 |
| President Barrow and European Commissioner, Neven Mimica |
The recently concluded two-day Donors’
Conference on The Gambia hosted by the European Union in Brussels closed on a high note with a total of €1.45 billion in pledges from donors to help finance the 3-year
National Development Plan (NDP) 2018 – 2021 of the coalition government of President
Adama Barrow.
In addition
to this amount, the European Union is contributing €140 million in grants on
top of the € 225 million already committed by Gambia’s single biggest
donor. The total amount pledged is
roughly equal the amount The Gambia came to Brussels to raise in pledges that
led the EU Commissioner to declare the two-day affair a great success.
The eight
priority areas of the NDP aimed to ensure sustainable and inclusive were
fully supported by the EU. Further
support of government priorities areas of democratic reforms, agriculture,
promoting job creation for the youth, in energy sector and granting access to
renewable and sustainable energy for the Gambian people.
The Gambian
delegation shared the sentiment of the EU Commissioner that the conference was
highly successful, confirmed by the competing press releases from State House touting
similar sentiments and urging Gambians to come out in droves to welcome the
president from his Brussels trip.
We expect
that once the celebratory mood has waned and reality sets in, the daunting task
of managing the high expectations driven, in part, by the citizen’s lack of
familiarity with and understanding of what transpired in Brussels will begin.
Managing
high expectations starts with explaining to Gambians that a pledge is nothing
but a promise. Thus the €1.45 billion in
pledges by the donor community is a collection of promises from donors – both
bilateral and multilateral – to contribute towards the financing of the
projects and programs suggested in the National Development Plan. As expected, the World Bank, AfDB, IsDB, BADEA, EIB will provide the bulk of the financing of the NDP on concessionary terms.
To
illustrate our point, the State House is reporting on its Facebook page that
France appears to have been the first to transform its pledge into a €50
million actual contribution towards the global figure of about a billion and a
half euros in pledges. The swift
decision by France did not come as much of a surprise as the level of its
contribution, given its increasing role and influence in post-Jammeh Gambia.
That said,
the road to translating the €1.45 billion pledges into actual contributions had
just started and it is going to take a great deal of effort to reach the goal
because the international community is notorious for failing to fulfil their
pledges. Haiti, Syria and, most
recently, the Democratic Republic of Congo, are few examples where actual
contributions fell far below pledges. In
the case of Haiti, the figure was as low as 30% of pledges and even lower in the case of the Haiti Trust Fund housed in the World Bank.
Therefore, to translate pledges into
contributions would require renewed commitments by the Barrow administration to
institutional and structural reforms – something they’ve been reluctant to do so
far - while taking firm steps on the fiscal front to provide the financing of
the other half of the total cost of the NDP, according to the official
submission of the Gambian delegation to the conference.
The
challenges on the fiscal as well as the monetary fronts are daunting. Government must explain the process to
ordinary Gambians to avoid misconceptions or run the risk of having government
initiatives buried by national euphoria, driven more by politics than
rationality, a condition that Alan Greenspan referred to as irrational
exuberance. They must understand that to transform pledges (promises) into actual contribution usually is contingent on further conditionalities imposed by prospective donors.
It is
encouraging, however, that President Barrow saw the need to signal, upon his return from
Brussels, that the time for politics is over. The time has come to work hard towards national cohesion to achieve the objectives of the
economic and social agenda set out in the National Development Plan. President Barrow's legacy, a major preoccupation of his, rests, in large part, on how successful the implementation of the new undertaken will be.
