Vision 2020 Revisited

On Saturday 16^th January, just a day before the planned Jamboree to celebrate President Jammeh’s Presidential Treatment Program in Kanilai, another event was concluded there.  The more serious gathering of cabinet members, top civil servants and representatives of the UNDP and other donor agencies hosted by President Jammeh, was for a retreat to review the achievements and shortcomings made so far in the pursuit of the goals of Vision 2020, the regime’s developmental vision formulated years ago.   Presided over by a tyrannical leader who tolerates no criticism, the retreat was seen by many as a non-starter.

The pessimism stems not only from the format of the retreat but by the failure of the thirteen-year old vision which now has only a lifespan of ten remaining. In fact it can be argued that when the goal was declared in May 1996, The Gambia stood a better chance attaining some of the goals, than it is now in 2010. This is not to say the country has not seen any development between 1996 and 2009. In fact the Jammeh regime, despite everything, has been able to make some major strides in development of the country’s infrastructure. The period has seen spectacular inroads in infrastructure advancements with new road networks, bridges, new hospitals and clinics, market places, new government buildings, new ferries, tripling of the number of schools, drastic reduction in electricity outages, etc, etc. But even this helps to illustrate the drama of the failure of the vision as a developmental planning device. Most of these achievements on the infrastructure front came not out of any plans but because elections were on the way  and Jammeh aimed to win the votes of a certain region, constituency, community or electorates of a given locality ; or that loans and grants were made available, and Jammeh together with undercover  business associates could collude to enrich themselves through one project  or the other; or that the country has been selected to host an international football competition or conference and President Jammeh wanted to use the occasion to showcase achievements in the erection of monumental edifices as a way of projecting his government’s profile and his own personal ego.

A planned investment of say a D100 million, properly researched, paced and sequenced can deliver results three or more times more valuable and sustainable than a spontaneous one, development experts agree. This is even truer in scenarios where resources are scarce and shortcomings huge. So the first failure of Vision 2020 is indeed the fact that it has never been seriously applied by the Jammeh regime since its launching. While it throughout remained on the lips of official government spokespersons, policymakers never really adhered to what it entails and the developmental achievements so far made have come spontaneously, without the results of one logically leading into a set of inputs for another succeeding project. While there have been some spectacular developmental gains since 2006, Spontaneity has indeed been the hall mark of this pattern of progress.

The Gambia enjoyed quite stable macroeconomic conditions during the first ten years of independence and economic growth rates were impressive, averaging 6.5% per annum in real terms.  But the devastating Sahelian drought came in the beginning of the seventies, combining with the worsening terms of international trade following the Washington Consensus of 1971 and bad government policies leading to a considerable weakening of economic performance  from 1975 and formidable economic crisis in the 1980s. It was in other to redress this situation that the Economy Recovery Program (ERP) was embarked upon in mid-1985 with assistance from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral and bilateral donors. The ERP succeeded partly in stabilizing the economy but failed in reaching the ultimate objective of ensuring sustainable growth. Though the ERP largely succeeded in taking the country out of the worst of the crisis it generated fresh imbalances that needed to be addressed with the introduction of the Program for Sustained Development (PSD) at expiration of the ERP in 1988/89. Even despite the gains per, capital income barely increased during this period though this might have been partly because of the rapid demographic growth. The Gambia still has to face the problems of widespread and worsening poverty for the bulk of the population and mounting economic difficulties even if the ERP help rescued the country from the crisis of the eighties. The production base of the economy remains narrow and national income still depend heavily on volatile activities like tourism, re-export trade and an undiversified primary agricultural system with very little industrial activity. In August of 1993 the CFA zone countries introduced a reform that posed enormous threat to The Gambia’s re-export trade. Five months later, in January 1994, the reform was further intensified, worsening the country’s economic position.

It was against this background that in July of that year, a military putsch brought about the change of government and all the chasms that such a change entailed. In the Second Republic that followed, the AFRC military junta thought it necessary to clearly map out a strategy for socio-economic policies aimed at raising the standard of living of the Gambian population by transforming The Gambia into dynamic middle-income country. This is the fundamental objective of “The Gambia Incorporated.. Vision 2020"designed and formulated by a so called national think tank composed of supposed experts, brilliant but young and inexperienced and thoroughly under the sway of market fundamentalist thinking. Members who had an unimaginative and stereotypical approach to the development process and even the global prosperity architecture .Members held it that The Gambia at the time of the formulation of the vision had a number of weaknesses which ought to be addressed in order to achieve the national development objectives. At the same time she had inherent strength and potentials which need to be properly harnessed for national socio-economic advancement. The think tank was far from being national, in spite of the nomenclature. The process of the formulation of the vision incorporated little input from other stakeholders and there was little participation from others. The one and only occasion which provided opportunity for outside input in fact exposed the superficiality of Vision 2020 Gambia Incorporated. It also showed that it lacked the intellectual red string that would thread through all the components of the vision and its project of activities into a holistic developmental paradigm. Like its forerunner, Jawara’s dream of the African Singapore, from which it actually took a great deal, Vision 2020 was highly at the mercy of foreign development paradigms.  

