very outset, i contrasted between State contrived
>cooperatives/collectivisation and spontaneous civil cooperation/association
>between individuals in an given entity - be they political, economic or
>social. And expressed a preference for the latter for obvious reasons.
>Suffice to say that this is what my point has always been vi-a-vis
>cooperative economics. Furthermore, given the diseconomies of scale
>associated with the PDOIS proposal, i argued that invariably we are going
>to
>end up with State contrived cooperatives as opposed to free market ones -
>if
>PDOIS' policy thrust is to make sense. What is so difficult about
>understanding this simple point? Where is the passage where i categorically
>condemned cooperatives? This misrepresentation of my views is getting out
>of
>hand. For the purposes clarity, i will reproduce my original essay on
>PDOIS'
>Economic Programme. Re-read it and show me where i've been inconsistent
>with
>i have been writing of late.
>
>More to the point of your lack of understanding of the issues, or that you
>are not simply paying attention to the issues being raised, you wrote:
>
><< Hamjatta, I find it difficult to see the relevance in your reference to
>Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" to the current debate. >>
>
>This is a clear manifestation - if any were needed - that you are not
>listening/reading carefully what is being said/written here. Let Buharry
>himself explain the relevance of the Hayek reference:
>
><< Which views have been repudiated by vast swathes of evidence? Socialism?
>Co-operatives?
>
>(a) Who carried out the rational disinterested study you talked about?
>(b) Was it you? >>
>
>To cut through what would have amounted to another endless debate on
>ideology, and bore people to death with theory-laden postings, i suggested
>the brother to read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", which is the classical
>liberal repudiation of socialism. If he disagrees with the Hayek position
>then we can take it up some other time.
>
>I can only hope you start reading properly people's views and stop muddling
>stuff you seem on the whole ignorant about.
>
>Hamjatta Kanteh
>
>*******************************************************
>
>Halifa,
>
>The way i see it, the central plank in PDOIS' Economic Programme is an
>urgent
>sense of renewal. It is a renewal of the type you have never seen wholly
>implemented in the Gambia before - even if in practice, it rhymes with some
>key elements of the PPP's economic edifice or strategy, especially as it
>relates to agriculture. I hasten to add that the PPP i speak of is the PPP
>in
>its formative and idealist years, especially in the early days of its
>existence when it was quite rightly labelled as 'mildly socialist'. The
>rhyming is more of a tacit structural and consequential resonance than,
>say,
>approach and outlook or tactical and philosophical emphasis. Perhaps, i
>ought
>to add further that the rhyming is more of an unwitting semblance than
>wittingly piggy-banking from the old and repudiated agricultural economics
>of
>the 'mildly socialist' PPP. It is worth a precious moment's pause to
>explain
>this supposition. The point here is not so much the similarities - in both
>design and intent - between the 'mildly socialist' PPP's old and repudiated
>agricultural economics and the central plank of the PDOIS' Economic
>Programme. Far from it. The point, though, is that by its prognosis and
>diagnosis and placing so much emphasis on an 'informal' farming-led
>resuscitation of the dilapidated Gambian economy, the PDOIS Economic
>Programme would fall in the same consequential and structural trap that
>eventually befell the PPP. How do we know this? When the PPP completely
>took
>over the reins of the country, they inherited more or less a very
>rusticated
>economy; some 85-90% of the Gambian economy was rural and the population
>dispersal pretty much matched this. To the extent that this is correct, the
>PPP naturally embarked upon something we might as well call rural economics
>in order to effectively respond to this reality. The result of this rural
>economics was to collectivise through "cooperative" societies - then very
>much in vogue and not yet repudiated - with government as a default
>inter-market for all agricultural yields. Thus the emergence of such
>publicly
>financed bogey-corporations and marketing outlets like GPMB, Gambia
>Cooperative Union, etc., etc.
