Barely 14 months before Gambians return to the polls to elect their President, the leader of the Gambia’s largest opposition party has disclosed that Gambians in the diaspora will be flying into the country in their multitudes to man “critical polling stations” for the United Democratic Party (UDP).
Lawyer Ousainou Darboe announced that these diaspora Gambians will comprise mature people, whose determination would not waver.
“You have to get young people involved in managing the affairs of the party and this includes managing elections. Serving as a polling agent, we did not think that requires extraordinary skills. If you are educated, you can read figures and you are a party loyalist, I think those are sufficient. But we later discovered that maybe, we ought not to have used those young people. We ought to have used elderly persons, people whose determination could have been stronger,” Darboe said in an interview with Coffee Time With Peter Gomez on Monday. He continued: “So, the diaspora are coming in big numbers. We are putting them at critical polling stations.”
He said he was “looking at URR and those places”.
“We are going to make sure we have good agents because the polling agents metamorphose into counting agents at the end of the ballot. So, we want to make sure polling agents are people who are very vigilant, who would not be bamboozled by anybody,” he emphasised.
According to Hon. Darboe, despite the fact that the majority of the Gambian diaspora is disenfranchised, the UDP has succeeded in convincing “quite a number of them to come back home between April and May to take the opportunity to register during the supplementary registration exercise”.
“Not only that but also at the election[2026 presidential election], we get a huge number of them to come and manage our polling stations,” he revealed.
