As harvesting on President Yahya Jammeh’s farm gets more and more intensified, hundreds of civil servants, over the weekend, descended on the president’s Kanilai rice field, in Foni Bondali, where they took part in the harvesting of the Nerica rice variety he cultivated.

Led by Mrs Teneng Bah - Jaiteh, the secretary general and head of the civil service, they demonstrated a veritable commitment in responding to President Jammeh’s appeal.

The president’s farming activities also drew a group of volunteers belonging to various associations in the country.

Speaking to the Daily Observer, Mrs Teneng Bah-Jaiteh described their mobilisation as an illustration of the readiness of the civil service in aiding the Gambian leader in his mission of putting agriculture at the centre stage of the development process.

She spoke at length about the ambitious farming activities of the president, noting that it demonstrates his untiring commitment to the cause of attaining food self-sufficiency within a short period.

Feeling impressed by the performance of the president’s farm, she expressed optimism about this year’s rainy season, and she predicted that it would register bumper harvest.

Food self sufficiency, according to her, is achievable in the Gambia considering the fact that the country has a lot of potential to ensure that "agriculture is basically grassroots based in the country and what we want to see is the policy orientation of the government responding to that need of the people." She indicated that from 2009 the country will be planning and embarking on a more decentralized agricultural system.
 
For his part, Momodou Kotu Cham, the secretary of state for forestry and the environment, said he was equally impressed with the president’s farming activities. He lauded the efforts deployed by civil servants and the volunteers in harvesting the rice field.

Mr Abdoulie Sallah, secretary to cabinet, Office of the President, recalled that the president has, since 1996, been making declarations for the people to go back to the land. He called on Gambians to reinforce this call and venture into agriculture so as to enable the country become self-sufficient.

Lieutenant Seedy Baldeh, coordinator of Kanilai Farms, applauded the volunteers for responding highly to the president’s call.  He called on other Gambians to emulate them.

Civil servants in The Gambia may start to reap more benefits for their labour when the development initiatives outlined by a World Bank draft report and a Public Service Reform Sector Strategy Paper are fully recommended and implemented by the government.

The World Bank report, which was evaluated and discussed at a two-day workshop at the Corinthia Atlantic Hotel in Banjul by participants from the public service sector, World Bank, DfID and the UNDP, was undertaken as a study by the World Bank in response to government’s request submitted in January 2007 for a comprehensive capacity assessment in the Public Service Sector, including the pension system.

The report proposes salaries and pension benefits (excluding the 20% salary increase across the board recently authorised by His Excellency the President) to strengthen payroll, establishment control, human resource management and training.

"The purpose of this workshop, in our view, is to critically examine and review the analytic study done by the World Bank/AfDB particularly in the area of Salaries, Allowances and Pension Reform," said the permanent secretary at the Personnel Management Office, Omar G. Sallah, while delivering a statement at the opening ceremony of the workshop on Tuesday.

He said the study should be viewed as a joint one on the basis that most of its "preliminary observations and data are the product of a joint consultations with the Mission [of World Bank] and a Gambian Technical Team" set up for the purpose since 2006.

"The issues highlighted in the data inter alia pointed to deficiencies in government effectives (52% in 2002 to 31% in 2005); quality of service (44% in 2002 to 38% in 2005) and anti-corruption (50% in 2002 to 30% in 2005)," Mr Sallah said.

He added: "The negative trend therefore confirmed the need for a comprehensive reform to enhance efficiency and effective service delivery. It is in this regard, that initiatives were bolstered, through further consultations and workshops for a comprehensive strategy.

"The results of these interventions and consultations were the product of the Public Service Reform Sector Strategy Paper (PSRSSP 2007 – 2011), one of the main components of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSPII 2007 – 2011) submitted to the Bank in January 2007."

PS Sallah further noted that the PSRSSP, which has a total cost package of US$7.5M (excluding salaries, allowances, wages and pensions), focused on four key areas of civil service reform. These, he explained, included improvement of the remuneration package, including Pension Reform to motivate and minimize attrition; strengthening institutional capacity for policy formulation; promotion of ethical values to ensure transparency, accountability and the induction of meritocracy into the service, and development of capacity at the local level for an effective and successful decentralisation of government activities and functions.

The sector strategy, he also said, broadly covers subjects such as Compensation and Benefits, Institutional Capacity Factors, and Governance and Management Factors.

In his keynote address, the Secretary of State for Finance and Economic Affairs, Hon. Mousa Bala Gaye, told participants at the workshop that their main task would be to evaluate and discuss the World Bank study or report and "not to make recommendations.

