As we welcome 2024, we ought to resolute to achieve the objectives aspired in 2023, but which are yet to be achieved. With hindsight of 2023, we ought to be able to suspect the reasons for our shortcomings in 2023 and our successes. Those are lessons of 2023 which can help us to better shape 2024.
We thus ought to resolute that 2024 should not be a repeat of 2023, regardless of how successful 2023 has been for us. That’s because 2024 is not a repeat of 2023, but a new year of its own, with its new opportunities for growth, development and prosperity!
As a region and a nation, our biggest challenge of 2023 had been corruption, which had impeded development in our region and country, impeded job opportunities for our youths, impeded our access to adequate housing, impeded our access to quality education, impeded our access to quality health care services, etc.
Corruption had polarised our polity and degraded our patriotism to sycophancy. Corruption remains the only attributable reason why politics has become a means to make ends meet instead of a means to register meaningful development in our region or country. It has divided us into tribes, when the very nature of our societies calls for the blurring of such divisive lines.
It has caused us to lose many young lives to the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean in 2023 than any preceding years since the Atlantic Slave trade, all in search of societies that have beaten us in combating corruption.
Thus, the lessons of 2023 are that we have to do more than what we did in 2023, as a region and country, in combating corruption and save the lives of our youth folks; to be able to invest in: job opportunities for our youths, quality education, quality health care services, adequate housing, agriculture, sports, etc.
Until we change our perception and appreciate corruption as one single challenge to the survival of our nation, the Gambia will remain corrupt and retrogressive, as there can be very limited development or progress registered in a corrupt nation.
Corruption further thrives in this country because it is easier to be corrupt and succeed at getting away with it than to fight corruption and succeed at getting rid off it. Until the reverse is the norm we are doomed to repeat the failures of 2023 in 2024.
Thus in this year 2024 let us unite as a region and nation in combatting our common enemy, which is corruption, in order to achieve a better Gambia for all of us.
I wish you all a corrupt free and prosperous new year, 2024!
Yankuba Darboe
Chairman Brikama Area Council
