Guinea Bissau’s Maritime Administration has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with The Gambia Maritime Administration (GMA) intending to tackle all forms of illegalities that exist within the two countries’ waters.
The Director-General of GMA, Bakary Janneh, interview session as well as his counterpart from Guinea Bissau, disclosed that the MOU will be drawn according to Bissau Guinea’s request and to Gambia’s interest to ensure the security of the existing bilateral agreement within the two countries, adding that Maritime safety and security will be a higher priority for the agreement to see through.
“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 said.
In his submission, he noted that drugs are a natural phenomenon in the whole world, with every country employing its approach as peculiar to its situation to combat it, noting that both nations had the problem of monitoring in terms of infrastructure, tools, and equipment and capacity building training, and it was time to improve their situation.
A representative of Bissau Maritime, Glyzalde Araujo, explained that maritime is one of the priority sectors for Bissau, and this was an opportunity to strengthen their waterways.
“We chose the Gambia because we are sister countries and we want to know how to overcome the security challenges. We lack the means to patrol our sea waters because if we could patrol our oceans, we will know the happenings in our seas” he said.