"Government has to take its time to constitute a taskforce that will review and assess the study in greater detail with a view to making recommendations to the Office of the President which will bring a paper to Cabinet that Cabinet will consider," Hon Bala Gaye told the participants, adding that the Public Service Reform Strategy funded by the UNDP and the civil service reform programme prepared by the World Bank, the African Development Fund and DfID should have been submitted to government since last year.

He explained: "Over the last five years government has been very much concerned with the reform of the civil service. It has taken considerable time to submit these reports to government. We have been working on this. We thought these reports were going to be submitted in June or July of last year.

I wanted the reports to be submitted in November or December last year, it was not possible. The reports are only submitted now."

He said his agreement with the World Bank was to hold two workshops one of which would be to present and explain the civil service programme.  

"I wanted to put this challenge before the workshop. How can we consider, jointly, the UNDP funded civil service reform strategy and also the World Bank-DfiD civil service reform programme study, because I do not want government to be approached with recommendations of the strategy and for decisions to be taken on that in the absence of a consideration of the recommendations of the civil service reform programme study?" he posited, adding:

"Let us try to consider the two documents together and make unified joint recommendations to government on a comprehensive civil service reform programme."

The second issue is on pension, he said. "What we have been seeing is that we have a lot of contributory pension schemes in government which has resulted in very low monthly pensions’ payment for our retired civil servants," the Finance SoS stressed, noting that the "highest monthly pension in this country is about three thousand dalasis a month", while the majority of retired civil servants are receiving less than fifty percent of this amount.

"We have over 800 people having pensions of D 100 and the scale goes on. The people in the D2,000 scale bracket are very few," he said, while noting that the government spent over D200 million in one year in respect of the recent 20% salary increase.

The World Bank Country economist in The Gambia, Mr Hoon Soh, said that although the civil service reform is a difficult and long-term endeavour but the World Bank would continue to support its proper reform process for the benefit of the civil service sector and the Government of The Gambia.

"Civil Service reform has become imperative in The Gambia due to the need to develop an effective and results-oriented civil service to prop the implementation of the country’s development strategy and plans in a sustainable manner," noted the UNDP Resident Representative in The Gambia, Mr Vitalie Muntean, in his remarks on the occasion.

In an interview recently granted to GRTS as part of activities marking the advent of the new year, President Jammeh issued yet another warning to all civil servants to do their job correctly or be removed, saying that one could only be save if he or she delivers up to expectation. “You can only be independent if you are delivering and if you are doing good things. You can be independent by doing the good things you want to do but if you are not doing anything you are not independent because there is an authority that is responsible for you.

“The law is clear on who is who. Nobody can be independent in this country, not even the President. If am not independent as the President, who else is free?” he enquired.

Speaking in a televised interview, President Jammeh, who deplored the poor performance of some civil service personnel, maintained that he would intervene to make sure that people did their jobs correctly as, he reasoned, that is what they are paid for.

“Here and there I fire people from government. I fire ministers because sometimes some of them are not ready to work. Sometimes they have the wrong people in the wrong place. If you put the wrong people in the wrong place, it is not going to work,” he opined.

Switching the discourse to the issue of the recent case filed by the UDP-NRP alliance at the Supreme Court to challenge the amendment of the local government act effectively putting the President in charge of Area Councils and Municipalities, the Gambian leader countered that the country is a democracy where the majority carries the vote. “The amendment was made by the majority of the National Assembly. If you are telling me that National Assembly’s action is illegal then I wonder which authority in this country can make laws which anybody considers constitutional, legal or illegal? If I have to intervene to save Gambians I will do so and who ever does not like it, you can leave the country,” Jammeh fumed. 

In President Jammeh’s opinion, it is a matter of choice for supporters of what he termed the so-called opposition. How many seats do they have in the National Assembly? Few, and all of the National Assembly Members are elected by constituencies. I have been elected by the country. Who has more authority?
“If anything goes wrong in this country, it is Yahya Jammeh that must fix it; so I will not allow anything to go wrong in this country. Those who are not satisfied with that can go to a country where nobody makes law but the opposition,” he asserted.

Commenting on the forthcoming local government elections, President Jammeh expressed optimism that the APRC party would win the elections because, according to him, Gambians are not fools.

He noted that 98% of the Gambian people want to progress, saying that they want a better nation that they can be proud of. “If we have won the presidential and National Assembly elections, obviously people want progress. If they wish this to continue they should vote for the APRC to continue our development agenda because there will be no point putting in people that would be opposed to anything that is progressive,” the President posited.

See subsequent issues for continuation of the interview.