Africa-Press – Gambia. At its core, the project demands rigorous cost-benefit analysis (CBA), a framework quantifying projected costs such as construction outlays and environmental externalities against anticipated benefits, including trade facilitation and regional connectivity.
Central to this evaluation is the principle of Pareto optimality, which asserts that public investments should enhance aggregate welfare without disadvantaging any stakeholder.
Here, public choice economics informs the governance structure: to avoid fiscal strain, a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) could allocate construction risks to private entities while amortising costs through user fees, sidestepping sovereign debt escalation. However, viability hinges on complementary infrastructure such as toll roads linking key traffic hubs to unlock network effects and justify long-term returns.
Feasibility studies must rigorously model traffic elasticity (e.g., a minimum threshold of 6,000 vehicles daily) and embed contingency plans for socio-environmental externalities. Without such analytical rigour, the bridge risks becoming a white elephant, failing to catalyse Gambia’s economic integration with Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.
Financing such a project with an approximate cost of $1.2 billion necessitates innovative multi-jurisdictional cost-sharing. By positioning the bridge as a node in the Trans-African Highway or an extension of ECOWAS’s Lagos-Abidjan Corridor, Gambia could leverage concessional funding from the African Union or regional blocs, reducing its fiscal exposure. Simultaneously, a revenue-sharing mechanism with Barra and Banjul redirecting toll proceeds to offset economic losses from reduced stopover traffic would address distributional equity. Strategically, terminating the bridge at Radio Syd to bypass urban congestion and integrating toll roads with exit ramps at critical hubs (e.g., Brikama, Abuko and beyond) would optimise spatial efficiency. Yet, absent granular traffic projections and stakeholder communication strategies, allocative inefficiencies loom. While skeptics question the project’s standalone viability, its transformative potential lies in reframing it as a continental asset a linchpin for Senegambia’s integration. The path forward demands not just financial ingenuity, but a harmonised vision of regional prosperity.
Nyang Njie
Banjul
Ghosts with Pens!
Dear Editor,
A pitiful Reflection on the Cowards Who Hide behind keyboards and fake profiles to launch attacks that are a deep reflection of themselves and the generations who occasioned their mistaken conception.
There is a peculiar type of man who, lacking both courage and integrity, chooses not to confront but to skulk in shadows.
These are cowards who bleed bitterness, hiding behind fake profiles, hiding behind AI-written words, hoping their venom might touch a man they dare not face.
They are ghost writers in every sense for they are neither truly present nor truly alive in spirit. They are political leaches who feast and feed on the circumstances of the moment.
It is almost laughable when men, if they can even be called that, who behave like spiteful children, airing petty grievances behind curtains of anonymity.
They fashion weapons from words they do not even craft themselves, outsourcing their hatred because even in their malice, they are too feeble and cowardly to stand alone.
I find it beneath me, deeply beneath me to respond to these types. To war with ghosts is to lose time better spent building, loving, creating, and living.
I am a builder of life, not a fighter of phantoms. Why should I acknowledge men who see their periods like women, cycling through emotional storms behind screens, afraid of daylight and truth?
I don’t do men who don’t carry balls beneath them but cower with a tightly clenched apple pie between their legs and replacing what otherwise would have been mistaken for manhood.
I walk forward in the full light of day, while they hide in the dark corners of the internet, hoping their anonymous little stings might burn or slow me down.
They will not!!!
Their words are as hollow as the lives they live. And I, standing on solid ground, do not reach down to argue with the ghosts in the mud.
Let them bark, let them bleed themselves dry in their small jealousies. I remain unbothered, undefeated, untouchable and most defiantly unshakeable.
Next time you seeing your monthly cycles, and swinging with intensified emotions, remember, that I am Melville and my sting causes “feminine men” to hide and launch attack from afar.
I am way ahead and my star can only be diminished in death.
Source: The Standard Newspaper | Gambia
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