‘Secco’ managers to protest over unpaid money

One of the affected secco managers who spoke to The Point on the condition of anonymity confirmed the development, saying: “I can tell you that the GCC owe us thousands of dalasis; if not up to millions. Personally, they owe me more than D60, 000 dalasis and many other secco managers across the country are affected too.”

The number of people that GCC owes money, the source explained, is more than 50. “We have finished all our compilation yet we can’t have our money back. We also hired vehicles for transporting the groundnuts during the trade season and those people are following us every day,” the source posited.

“We will storm the premises of the GCC and protest if we still haven't got our monies back. We finished our work in March 2022; and they need to pay us our monies. In fact, during the former management of GCC, immediately we finish our compilation, the management will issue us cheques. We will give them an ultimatum and if they don’t pay us, we will be left with no option than to protest. It’s our money and we need it. We also have other pressing issues to attend to especially when the Tobaski is fast approaching,” the source added.    

The director of Finance of The Gambia Groundnut Corporation (GCC), Alhagie Barry, who was contacted for comments, confirmed that the GGC owed the secco managers across the country.

“It’s true that we owe them money. However, we are also working tirelessly in ensuring that we compile everything before we pay them. There are about 85 seccos across the country, thus compiling all those books at once is not an easy thing. We want to regularise everything before we could start payment. In fact, we will even start paying them before the end of the week,” he told our reporter in an interview.

“We want to reconcile with a view to ensuring that the money that we give them to buy groundnuts on our behalf is spent judiciously. I can tell you that within a week, we will start the payments. We have a cordial working relationship with the seccos managers across the country. In fact, we are even to sign a contract with them where they will be selling fertilisers on behalf of the GCC.”