By: Momodou Justice Darboe February 7, 2022
The Foni Yiriwa Kafo and affiliated organizations were quite busy last week doling out cash support to host families of the people displaced by the recent clash between MFDC and Senegalese forces but the question about when schools will fully resume in some affected Foni settlements lingers.
The Gambian security have since been policing the area of the Gambia- Casamance border where the forces clashed but reports of many pupils not returning to classrooms since the clash have been reaching The Progress Newspaper.
“Children are still afraid to go back to classrooms,” a mother of six from Kanoor village told this reporter. Many school children were reportedly shell-shocked and were still reluctant to go back to school. It has yet to be clear whether some of them will get over the trauma of the recent fighting and return to school today.
Meanwhile, Foni welfare associations alongside the National Disaster Management Agency late last week disbursed cash to families hosting the displaced. The cash was distributed based on the number of people each family was looking after.
The member of the National Assembly for Foni Kansala last week told journalists that the ministers of defense, the Interior, SIS Chief and Deputy Chief of Defense Staff have been summoned before the Peace and Security Committee of the legislature over the confrontation.
Musa Amul Nyassi also joined the chorus of condemnations of the presence of Senegalese forces in Foni.
Amul said the presence of Senegalese forces in Foni was concerning to the people of one of West Coast Region’s sub-regions. He elucidated that Foni was not against the deployment of Ecomig forces in the region. “Our concern has always been that the wrong forces were deployed in the area”, Amul told reporters.
