By Mathew K Jallow
Prologue
Institutions are the building blocks of the state. The First Republic boasted of a robust institutional framework, albeit, an internally weak one, which lacked accountability and impeded development. The social disquiet that flared up in 1981, and the 1994 military take-over were byproducts of a system that had grown bloated and inefficient. Following the 1994 removal of the government of Sir Dawda K Jawara, the military regime slowly collapsed the institutions of government and looted state funds earmarked for nation building and diverted them for personal use It. resulted in the impoverization of the rural countryside and the massive rural urban in migration that ensued, eventually caused a sharp drop in Gambia’s primary export earner; groundnuts. This wrecked the agricultural sector. In less than one decade, agriculture, which until 1994 accounted for 75% of the Gambia’s GDP, saw a precipitous drop; replaced by the service industry as the primary revenue source for the government. The power concentration in the hands of the executive had a deleterious effect by further causing the decline in effectiveness of institutions, nearly devastating the tourism industry Eventually the executive and its agents resorted to cavalierly siphoning off the financial resources of the state’s revenue earning agencies, effectively using them as piggy-banks to finance the executive’s round the clock merrymaking. Morale in state institutions and agencies among the bureaucracy was at an all time low, due primarily to the chronic lack of job security and the familiar institutionalization of tribalism and favoritism, as official government policy. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE