Gambian MPs Monday voted to maintain the country’s ban on female genial mutilation, an issue which had divided opinion on religious and cultural lines.
A statement from scribes of the National Assembly confirmed that its MPs rejected the Women’s (Amendment) Bill, 2023.
Not a single of the clauses making up the bill was passed during the Committee of the Whole Assembly stage.
The failure of the bill has been met with approbation by activists against FGM who were alarmed about the bid to reverse what they called the gains made against the practice in the past eight years.
Imam Fatty, a well known campaigner to unban FGM had taken his evangelism to national assembly in support of a Bill which had sought to reverse the ban.
Imam Fatty last March led a bunch of other clerics and some veiled schoolgirls to the bowel of the national assembly in Banjul as the Bill was brought to the floor of the House and subjected to a debate.
Just a few feet away sat a gaggle of fiery anti-FGM amazons from among Gambia’s gender activists who have been up in arms against the Bill ever since it was crafted by MP Gibba.
Activists have been celebrating their ‘victory’ against Gibba’s Bill, described the vote as a watershed moment in Gambian history.
Gibba belongs to a faction of the former ruling Alliance for the Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) of exiled ex-president Yahya Jammeh.
The other faction is led by current national assembly speaker Fabakary Tombong Jatta.
The practice of female circumcision was criminalised in The Gambia in 2015 during which then President Jammeh described it as momentous as it ushered his country unrelentingly into the 21st century when such tendencies which scar women and girls for life have no place in her future.
However, nine years after the ban, both local and international activists have been warning that anti-FGM legislation was under threat from an unyielding campaign by mostly religious scholars and custodians of tradition to ”bring it back from the dead”.
Religious clerics had taken their campaign a step further, paying the fines of FGM practitioners prosecuted and found guilty of breaking the anti-FGM law and using scripture to justify the practice as virtuous in Islam.
Continental watchdogs such as the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child which had joined forces with an array of civil society groups in The Gambia criticised the ‘regressive parliamentary debate’ on the issue which overlooked a commitment to protect women and girls against the injurious consequences of FGM.
WN/as/APA