Democracy suffers when too many Mercenaries are hired to kill it. Though it ought to be accepted that there will always be cynics to any issue of public contention, but in our democracy, certain cynics are not cynics, but Mercenaries, hell bent on stifling our democracy, in order to satisfy their pay masters or bigotry!
Hence, even being confronted with irrefutable evidence, the cynics have excuse to claim, if UDP had such evidence of fraud, why did they not take their claim of voter fraud to the Revising Courts? Such cynics, simply do not want to appreciate the grand scheme of fraud perpetrated by the National Peoples Party (NPP) of President Adama Barrow and the Mercenary Independent Electoral Commission of The Gambia (M-IEC).
From the outset, the UDP was the only political party in The Gambia, who had ensured that it had party agents at all the voter registration centres assigned by the M-IEC from 29 May 2021 to 11 July 2021. The party further assigned a team, labelled by President Barrow as Black Black, to visit all the registration centres across the length and breath of country, to ensure that there were no irregularities taken place at any of the registration centres.
Thus, if any fraudulent registration was to happen at such registration centres, the party would have known and challenge the same to the Revising Courts, which are ad hoc courts established mainly for such purposes in a short period of time, in our case for only 30 days in September 2021, after which that court is dissolved. The UDP did not challenge any voter registration to that court, because it had no cause to do so based on the evidence provided at the official registration centres that they invigilated.
However, the M-IEC’s fraudulent registrations, as proven by evidence did not take place at those official registration centres or times, for the most obvious reasons, as they did not want the UDP to become aware of their fraud, in order to deprive them of the opportunity to challenge such registrations at the Revising Court!
Clever, you would think, but they failed to appreciate that the Voter Card number of the 2021 voters’ cards are consisting of the date and time of the issuing of the voter card. Thus, one can tell the date, time and place a particular voter card was issued at, from the face of the voters card.
As such, the registration of the Mercenary Voters, hired simply to kill the will of the Gambian people at the polls, did not happen at the official registration centres and times, which is also captured in the evidence of the Mercenary Voters cards issued, but at registration centres best know to the M-IEC.
The M-IEC further did not provide the public or the opposition parties with the final master roll of all the registered voters before the end of the term of the Revising Courts. Instead they merely gave the public the total number of registered voters for each region and finally the country as a whole, but did not provide the master roll with the voter card printout of all the registered voters to the opposition parties.
The master roll was only provided to the opposition parties a week before the election date in December 2021, at which point, there was no Revising Court sitting. Thus, you could say, they succeeded in perfectly denying the opposition parties the opportunity to challenge their registration of Mercenary Voters or ineligible voters into the national voter roll of The Gambia for 2021.
You would think it’s a script from a dictator’s playbook on how to rig a Presidential election in Africa. But this can only happen with the complicity of the electoral body, if such a body is independent and impartial, as it is expected of our IEC, it would not have been possible.
So the opposition UDP only became aware of such fraud after the election, simply because small border hamlets with 7 compounds and total population of 100 people were polling thousand voters on election date, which could not make sense to even a toddler, and begs one to wonder, where did all those voters hailed from.
The answer is simple, they are from the neighbouring country of Senegal, who were registered at their convenient places and issued with Gambian voters cards, which permit them to vote for their pay master, as instructed. These Mercenary Voters cannot be denied to vote on Election Day, even if detected, because they carried a valid voters card issued to them by the electoral body.
Welcome to electoral fraud, Gambian style, how the incumbent succeed in overthrowing themselves in the name of election victories, fathered by Yahya Jammeh and mothered by Adama Barrow!
Once this fraud is detected, the opposition as in the UDP case, are left with one limited option to challenge and that is to challenge it to the Supreme Court of the country by way of an election petition. Such petitions are always a fight to succeed in the African Courts, due to the infestation of such courts by Mercenary Judges when dealing with political matters involving the incumbent!
Though of recent, countries such as Kenya and Malawi, had given hope that African courts are willing to uphold the will of the people. The UDP had banked on such hopes and took their petition to the country’s apex court in December 2021, but were disappointed for they were blocked at the entrance and not welcomed inside, which meant their petition despite its merits, which included a claim of fraud, was thrown into the bin.
By the way, though fraud is a criminal offence in the Gambian penal codes, electoral fraud is the only benign fraud that hardly attracts the attention of the Gambian prosecutor, especially when that allegation is levelled against the incumbent.
As a result of these Mercenary assaults, the UDP was left with no choice but to expose the evidence for the public to be informed about the fraud of their Mercenary Independent Electoral Commission.
In any serious nation, an institution of such magnitude as the IEC, facing such serious allegations, would be expected to subject themselves to an independent public enquiry to get to the bottom of the allegations levelled, in order to ensure that no such failings had occurred under their watch, and ensure that public trust and confidence in the commission is not decreased by a scintilla.
But our Mercenary Commissioners attempted to brush such serious allegations aside, as just opposition disquiet, even in the face of the glaring evidence, some of which was corroborated by an objective, impartial, independent and experienced electoral observers like the European Electoral Observers.
And in fact despite all what I have written in this piece, in addition to the evidence provided or available at the UDP HQ, the country’s Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) will take a laid back position on this serious issue and pay oblivion to its existence. I guess we can just conclude that they too have joined the Mercenary club, hired to kill the will of the Gambian Voters!
