Ebrima, thank you very much for your highly important contributions to the national discourse. Please keep the brilliant ideas coming. As Saul Khan said, your ideas should be studied carefully by the Gambian public, in general and opposition leaders, in particular. Although am more interested in policies for a transitional government (as opposed to a permanent democratically elected government), I have been following your contributions keenly and would have commented earlier, but for some other engagements. The benchmarks you are setting for our next democratically elected leaders are very important. This will enable the ordinary Gambian to cry foul as soon as they detect major deviations from these standards. I agree with you entirely that Gambians should have high expectations from their leaders. People should also be prepared to effect changes if those expectations are not met. Ebrima, allow me to suggest a few issues you might want to consider in future messages. These issues pertain mainly to the break-down of law and order in the country. By now everyone knows about the lawlessness in The Gambia. Government sanctioned thugs terrorize citizens with impunity. The last place ordinary citizens would want to report crimes is the police. Even the police admit that the public has lost confidence in them. State attorneys are corrupt and incompetent. Magistrates and judges are intimidated and the judicial system is rotten. It is not too long ago that Halifa Sallah told us that there were citizens rotting in jail because the courts cannot try their cases. Ebrima, this law and order problem is one of the biggest threat to our society and it needs to be addressed urgently by future governments. When people cannot have redress through the proper channels, they take the law into their own hands and anarchy ensues. For example, because the police and the courts cannot guarantee the safety of opposition leaders, people like Ousainou Darboe have an entourage of guards that are ready to do anything to defend their leaders. This phenomenon coupled with the activities of the July 22nd Movement members is a recipe for chaos. As you eloquently stated in your numerous postings, we are sitting on a time-bomb. The demonstrations on April 10 and 11 happened because justice was denied to the citizens in the Ebrima Barry case. The subsequent massacre was caused by a breakdown of law and order. How do we solve this law and order problem? The top echelon of the police has to be manned by highly competent people that can lead by example. Resources have to be made available to the police for a more rigorous training in community policing, crowd control etc. The police code of conduct has to be revisited with the aim of eradicating political party partisanship in the police. There should be zero tolerance for corruption in the police department. The relationship between the AG chambers and the police should be clearly defined. The police's relationship with the central government and the municipal authorities should also be addressed. The NIA is also an institution that requires a thorough overhaul, if it is going to survive. The AG chambers should exercise a certain degree of oversight on both the police and the NIA. The AG should ensure that these institution operate within the bounds of the law. If the AG believes that he/she cannot justify the actions of the police or secret service agents before a court of law, the latter should desist from that unlawful conduct. Major work also needs to be done at the AG chambers. The next government should endeavor to entice a highly skilled Gambian of impeccable character to head the AG chambers. We should get rid of all the foreign prosecutors and revise the remuneration package of state attorneys (with an aim to attract and retain competent Gambian lawyers that can file their briefs on time). Am not xenophobic, but I cannot stand what some of those foreign prosecutors are doing to the ordinary Gambians. These foreigners can be replaced by the young lawyers that have recently graduated from law school. With the right coaching, these lawyers can do a better job than those corrupt foreigners. Our judiciary should also be rid of the foreign judges. Gambian judges have demonstrated that they are more sensitive to the plight of the ordinary citizens and they are cognizant of the fact they have to live in the same community with the people the authorities at times seek to victimize. There are a lot of competent Gambian lawyers that are willing to become judges if they are remunerated fairly and given adequate independence. If these Gambian lawyers are confident that there will be no government tampering with the judiciary, they will gladly want to serve at the bench. Structures have to be put in place to make it more difficult to fire judges. Parliament has to be actively involved in the hiring and firing of judges. Judges should be paid from a vote totally independent of the department of justice. Some of the archaic rules we inherited from the British should also be gotten rid of. For instance, we should abolish court vacations. The courts should be open all year round to hear all types of cases. Judges and their staff can take annual leaves just like other government functionaries. This will help clear some of the backlog we currently have in the court system. There are numerous other changes that could be put in place to speed up the dispensation of justice and ensure that the courts dispense justice properly. We should also address our appellate process and decide whether the legal system is matured enough to have a permanent court of appeal where the buck will stop (as opposed to having an ad hoc court of appeal or going to the Privy Council). Ebrima, as you can see, we have a lot of work to do with our law and order problem. Sorry if I repeated some of the points you already made. I do not pretend to have all the answers to our problems. I sincerely think that we need a serious debate to address ways and means by which we will be able to restore confidence in the police and the justice system. As I said before, without law and order in a society, we will revert back to primitive living; law of the jungle; might makes right; an eye for an eye. Thanks again for your contributions. KB _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. 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