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| The Truth About The Rapidly Thinning Boundary Between ECOMIG and Senegalese Government Foreign Policy Interests & Its Implications |      By Pa Louis Sambou   T he presence of foreign troops of whatsoever nationality, fold or grade, on any third country is an exceptional phenomenon which is bound to attract a considerable degree of curiosity from ordinary citizens. The fact that this is so in our case is not an exception at all. Besides, one of the benefits of living in an open democratic society is, it avails as of right and constitutional entitlement, the freedom for questions to be asked of matters of public interest which are not fully understood. In light of the active provocation of conflict between The Gambia and MFDC fighters in Senegal’s Casamance regions by the foreign troops in question, it is of paramount importance that hard-hitting questions be asked as to whether these foreign troops are staying far too long for their own good and undoing all the good they have don

 |A Case For An Opposition Pact & Tactical Voting Against a Government Parliamentary Majority|    By Pa Louis Sambou   T o suggest that the result of the just concluded presidential elections was a landslide for President Barrow’s NPP led coalition would be the understatement of the year; it was a brutal political earthquake, whose tremor is yet to even abate. After everything said and done over the preceding eventful five years, the Gambian people decided and the weight and strength of their democratic verdict leaves very little room for any credible polemical exercise on the subject matter. Well, this is at least the view of most fair-minded people and it must not come as a surprise that such is a view with which I fully agree. I must however concede that exploring the slew of theories as to the mechanics behind why people voted the way they did, although an interesting exercise, on balance, it is a distraction which I am yet to be convinced meets sufficient threshold to be accor

|How The Gambian Opposition Walked Itself Into A Crushing DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Defeat|       By Pa Louis Sambou    T he minute Jammeh whisked himself into exile, the repression was no more. With time, what was a stiffened democratic space gradually opened up, accelerated by a Gambian mastery of the use of online media in ways which few could have reasonably foreseen. Once ordinary people found their voice, it was very quickly put into effective use by a people firmly determined never to be shut up ever again. Although slow to find his voice within his cabinet, but the President also eventually caught up, and having discovered his executive powers, his ‘political Godfather’ soon found out about it when the nest became too small for both ‘son’ and ‘political Godfather’ — from which rupture, emerged the not so youthful Barrow ‘Youth’ Movement and eventually the National People’s Party (NPP) and which development it is not possible to discount from any credible commentary on the subject of