As my compatriot, Hamjatta Kanteh, would say, when one reads Famara Jatta’s Budget Speech, one is at a lost as to whether to cry or to laugh. It is just mind-boggling to me to see the Finance Minister (Famara Jatta) willingly exhibit such ineptitude. But then again we all know that what we have back home is the inmates running the asylum. Mental midgets at the helm of government. One would have thought that with the magnitude of the problems listed by none other than Jatta himself, we would have the best minds in the universe trying to solve those problems. Instead, we have midgets trying to do the work of giants. To demonstrate how pathetic this budget is, let me quote a few passages from Jatta’s piece of trash. Jatta started by painting the dismal state of the Gambia population. He said: “Today, our people continue to be afflicted by ACUTE poverty (69% of persons and 54% of households) with MOST of our social indicators lying FAR below the internationally acceptable minimum levels. Infant and under-5 mortality rates are as high as 61 and 80 per thousand populations. Access to safe drinking water stands at 79% (97% for urban and 50% for rural), the doctor patient ratio is one to every 15,269 population and the patient per bed ratio is 916 per bed. Overall life expectancy is 59.3 years. The combined enrolment ratio is 41% while adult literacy is as low as 33.1%. Infrastructural [sic] development is still at an infancy stage with only 20% of the total road network paved. These are but only a FEW of the DAUNTING challenges that we must confront and overcome, if we should win the fight against poverty and deprivation.” Emphasis mine. After reading this paragraph early in Jatta’s speech (paragraph 4), I said to myself that perhaps if I read on I will see where Jatta was ‘confronting’ and ‘overcoming’ these ‘few daunting challenges’. I read the entire 191-paragraphed document and did not know whether to laugh or to cry. I laughed at Jatta’s ineptitude, but cried when I saw the plight of Gambians. We are in deep trouble. Jatta and his cohorts are overseeing a bankrupt country. This man was peddling a budget running deficits of almost 400 million Dalasis and yet he opened his ‘solutions-side’ of the budget by ‘lecturing’ the APRC rubber-stamps in parliament about the intricacies of Program Based Budgeting. As mentioned above, our ‘daunting challenges’ were listed in paragraph 4 and in paragraph 5 Jatta started lecturing his cohorts about PBB, as if he is lecturing a Finance 101 class. Is this man serious? Here we see a government seriously lacking of ideas. Jatta is bringing back the multi-year development plans that the AFPRC/APRC regime is so fond of denouncing. Many times we have heard AFPRC/APRC stalwarts mocking the former regime for their ‘Five-year Development Plans’. But that is the same thing Jatta is talking about in his budget speech when he peddled the notion of “Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF)”. The bottom-line is that these fancy jargons amount to zilch. These jargons just enable inept governments like the one we have back home to draw out grandiose plans to fool people. They will promise gullible citizens big projects when they know that they had no idea as to how to bring the projects to fruition apart from going abroad to beg for money. Jatta betrays the fraud when he said on paragraph nine that: “The MTEF is a form of programme based rolling plan, where programme implementation is spread over a given number of years e.g. three years. Whatever activity could not be implemented in the first year of plan implementation is carried forward to the second year. The spill over of the second year is then moved on to the third year and so on, so that at any one time you have programmes for implementation spanning over three budget years.” Hello!! Sounds like a Three-year (instead of the infamous Five-year) Development Plan. I wonder who is now taking our people back to yesteryears. Worst still, these people are rendering Gambians even poorer than they were when we had the Five-year Development Plans. In paragraph 10 Jatta ‘astutely’ recognized that the ‘biggest constraint’ in our development efforts has been the manpower needs for the implementation of the ‘Plans’. Sadly though, that constraint is getting bigger as we speak. Arguably, most of the aid that comes to the country comes in the form of Capacity Building (although Jatta now prefers to use ‘Capacity Enhancement, Utilization and Retention’. See paragraph 189). These people are simply hilarious. They lament about our manpower needs, yet Yaya grabs an axe and dismember the civil service and in the process dismiss the most seasoned civil servants that received the bulk of the aid coming to the country. The most educated people in the country (thanks to scholarships from abroad) that can deliver on these projects are bastardized by High School drop-outs. Mental midgets like Famara Jatta are given the task of ‘overcoming’ our ‘daunting challenges’. I want to inform Jatta that we still have a manpower problem and will continue to have one as long as Yaya is in power. So, here again we have the AFPRC/APRC identifying a problem they know they have no solution for. As we keep telling Gambians, these people cannot solve our problems. Matter of fact, they are increasing our problems. The ‘highlights’ in the budget merely talk about ongoing projects that were made possible because of loans from institutions such as the African Development Bank. These projects will happen even if ten-year-olds were running the country. We want to hear something else from Jatta and his cohorts. We want to hear how they are going to solve the ‘daunting challenges’ that face the Groundnut sector. We want to hear about the gigantic budget deficits. We want to see results in the Tourism industry. We want them to report the Inflation figures correctly and stop playing games with silly jargons like ‘Consumer Price Index’. Furthermore, we want them to bring down the price of rice, cooking oil, kerosene, candles, sugar, etc. In short, we want to know how the country is going to come out of the bankruptcy it is in. Clearly, the mental midgets do not know how to move our people forward. The government has all but said that it is not the government’s job to ensure that the farmers (the majority in the society) earn a decent living. Three years in a row, we are reporting dismal performances in the Groundnut sector. Famara Jatta’s budget has no solutions for our farmers in the coming years. All he said was that there were plans to ‘redress’ the plight of the farmers. We ask him to tell us those plans. I thought APRC had a manifesto that addressed that problem. Where were those plans the past three years? These people are jokers. Talking about groundnut, we also want to hear about how the Alimenta Payment “exerted pressure on the outcome of 2001 fiscal aggregates” (paragraph 21). What is Famara Jatta talking about? Gambians should take Jatta to task on his utterances. That is the whole purposed of publicizing the budget speech. Exhibiting ineptitude is one thing. Cooking out national books is an entirely different matter. So, Jatta has to be asked to clarify areas where we think we sense discrepancies. What I am trying to say here is that, to my knowledge the Alimenta settlement was financed by the EU. Granted, initially Gambian Reserves were used in order to pay part of the settlement. But, the EU gave us a grant to replenish the Reserves. So, Gambian taxes (fiscal aggregates) did not suffer a net loss. Unless Jatta wants to tell us that the EU did not deliver on its promise. Jatta needs to give us a better explanation as to where their inept government put taxpayers’ moneys. I am almost certain that it was not used to pay Alimenta. The more likely thing is that taxpayers’ moneys were used to buy the fancy SUVs and pay for the frivolous travel expenses of Jatta and his cohorts. There is more to this budget than meets the eye. Jatta’s explanations do not add up. For instance the man reported to us that our foreign reserves (overseen by Central Bank) have suffered a drastic reduction of 12.1% (paragraph 26). If I am not mistaken, this is the first such decline in our foreign reserves since 1986/87. But the problem does not stop there. The explanation Jatta gives us for the reduced reserves does not make sense. Jatta says in paragraph 26 that: “The drop in the external reserves of the Bank was due to the heavy debt service payments and Central Bank’s intervention to sell foreign exchange in the inter-bank market in order to reverse the build-up in commercial bank arrears”. Rubbish. Let us look at the ‘debt excuse’ for instance. According to Jatta (paragraph 41), the government is going to reduce the ‘External Debt’ by $23 million this year. But Jatta does not tell us what portion of the $23 million were debt write-offs and whether the $12 million paid to Alimenta was part of this $23 million. It is very important that Gambians know the make-up of this $23 million and relate this to the “D234.6 million drawdown [sic] in gross official reserves”. We are not interested in gross numbers. We want to hear about net figures. Where did our Reserves go? The 12.1% figure mentioned above is a ‘net figure’. We want to know where that went. No smoking mirrors about a D234.6 million ‘draw-down’ in ‘gross official reserves’. We know the Alimenta payment should not feature in ‘net’ discussions. EU gave us the money and we paid Alimenta off. Simple as that. The bottom-line is that most of this Reserve was used to ‘intervene’ in the foreign exchange market in the country. Out of the two reasons Jatta gave us, this is the more plausible one. On this forum, we have on many occasions warned the Opposition back home to keep a watchful eye on this phenomenon of “Central Bank’s intervention to sell foreign exchange in the inter-bank market”. I again reiterate my earlier caution. The Opposition back home should dig deeper. There is lot more here than meets the eye. Tourism in the country is down. Trade is down. Ordinary Gambians are poorer. Who is ‘consuming’ all the foreign currency that is floating around in the country? Famara Jatta tells us in paragraph 32 that: “the foreign exchange market was quite vibrant as transaction volumes, measured by aggregate sales and purchases of foreign currency in the inter-bank market, rose by 18% to D6.8 billion by end-September”. D6.8 BILLION. Where is this money coming from and who is using it to import goods? We all know that the ‘Re-export Trade’ does not exist anymore. Again, trade (both import and export) is down; tourism is down. There is a simple and sinister explanation for this ‘vibrancy’ in the inter-bank foreign exchange market. Famara Jatta gives us an insight as to why the government and commercial banks in the country will engage in these transactions when there appears to be no rational economic basis for these transactions. Listen to Jatta: “The Dalasi fell by 12.4% against the US Dollar and 5% against the Pound Sterling. The depreciation of the Dalasi was more pronounced in the parallel market where it fell against the Dollar and the Pound by 13.1% and 13.7% respectively. Thus the premium between the parallel and inter-bank markets widened especially in the case of the Pound from 3.4% at end-December 2000 to 10.8% at the end of September 2001 whilst in the case of the dollar, the movement was from 7.2% to 7.8%” (paragraph 34). When you read between the lines here what you see is that it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when someone buys foreign currency in the inter-bank market and sells it in the parallel market, one makes an easy profit. In other words, government can sell pounds in the inter-bank market and the buyer of those pounds will simply go to ‘Ganaw Marcheh’ and sell the pounds and make a profit. What is wrong here? Something is very wrong here. Our Reserves are meant to intervene to help banks finance foreign trade. When we are told that trade is down, we have to ask the government why it is necessary for the government to intervene in the currency markets. It is not a coincident that the Reserves are measured in terms of ‘Import Cover’. What proportion of the D6.8 billion Jatta talked about went to import goods for ordinary Gambians? What portion of this money was only used to generate profits through arbitrage in the currency markets? Are some government officials benefiting from this ‘racket’? I will read Famara Jatta’s piece of trash some more and come up with other comments if need be. 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