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| Moroccan-born First Lady holding her Gambia bio metric voters card |
When the regime of The Gambian dictator, Yaya Jammeh, embraced biometrics technology in 2009, neither he nor his Interior Minister, Ousman Sonko, understood the technology the Touray brothers, Hassan and Abdou Draman were introducing in their country of birth.
The brothers are
Gambians who studied and worked in the United States, returning to their native
country to invest their own funds in what became known as the GAMBIS
(Biometrics) project which, with the expected cooperation of a willing partner,
would have placed The Gambia in an enviable position by ushering in
transparency in future elections.
The financial sector and
particularly the banking and insurance sub-sectors, would have benefited in
more ways than one. The country would have been - although in a sense, it still
is somewhat - the first country in the ECOWAS region to have embraced the new
technology had the regime not broke the conditions of the contract with
Pristine Consulting headed by Hassan Touray.
Biometrics technology
allows one to measure and analyze the physical attributes of a subject's facial
and voice features. It can also scan retinal features, all of which can
be stored in the chip and once stored the data cannot be altered or manipulated
in any form. It is this high degree of transparency that biometrics technology provides that troubled a notoriously opaque regime.
The project introduced a
centralized accounting platform making it possible for revenue data collected
by the Gambia Revenue Agency to be easily accessible to authorized
personnel. It eliminated the need for
government departments to collect cash for issuance and renewal of passports,
driver’s licenses, national IDs or similar official documents.
The effect was instantaneous. But so was the reaction of the Inspector
General of Police Ensa Badjie who stormed the Pristine Consulting offices to
register his displeasure at the new system because revenue is not being
collected by his officers. IGP Badjie
may have been expressing the sentiments shared by many of his colleagues in the
government.
After the IGP Ensa
Badjie’s incident, it became increasingly evident that buyer’s remorse was
beginning to set in, resulting in the regime framing charges against the
company which resulted in counter suit that ended up with the government
dropping the charges.
The financial and legal
implications of the regime’s decision to discontinue the biometrics project are
grave in the midst of an economic crisis that is of the doing of Yaya Jammeh
who continues to ignore advice of the IMF and other donors to be prudent in his
spending.
Legal liabilities
resulting from the breach of contract which led to Pristine Consulting suing
government may result in additional financial cost to the public treasury. The regime’s reaction to the company’s legal
action was to frame the Touray brothers.
Even though the false charges were eventually dropped with the promise
to financially settle, the regime failed to fulfill in its promise.
Abandoning the biometrics project that was being 100% pre-financed by private investors were to recover
their investment costs over 5 years means additional financial burden of the
public treasury resulting from litigation.
It also means that the
country is returning to the old system of laminated national ID and driver’s
license that are susceptible to forgery and manipulation. 2016 is presidential election year which is
an inopportune time to abandon a system which would have made voter
registration more fraud-proof and thus a more transparent electoral process.
It should be noted that
while the Jammeh regime has abandoned the biometrics system, ECOWAS’s protocol
requiring all of its 16 Members State to adopt the biometrics ID cards effective
this month, January 2016. The Gambia
thus has the dubious honor of being the first to have adopted the system, the
first to abandon it and will be the last to adopt it. It is not surprising because this is a regime
that is confused and lacks both direction and resolve.
