Halifa
Sallah, secretary general of the People’s Democratic Organisation for
Independence and Socialism, PDOIS, has said he needs just one more chance to be
in the National Assembly, and he would be done.
He
was speaking to journalists on Saturday at the IEC regional office in KMC,
after his nomination was accepted contest as a National Assembly candidate for
Serrekunda constituency.
He
said: “Now one more chance is what I
needed, and I am no longer interested in the National Assembly elections.”
The
63-year-old politician said for this one last term, his aspiration is to build
the sovereignty of the people “who would no longer be dominated by anyone and
no longer owned by anyone”.
“That
is my aspiration; to build that National Assembly, and I am done with National
Assembly work; maybe the presidency is the next. There too, if I serve one term, I am finished
with representation,” he declared.
Sallah
had contested the Serekunda East constituency in the 1987 and 1992 elections
for the House of Representatives, but only won around 10 per cent of the vote.
He
again unsuccessfully contested the Serekunda East constituency in the 1997
election, but was elected to the new constituency of Serekunda Central in the
2002 parliamentary election.
As
the United Democratic Party (UDP) had boycotted the election, the PDOIS, with
only two seats, emerged as the largest opposition party, and Sallah became the
Minority Leader in the National Assembly, from 2002 to 2007.
During
this period, he also served as a member of the Pan-African Parliament.
In
June 2005, he was expelled from the National Assembly along with three other
opposition members on the grounds of dual party membership.
NADD,
an opposition alliance that the PDOIS had joined earlier that year, had been
registered as a political party, and the Supreme Court of The Gambia ruled that
holding dual membership was against the Gambian Constitution.
He
lost his seat in the National Assembly in the 2007 parliamentary election to
Sainey Jaiteh, a member of the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and
Construction (APRC), the former ruling party.
