Former Dictator Yahya Jammeh’s party, the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC), announced it would merge with current Gambia President Adama Barrow’s National Peoples’ Party (NPP) for the two political formations to back Adama Barrow in the coming December presidential election.
“I’m glad to report that the MoU agreement between APRC and NPP was signed on Thursday 2nd September 2021. […] We acted in the supreme interest of our country, our two political parties, and our people,” the APRC interim leader Fabakary Tombong Jatta told the media in a press conference Saturday.
From his exile in Equatorial Guinea, Yahya Jammeh pulled the strings for the new APRC-NPP alliance to become a reality. In doing so, Yahya Jammeh ensured that an explicit provision in the memorandum of understanding sealing the merger clearly spells out that he (Jammeh) will return to The Gambia should Adama Barrow win the coming presidential election.
“Whatever we are doing, former President Yahya Jammeh is aware and has endorsed it. […] Our objective is for former President Yahya Jammeh to return to this country peacefully and in dignity. And make no mistake, that gesture will be a good one for any government because the plurality of the Gambia, the stability of this country you cannot ignore.”
The announcement of Yahya Jammeh’s APRC and Adama Barrow’s NPP has sent shockwaves in Gambian Human Rights activist groups and the victims of Yahya Jammeh’s Human Rights abuses.
One such reaction is from former TANGO deputy executive and current head of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in The Gambia Madi Jobarteh. “Adama Barrow unequivocally exemplifies a Traitor par excellence! The Gambia has never been so insulted and sold! The betrayal can only be comparable to Judas! Indeed Barrow has stabbed the wounds of Gambians with the sharpest, longest, and the biggest danger of betrayal. This dishonor stinks more than a rotten dead carcass. Shame!” Madi Jobarteh said.