Mai Fatty, Secretary General and Party Leader of Gambia Moral Congress (GMC)
By Buba Gagigo
At his party’s Tuesday press conference, Mai Fatty, the Secretary-General and Party Leader of the Gambia Moral Congress (GMC), pointed fingers at the Ministry of Agriculture, accusing them of the most significant resource wastage in the Gambia.
Fatty emphasized that the foremost challenge facing the country is ensuring food security.
“There’s no food, there’s no security of any sort. So the focus of any government, particularly a government in which GMC leads or is a part of would be to ensure that we’re able to feed ourselves as a nation and we can because we have the land and we have the water,” he said.
The former Interior Minister said the Gambia already has the policies but it is not being implemented properly.
“We have a lot of Gambians who work in the Minister of Agriculture and government areas who are very unfair to their own country because they are not sincere to their country. And because they are mostly for their pockets. The greatest waste of resources in this country is at the Ministry of Agriculture. Consistently for the past 20 to 30 years. And they have the greatest, the highest qualified graduates in this country. So many PhDs and master’s degrees at the Minister of Agriculture. Still, we are hungry, and still, we cannot achieve food self-sufficiency. Something is fundamentally wrong with the system,” he said.
The GMC leader said he would have cleared the agriculture ministry;
“I will clean the place totally. We cannot have PhDs and Masters degrees working with too many projects, and millions of dollars, and yet the Gambia is not able to feed itself even 30 percent of its food requirements. So what are these people doing at the Ministry of Agriculture? Let’s stop fooling each other. let’s stop looking into each other’s eyes. Let’s tell the truth to each other,” he said.
He also criticizes the government for the manner in which vehicles are use in the country. According to the GMC leader, he would do away with four-wheel drive vehicles in government;
“You cannot be at the Ministry of Agriculture, spending money and every project the first thing they do is to buy a four-wheel drive and create per diem and all these sorts of things and all these projects Money goes into their own administrative costs forgetting about the farmers who’s purpose they are. I will seize all those vehicles from them. That is what I will do first. In fact, I will do away with four-wheel drive in the government. We believe that the government has too many vehicles and many of those vehicles are useless,” he said.
Mai Ahmed Fatty is the Secretary-General and Party Leader of Gambia Moral Congress (GMC), former Interior minister under President Adama Barrow, and former presidential adviser under the same regime.