OP

By Alagie Saidy-Barrow 

Let me begin by saying I am a huge advocate for holding people accountable for their work. If people are being paid to deliver services to the public, they should be held accountable for the services they deliver, good or bad. So I am all for realistic performance evaluations. If I had my way, every single government civil or public servant would be on a contract that is tethered to their performance! 

I don’t think anyone should be in the service of the people as a public or civil servant when they somehow manage to serve themselves while the people they claim to be serving remain destitute. Serving in government should never be a vehicle for any public or civil servant to get rich when the majority of those they serve are poor! 

Imagine if my Bandam established performance evaluations for himself and all his ministers and made it all public! We will all know what each minister is required to deliver and can easily hold them to account. 

That thought brings me to the news about NAWEC staff being ducked 5% of their salaries because they didn’t meet Key Performance Indicators (KPI) targets set for 2021-2022. Reading the news about this deduction, I kept hoping that they would tell us that 5% only affects staff who occupy certain leadership positions. But from what I see in the news, it seems that is not the case. It is essentially collective punishment!! I don’t see how a lowly engineer bears the same responsibility as a director or manager such that they should be equally punished. There is no such reality as collective responsibility where there is a hierarchy and different functions. Therefore, I think the collective punishment is timidity at best. 

Wouldn’t it have been better to get to the root cause of why NAWEC has been failing Gambians for decades? Is NAWEC properly equipped to deliver on its mandate? If not, who is responsible for that? You cannot hold an institution accountable when you haven’t provided it with the necessary resources to succeed. 

Collective punishment dilutes individual responsibility. There is a reason some people at NAWEC are paid more than others. It is because they don’t all have the same or equal responsibilities. And if they don’t all have the same responsibilities and are paid based on who bears more responsibility, why must they be punished equally? It does not make sense to me and smells of a cop-out by the government.

About the Author

The author is a social and political commentator

Publisher’s Note

Views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the publisher. Want to be a contributing author? Please email opmail220@gmail.com

Team Outpost 

Hon. Seedy SK Njie, Deputy Speaker of The National Assembly addressed a workshop on \"Constitutionalising Rights in the 21st Century – A Comparative Workshop for Constitution Makers, Gender Perspectives in The Gambia.\" The workshop was held in Oxford from June 19th to 21st, 2024.

Deputy Speaker Njie emphasised The Gambia\

By Amadou Manjang 

 This time tomorrow I will leave the

newsroom for good. The testimony of the

moment is the stories of the society which

pressure is felt by all [I’m not speaking of

the wealthy]. As a reporter, I am always in

the service of nursing my agony when

telling people what is wrong when they

already knew what is wrong in a country

where everything seems wrong. Our job is

terrible one and I think we often need some

therapy sessions to muse our sanity since

we are daily bombarded by the bleeding

wounds of the society: pain, hunger, poverty, death, and crime of the ordinary

people. We have double dose of these

things. Firstly, we have our own dose of it

as individuals living with it. Secondly, we

have the dose as individual who daily

collected these stories from the people. This surplus pain will eke our mental

health out before we knew what is

happening. And there isn’t any support to

avert it as I write. We listen to people’s stories of

sickness and unpaid medical bills, hunger

and poverty, pains and suffering of being a

Gambian. And then some of the people

turn to us for help when we are living in

the same shit with them; pain, hunger, poverty, death, and crime. We have the

same stories which get intertwined and lost, in some way, as we tell their stories. But

we always find ways to nurse and dress our

emotions and pains in their stories. Any

story we tell is a make up of a thousand

pieces of broken lives of a thousand

Gambians. These stories are surplus pains;

pains of thousand stories plus ours. As we

interview people, sometimes in our mind

it’s only the replay of our own stories lost

somewhere in the amnesia of our ethic that

try to separated us from the stories but fail

because it is only gods and madmen who

live outside the society. So every story we

tell contain a pieces of own story. Here, I

think I can appoint myself as spokesperson

for many young journalist to say that the

miserable, the poverty and the suffering we

tell or write contain pieces of our own

stories.I have such discussions with my

fellow young journalists. We compliant

about poverty, and suffering in this country.     We like any other human being feel

our own pains and the pains of others. We grief over death, crime and

sickness our beloved ones. We went to

the same markets and hospitals. We are

feeling the same shit in these places. But we don’t tell our stories quiet

often.We sometime act as if we not at

the receiving end of the distributed

pain. Knowing this truth and not

adopting to it changes my views. I

believe this is why I always take a

position on the stories. I am not an

objective reporter. There is no

neutrality in here, at least from my side. At this point, I think of Ngugi’s

remarks that that all writers have to

pick side knowing or unknowingly. We

are all writers in politics from novelists

to journalists. We all dig in the same

mine field of human poverty, misery, emotions and happiness which we

present to our audience either through

the lens of the have or the have not. Since I am part of the former, I have

stayed on the default side of my status. My editor gives me a reason to justify

my subjective journalism when told

me that they more interested in social

advocacy journalism which I interpret

as ‘always be on the side of the

ordinary people’ whose stories are

your stories too. This time tomorrow, I won’t be in

the newsroom which is hot like an

oven with broken tile floods, and

stinging backyard thinking about that

hungry child at the edge of town, the

sicks who couldn’t get drugs from the

hospitals, poor displaced vendors, or

the kush victims among all category of

people in pain, poverty and misery. Ah, this time tomorrow, I won’t be

gossiping their stories to hundreds of

ears that are facing more or less similar

stories in theirs lives. Ah, this time

tomorrow, I won’t be collecting others

poverty and narrating them rather I will

be living with them in the same

poverty, pains and suffering, telling

our stories as my poetic friend would

say ‘Go Tell Fate My Take’.

About the Author

The author is a young journalist, and a political science student at UTG

Publisher’s Note

Views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the publisher. Want to be a contributing author? Please email opmail220@gmail.com