In the words of the think tank Vision 2020 seeks to transform The Gambia into a dynamic middle income country, socially, economically and scientifically over a 25 year period. It therefore sets out the broad outline of policies to facilitate the realization of this objective. Six major activity areas relating to Agriculture, Industry, Trade, Tourism, Financial Services and Human Resource Development call for special attention in order to attain the given level of economic development. The project’s mission statement read: The overall orientation of Vision 2020 is contained in its mission statement:
"To transform The Gambia into a financial centre, a tourist paradise, a trading, export-oriented agricultural and manufacturing nation, thriving on free market policies and a vibrant private sector, sustained by a well-educated, trained, skilled, healthy, self-reliant and enterprising population and guaranteeing a well-balanced eco- system and a decent standard of living for one and all under a system of government based on the consent of the citizenry."
When he officially launched Vision 2020 in May 1996, President Jammeh read: “The Gambia’s choice of economic ideology is clear- it is based on free market principles. Within this framework, a development strategy that is human-centered and export-oriented has been adopted. This means that the production base of the economy will be strengthened and diversified to cater for the needs of an export-oriented industry. In pursuit of pragmatism, Vision 2020 will build on the sound macro-economic policies of our recent past while launching a new partnership contract between the public and private sectors to spur faster growth with equity. Simultaneously, a new diplomatic drive will ensure good and fruitful neighborliness with both regional governments and other government further afield in addition to maintaining dialogue and co-operation with development partners.”

But on the whole Vision 2020 was more a party political manifesto than a policy statement or a project document, which it is at times claimed to be. Whatever it is however, the goals briefly captured in the mission statement are all further from attainment today than they were in May 1996. Before the1994 coup up to 190 000 tourists came to the country annually. Bad government policies and international publicity has so drastically cut down arrival figures that players in the industry applaud when arrivals reach 80 000 annually. The country is now being strongly competed by the Cape Verde Islands, Senegal and even Ghana. The country’s re-export trade, formerly one of the few cornerstones of the country’s economy, has now almost completely collapsed due to worsening business climate, over taxation and Gambia’s thoughtless adoption of the ECOWAS import duty harmonization agreement that substantially raised The Gambia’s customs tariffs.  Since1996 the volumes The Gambia’s exports of groundnuts, fish and fish products, and vegetables have all tumbled down by over 50%. In both 2006 and 2007 the one and only major exporter of groundnuts, Gambia Groundnut Corporation, was able to gather only 7 000 and 3 700 metric tons respectively for export, lowest figures in about a century.  All this because Agriculture, which the think tank said is the dominant sector of the Gambian economy, employing about 70% of the total work force and contributing, on average, 22%  of GDP, continues to lag behind other sectors in productivity and modernization and is still characterized by an undiversified primary agricultural system an “unbreakable” cycle of erratic and inadequate input supplies, inappropriate technology, low output and productivity growth, low incomes and an acute inability to generate savings for investment. Adding to this they also pointed at what they called the unsatisfactory land tenure system seen as a major obstacle to the development of commercial agriculture at modern, economically viable scales. And it is not only the volume of the groundnut trade that has plummeted but also the quality and value. In the world of agro-oils today Gambian groundnut is classified as bird feed due to the deterioration in quality control and post-harvest handling care.  

Before the1994 coup and its Vision 2020, fish exports to Western Europe and Asia boomed and there were five fish processing factories registered to be used for export to the European Union, today there are seven of them, but only one that continues to operate continuously due to high electricity costs, over-taxation, unfavorable business climate  and bad government policies.  So sixteen years into the supposed implementation of the Vision 2020 project, or compliance with its guidance all of the country’s exports have plummet by over 50% since 1996. While the country today exports cashew nuts trucked in from Guinea Bissau, which it did not in 1996; mineral sands also weren’t exported then, but there were horticultural and floricultural exports, meat to Gabon , cotton exports, that took place before the coup that  have all collapsed today.