The National People’s Party mayoral candidate for the Kanifing Municipal Council election, Bakary Y. Badjie, has said that Talib Bensuda-led Council has been focusing on increasing revenue collection instead of focusing on improving the municipality from the taxpayers’ money, citing that the Mayor has not even constructed a feeder road in the past five years.
In an interview with the media, Badjie stated that he has been critical of the council because the Mayor has yet to deliver what he envisioned when contesting against him in 2018.
He claimed that Talib Bensuda had failed. He narrated that the council should have decongested the traffic congestion in the municipality through the construction of feeder roads.
“I said he failed because the transformation we thought would have happened did not happen. The council has responsibilities to develop feeder roads, and we didn’t see any feeder roads in the past five years by the council. We didn’t even see a road that is ungraded to a minimum for the people within the municipality,” he explained.
Badjie, who ran and lost to Talib in the 2018 Mayoral election, argued that the current council’s only focus has been increasing the council’s revenue instead of plowing revenue back into the municipality for development.
According to him, the current council needs to do more to plow back the revenue to the people of KM. He explained that since the council increased the tax and duty rate at the market to 100%, it is evident that the revenue will be increased.
“The council is a service-generating institution. The generated revenue should be plowed back into the people and not taken more from people, and that is what is happening. They focus more on revenue generation than understanding people’s situations. And they will come out to tell people that we have boasted the revenue from D120 million to D200 million. But what is it for? They increase taxes by 100 percent, and you generate an extra 100 percent of revenue. That is exploitation. They are not giving back what taxpayers are paying for,” he said.
The election is set for tomorrow. Badjie will compete with Talib Ahmed Bensuda and Pa Modou Mbowe for the top local government seat in the Kanifing Municipality. Talib, backed by the opposition United Democratic Party, is the front-runner for the seat as the incumbent. A recent Ceprass survey gave him an edge over Badjie and Mbowe.