>
>We all know the fateful histories of these bogey-corporations. However,
>contrary to popular myth, GPMB and Cooperative didn't fail simply because
>of
>endemic corruption. Admittedly, endemic corruption was what eventually
>break
>the camel's back in these bogey-corporations. The problem lied mainly in
>how
>they were structured and this primarily was telling in their ultimate
>consequences. The much-highlighted endemic corruption was as a result of
>these very structures and the pork-barrel politics that sustained the
>corruption and corrupt officials. And understandably so. If corporations
>are
>structured in such an economically inefficient way - as GPMB et al were -
>corruption is inevitable. Worse, when the structures assume monopolist
>traits
>and form a symbiotic relationship with the Mercantilist State, the choice
>of
>producers vis-à-vis the marketing of their produce is drastically limited -
>especially if it is a politically sanctioned monopoly. However, the biggest
>indictment against such public corporation bogeys like GPMB is how they
>crowd-out much needed investments that agriculture and these corporations
>need very badly, especially when the gov't has other priorities or as
>circumstances keep changing. The result is subsidised inefficient, corrupt
>and unprofitable public corporations feeding from the troughs of
>never-ending
>taxpayer led rescue packages. Until, of course, the gov't - largely because
>of its skyrocketing external debt - is literally forced to stop the
>subsidies
>and privatise. Never has solved the problem; because in any event, all
>these
>privatisations are ill-thought out and never factor the structural and
>consequential problems that have always dogged politically sanctioned
>corporations. To be sure, PDOIS' Economic Programme doesn't resemble an
>exact
>replica of this caricature. However, as i pointed out earlier, the point is
>how the PDOIS programme unwittingly tinkers with the very structures that
>the
>PPP initiated some three decades ago and - despite the altruism and
>dedication we can always expect from a PDOIS led gov't - how as an economic
>consequence, the PDOIS programme is also prone to a similar economic fate
>as
>the PPP. Let us closely examine the evidence before us. This is how you,
>Halifa Sallah, described the synopsis of the PDOIS' Economic Programme:
>
>"Today, the country has no public sector or private sector led growth. Only
>11% of the work forces are employed by government, parastatals and private
>sector. This is why we say that we need a productive public sector to
>generate income rather than rely entirely on taxation. We maintain that the
>private sector should be productive according its capacity. We argue that
>since 57% of the work force rely on agriculture the informal sector holds
>the
>key to the national economy. In our view, if a company can rely on 1000
>acres
>of land to make millions in producing fruits vegetables we can organise a
>cooperative system where those engaged in horticulture can be provided with
>bore holes to produce and share their income as well as to contribute to
>the
>provision of services to their villages. We therefore stand for the
>building
>of co-operatives to enhance personal income and promote community
>development. This is one way of developing the informal sector." Emphasis
>mine.
>
>Needless to say that such weasel- words as "cooperatives" are nothing but
>State contrived collectivisation at the expense individual enterprise and
>initiatives. Don't get me wrong. Free market liberals might be reluctant to
>use the weasel-word "cooperatives" but they see nothing wrong with
>voluntary
>and spontaneous civil cooperation or association between individuals in a
>market place or social entity. Liberals only object when the association or
>cooperation is State/gov't contrived as opposed to being a spontaneous and
>voluntary civil association between individuals. Let's now closely examine
>the above passage i just quoted from you. If this passage is not an exact
>replica of what the PPP had in place before the privatisation zealotry of
>the
>late1980s, then by God its wording is eerily close. Let me first make an
>ethical point and all good things shall follow. Good, avuncular or
>benevolent
>intentions by themselves alone don't make good business entities or lift
>the
>poor out of poverty. If the normative and economic dispositions of an
>entity
>do not square with its structural and consequential dispositions, no amount
>of avuncular benevolence can save the day. This ethical point is precisely
>what will eventually handicap a PDOIS led gov't as it did the PPP and most
>certainly the meeting point of the two very different political parties
>with
>two totally different agendas.
>
>  Another fundamental flaw of the PDOIS Economic Programme is one of
>supposition. Because the Gambia's current provincial or rural populace is
>larger than that of its urban one and because agriculture still employs far
>more than any other sector of the Gambian economy, PDOIS supposes that in
>lieu of this, its economic programme should be primordially be
>representative
>of this. In short, PDOIS' Economic Programme was formulated as if the
>Gambia
>is ruralising or the rural populace is growing or static. The reality,
>however, is that the Gambia has a rural populace that is increasingly
>dwindling and urbanising at a very fast rate. Maybe as a transitionary
>phase,
>making rural economics the centrepiece of your economic programme is
>mooted.
>Yet, as a long-term strategy, there is no doubt that it will inevitably
>head
>for the rocks. To make the point clearer, let us examine how the Gambia's
>demographic disposition has been developing. According to the UN's World
>Development Indicators 2000, the Gambia's demographic disposition
>from1980-1998 looked like this:
>
>  Urban Population: 20% in 1980 and increased to 31% in 1998
>
>Rural Population: 80% in 1980 and declined to 69% in 1998
>
>The evidence exhibited above shows a country that is exponentially
>urbanising. That is not the end of the matter. In a recent conversation
>with
>a development economist, this gentleman told me that by his estimation -
>and
>indeed that of most of his colleagues - more than half of sub Saharan
>Africa's population would by 2015 be urbanised. This is a very conservative
>estimation; it could well turn out to be more than that. My hunch is that
>given the exponential rate of the urbanisation, it would not be far-fetched
>to suggest something like 65% of the population being urbanised by 2020.
