Mr. Lamin Waa Juwara, the Executive Secretary of National Democratic Action Movement (NDAM), gave his views on the withdrawal of the party from the NADD alliance, stressing that the break-up was due to the fact that the MOU was not followed through. Mr. Juwara said this in an interview with The Point on Tuesday.

He added that there were also concerns on the direction that NADD would take after the parliamentary elections.

He revealed that during a meeting immediately after the election, he summed up his views on the elections and expressed his opinion on the issue of keeping the office of flag bearer vacant until two years before a presidential election, as had been articulated by others. He reiterated his total opposition to the idea of leaving the office of flag bearer vacant. “This is a portion which I believe is not correct at all. How can you have a party without a leader? You keep the position of flag bearer until two years before the election. What about three years. How do you run a party that have six percent in last presidential election and you want to keep the position of a flag bearer vacant?” he queried.

“You are talking about popular consent but this time around when we went there, they where playing what you call delaying tactics until in the nick of time, when we could not have gone back and put into play what we put in the MOU,” he added.

He stressed that the position of a party leader is so important that only congresses and party can choose it.
“We are a supreme party of our own and we went into this alliance on public interest. We never rock the boat. We can campaign and we went to all the villages in the country. I knew before the election that we were going to fail because neither the UDP-NRP nor NADD will make it because we disappointed the people. The people decided to leave. We have taken the people for granted,” he elucidated.

He further posited that in their view the whole thing was a waste of time and therefore pulled out, adding that as they had lost the confidence of the people, the best thing to do as mature politicians is to tell the people that they had failed. “If Amat Bah can lose his seat in Saloum and lost every single seat in the country what is he doing in politics,” he said, adding:
“If Darboe can stand for three chances and has got far less number of votes this time than five years ago, that is telling you that the people have rejected you. Are these parties individual parties or properties?” he asked.
“In the actual sense of the word, all they would have done was to say I have resigned and a new leader be selected, but they have not done that. Halifa has not done that either. But to leave the position vacant- that’s not the point. Don’t you think there should be changes in the leadership because he performed such dismally? But he still wants to be there. What sort of politics are we playing? We think it is a waste of time that is why we pulled out of the alliance. It is not a question of being provoked or not. Realistically we don’t think we can do it. To be candid we lost the election because of our own fault,” he remarked.

Mr. Juwara at length expressed his belief that it would be impossible to make any impact in the circumstances saying that all these facts are irrefutable proof that they had totally failed.

He also asserted that PPP is non-existent. “PPP is not existing. We don’t want to go that far. But OJ alone cannot be PPP. All the others have disappeared. Some are exiled and others have joined the APRC. What we used to know as PPP is not in existence. There are also some elements within the PPP that don’t want to lose their privileges and they want to dictate what is going on.

“We had everything. We singed the MOU and it was clearly spelt out there that there was no reason for anybody to have gone out of it,” Juwara noted, adding that the only regrettable thing was that the people should have been allowed to do the selection.