Outlining their achievements and their plans, Mr. Mohamed S. Kamara, an executive member of PeDA, in an engagement held with Bureh beach, York and Kent communities on 7th June 2022, said, “it is very important to live peacefully together.” He maintained that, “community peace is very important because general elections are around the corner.” Mr. Kamara further admonished that, elections are held just for a day and life goes on afterwards (for a longer period), therefore community members should not allow politicians to destroy the good relationship they had nurtured due to party politics. He stressed that Peninsula communities fall behind all other communities because of disunity. According to him, PeDA was formed a year ago to address this and pursue community development programmes. He further singled out environmental degradation as the greatest challenge facing them, adding that it’s a primary contributing factor to climate change that culminated into sea rise and destruction of graveyards. “It is very sad to see the skeletons of our loved ones exposed by the see rise. This is as a result of our own activities in the community”. In lamentation, he highlighted the following concerns: “Do you want to be sent for one day to rebury your love ones? We are hosting Guma Valley but we don’t have pipe borne water, education here is nothing to write home about, no hospital or toilet facility; all of these account for the backwardness I talk about all the time!”. He stated however, that due to the intervention of PeDA, there has been an increase in enrollment of students living in the Peninsula community from 18 to 162. The association has also secured a plot of land to build a school which is intended to serve several communities along the peninsula. He concluded that the association also secured a school Bus to take children to and from school.
Kissma Gassama, NaCCED Director of Communications and Outreach conveyed greetings from the Council Chairman and thanked community stakeholders for making it to the engagement. He intimated the gathering that the president established NaCCED to reintroduce civics in schools and to promote community civic engagement and contribution to development at their level. “This is why we supported PeDA to have this engaged in these communities”, he noted. He highlighted a few achievements of the Council, and concluded with stressing the importance of rights and corresponding responsibilities as critical elements of any citizens’ education programme. He encouraged stakeholders to fully participate in the engagement and to continue the dialogue with officials even after the engagement.
Speaker after speaker from among community stakeholders identified transportation for pupils/students as a major issue. According to them, this situation is largely responsible for early pregnancy, drop outs, and increased road accidents. It came out clearly that having a school at Kent would remedy the situation.
Earlier, the chairman of the program Mr. Mustapha Bendu intimated that though their slogan is “Peninsula First”, community Peninsula stakeholders are not putting Peninsula first. He cited the destruction of the environment due to sand mining and deforestation as a case in point.