>The
>estimation is well within reason. Herein, the evidence is that the Gambia
>is
>on the threshold of urbanisation and not ruralisation - as PDOIS' Economic
>Programme tacitly seemed to suppose and responding to. Since PDOIS'
>Economic
>Programme has not factored this development, it is understandable why the
>central plank of its economic policy is not reflective of these changes.
>Rather, it chose to centrally focus on what couldn't possibly - in the long
>run - be the main engine of the Gambian economy: rural economics. Economic
>orthodoxy suggests that the logical concomitant of urbanisation is
>industrialisation and commercialisation on a scale befitting a nation on
>the
>threshold of urbanisation. What does PDOIS' Economic Programme has to say
>about industrial and commercial policy? I'm all ears. Certainly, it would
>be
>very fair to surmise here that industrialisation and commercialisation -
>the
>key to resuscitating an increasingly urbanised country - remain low-key, if
>not totally mute, in the top priorities of the PDOIS' Economic Programme.
>If
>all PDOIS can come up with to manage an economy - that has an increasingly
>urbanised population - is to believe in "cooperatives to enhance personal
>income and promote community development", PDOIS might as well believe in
>squaring round holes.
>
>In my opinion, agriculture in the Gambia is not becoming a less attractive
>vocation because farmers are not producing enough. Indeed, the evidence is
>that agricultural productivity has been registering some useful gains -
>even
>if we are obliged to call it modest gains. That productivity, i hasten to
>add, doesn't corrode the fact that with the right environment and
>motivation,
>productivity would definitely be more than what it currently is. And
>whatever
>it takes to increase productivity, we should strive to that end. No, the
>crucial problem here is not lack of productivity. The problem is, however,
>one of chronic structural and marketing impediments that stymie the
>potentials of farmers to earn more to expand their productive bases. The
>first thing a liberal gov't ought to do herein is to adopt a multi-pronged
>approach to the deal with the agricultural problem. The first of such would
>be a major assessment of the impediments that shackle not only the
>marketability of the country's agricultural yields but what structures
>ought
>to be in place in order to plan ultimately the liberalisation of marketing
>the country's agricultural yields. This assessment would be gov't, farmers
>and interested private investor led. Whilst this assessment is in place or
>taking its course, the liberal gov't ought to, as an interim measure, take
>over direct responsibility of the marketing of agricultural yields with the
>view that as the agricultural environment ripens for market liberalisation,
>the gov't will totally relinquish such a role and take more or less
>backstage
>role in agricultural marketing. There is absolutely no need to create
>another
>publicly financed Bogey Corporation like GPMB or Cooperative Union to make
>this transition work. Because of its temporary nature, a Competition
>Commission can simply, as an interim measure, assume full responsibility
>for
>such a task. When the time is ripe to liberalise the marketing of
>agricultural yields, the Competition Commission can be given a new lease on
>life by being mandated with the task of regulating the free market that
>assume its former role. Under these arrangements, the Competition
>Commission
>would be decoupled completely from the gov't and would eventually assume
>the
>role of an independent regulator of business; with the clout of an
>heavy-weight public body ready to impartially take on any entity that
>undermines competitive capitalism. The Competition Commission would be
>empowered with anti-trust laws to ensure that no one corporation or
>individual investor can willfully or deliberately frustrate the
>'spontaneous
>order' of the free market.
>
>Finally, and in lieu of the aforesaid, the State's or gov't's gradual
>retreat
>from the direct marketing of agricultural produce would definitely mean
>delineating a new role for it. Liberalisation doesn't mean the State or
>gov't
>is left impotent with nothing to do. Gov't's role would primarily be an
>informed, cautious and empirically determined subsidisation of agricultural
>inputs and infrastructures; and facilitating a conducive environment for
>agriculture to create a middle income rural economy. Most importantly,
>gov't
>would ensure that the Rule of Law is respected by all parties and the lines
>between the private and public sphere in agriculture are clearly
>demarcated.
>Where it would not fatally damage free trade and competition, the gov't can
>invest in rural structures that are crucial for the sustenance of modern
>agriculture. Hereupon, gov't shall ultimately retain primacy in all policy
>areas associated with agriculture - even if it entails consulting all
>participants in agriculture. In the very end, the new powers conferred on
>the
>State/gov't would be limited to the extent to which it can be an efficient
>enabler and facilitator in agriculture without becoming directly involved
>with its daily nitty-gritties or raking its grubby hands in the marketing
>of
>agricultural produce. This, in my humble opinion, is how a liberal gov't
>can
>help Gambian farmers become middle income earners and make rural life
>attractive again to dissuade the rural-urban migration.
>
>  I hope you had a successful party convention/conference. Looking forward
>to
>hearing from you.
>
>All the best,
>
>
>Hamjatta Kanteh
>
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