By Fatou Sillah
The Gambian government has completed a new vehicle policy intended to curb fuel consumption and reduce maintenance costs across the public service, the minister of transport, works, and infrastructure said in a recent interview.
The minister, Ebrima Sillah, said the policy has been finalized and a cabinet paper prepared for consideration, as authorities respond to rising global fuel prices and mounting public expenditure.
“Vehicle policy has already been finalized,” Mr. Sillah said in an interview with West Coast Radio. “The cabinet will discuss it shortly; we have prepared the cabinet paper for this.”
The policy is designed to establish clearer rules governing which categories of civil servants are entitled to government vehicles, while also setting standards for procurement and maintenance.
Mr. Sillah said the reforms aim to rationalize spending by aligning vehicle allocation with official roles and tightening oversight of operational costs.
“What it intends to do actually is to look at the category of civil servants who are entitled to have a government vehicle,” he said. “It also has a maintenance policy and the type of vehicles that are supposed to be bought for different categories.”
The government expects the measures to lower annual spending on fuel, repairs, and fleet management, which officials say have been rising in recent years.
“Annually, we are looking at decreasing government expenditure on all aspects of vehicles that are allocated to civil servants in terms of maintenance, in terms of cost of fuel, and also in terms of those who should have it,” he said.
He pointed to weak coordination among ministries as a persistent obstacle to controlling fuel use and vehicle operations, saying oversight responsibilities are often unclear.
“One of the biggest problems is a lack of coordination between the various ministries in terms of who is responsible for overseeing certain aspects of vehicles,” he said.
Improved regulation and centralized monitoring, he added, would provide a clearer picture of government spending on fuel and help enforce accountability across agencies.
“Once this is properly regulated, I think we will have a proper window of government actual expenditure on fuel,” he said.
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