In an interview with the two parties, the director general of GMA, Bakary Janneh, explained that the MOU will be drawn according to Bissau Guinea’s request and to Gambia’s interest in order to keep the existing bilateral agreement within the two countries. He added that Maritime safety and security will be higher priority for the agreement.
“Bissau and Banjul are very close and whatever activity that happens in Bissau is likely to happen in Gambia’s water. So it becomes our joint responsibilities to work as a team and combat any form of illegal means, either drug trafficking, illegal migration, illegal fishing in our waters and anything that could hamper our community and development.”
He further stated that drug is a natural phenomenon in the whole world and every country has its approach to combat it, saying both The Gambia and Bissau’s problem is weakness in monitoring in terms of infrastructure, tools and equipment and capacity building training.
DG Janneh clarified that maritime is strictly for the security and safety at the sea and how to control thieves in our waters.
Glyzalde Araujo, an adviser for Bissau Maritime also pointed out that this was the first visit of Bissau, while saying that maritime is one of the priority sectors for Bissau.
He added that one of their priority works is to provide maritime security, civilisation of the sea, management of the maritime public dormant, revenue sources and improvement, monitoring the sea territory and other necessity areas.
“We choice Gambia because we are sister countries and we want to know how to overcome the security challenges. We lack means to patrol to our sea waters because if we could patrol our oceans, we will know the happenings in our seas.”
