>From: [log in to unmask] >Subject: The time is nigh to take stock. >Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 22:48:02 EDT > >Next week, Gambians of voting age and registration will have another >quintennial opportunity to reflect. To take stock of what their votes yielded >them after the referendum of five years ago. > >Five years ago, after realizing that we had been electing kings or their >likeness, we vowed as we did some thirty years ago that we do not desire a >monarchy or its fact-simile. Here is what that vow obtained: > >During all five years, we would willingly pool our resources to the tune of >D1,300,000,000 each year. We did not pool our resources because we could not manage our own affairs. We, the people, believed that our collective needs and desires could be better addressed by entrusting agency in one individual - the president - to manage on our behalf and deputised by members of parliament our various constituencies elected who would see to it that our combined voices and resources could yield returns to our communities in as equitable a manner as possible. > >We got decrepit and poorly constructed roads that wash away with the rains. > >We got buildings called hospitals with no intelligible doctors or none at all, inadequate medicine, and no working ambulances. Our president so abhors them that his children had to be delivered in overseas hospitals. > >We got a white elephant of a university with a joke of a curriculum, unaccredited and unrecognized the world over, and its graduates languish unemployed. > >We got a few buildings for schools but no teachers or supplies. When our children took to the streets to express displeasure, they were mowed down with arms purchased from our pooled resources. > >We got arch 22. > >We got a president who tells us he would not invest our pooled resources in us unless we behave a certain way. > >Our farming community gets dishonorable promissory notes for their groundnuts. > >Our secretaries of state are issued several vehicles each when we have no working ambulances to transport our sisters and mothers to the maternity wards. > >Our collective voices and power of agency is mortgaged to Taiwan, Libya, and Cuba at the UN and other international fora. > >Tribal strife is introduced into our communities to further weaken our collective resolve. > >Our fellow citizens languish in jails sans offense. > >All this is visited on us with the help of arms that our collective voices and resources acquired. > >Our president aided and abetted in the killing of our brothers and sisters in Cassamance. > >Our president aided and abetted in the maiming and killing of our brothers and sisters in Sierra Leone for greed in diamonds and a distorted idea of an Islamic States of Africa. > >If you are now asked the question: Is this what you envisaged for your country five years ago? What would your reply be? > >Now you have the same opportunity to choose a servant-leader, not a king. To choose an articulate servant-leader, not an ignoramus. One who respects your wishes and desires and treats as sacrosanct his custody of your collective voices and authority of agency. Do you think you have a clear choice? Have you been paralysed by fear? > >PDOIS will stand with you for PDOIS has toiled with you. You have seen what a PDOIS mandate would yield. It is time to take stock of our prior actions and for our children and posterity, chart the right course. At PDOIS, there are only two tribes of people: The Truthful and the deceitful. The disciplined and the ill-disciplined. The honest and the dishonest. The sincere and the insincere. The other tribes are natural and cultural phenomena and are not >earned. It is time for People's Power. A Peoples' Democracy. Don't let unfounded fear relegate you to another five years of Hell on Earth. > >Haruna (for TEGGINPDOIS) - Together - in the service of LIBERTY, DIGNITY, and >PROSPERITY.