Political parties to send monitoring team to voter registration centers

By Adama Makasuba

The Inter Party Committee (IPC) has announced plan to send monitoring team to all voter registration centers, which the committee said seeks to help deter any attempt of fraud.

The eighteen-political party decision comes as the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) Saturday started a 44 days registration of Gambians for the December presidential election.

Meanwhile, the committee also seeks to table its strategic plans before the National Assembly after it unanimously adopts the document.

This was made known at the InterParty Committee forum held at Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara Conference Centre in Bijilo on Saturday.

Speaking at a news conference held shortly after the programme, the committee’s chairperson, Honorable Halifa Sallah told reporters: “we have examined the number of registration team established by the IEC who has looked at their regional composition of those teams, and we have finally agreed that we should assign two members of the IEC to follow each registration team.”

He said the committee has decided to divide the number of the registration teams among the 18 political parties and that “we are just simply waiting finally for financial support in order to start work.”

He said the committee has been asked to communicate “plan to the leadership of their parties so that we will able to select five members of that party who ultimately will be discharged together to each team to follow the registration process.”

“Of course, the funding is now being pursued and our partners have shown interest in funding and we hope that as far as Monday, Tuesday we should be able to get the green light. Once that is there we expect that the composition of this monitoring team would be highlighted and we would start the process in harness to monitor the registration exercise,” he added.

We set up a committee and these are multi party committee and the committee has done its ground work, he said.