In December 2011, presidential elections were held in The Gambia, with the incumbent President Yahya Jammeh contesting for what would be his fourth term in office. President Jammeh was confident he would win “unless all Gambian people [were] mad” because he had, in 17 years, done more for them than the British had in 400 years of colonial rule. In the event, President Jammeh won the elections with 72 percent of the votes cast, compared to 17 percent for the runner-up opposition candidate, Ousainou Darboe of the United Democratic Party (UDP).
I distinctly recall that following the confirmation of the results of the 2011 presidential elections, hordes of youths were dancing and singing in the streets, celebrating President Jammeh’s victory. I met with a group of them singing in unison: “We don’t want old Pa; we need Yaya!” in reference to “Old Pa” Darboe, who is about 17 years older than Jammeh. I remember, too, feeling very sorry for President Jammeh because I thought to myself: it would be ugly the day these very youths in support of Jammeh turned against him.
I didn’t have to wait for long, because five years later, the relationship about Jammeh and Gambian youths soured. In December 2016, President Jammeh narrowly lost the presidential elections — a loss that shocked all Gambians, Jammeh included. In a hard-fought election, Jammeh was narrowly defeated by Adama Barrow, who received 43.3 percent of the votes cast, compared to 39.6 percent for Jammeh. Barrow’s surprise victory over Jammeh was mainly because of a Coalition of seven opposition parties and civil society formed in October 2016.
Fast forward another five years, and President Barrow faced Gambian voters again earlier this month to seek a second term in office. Despite reneging on his earlier promise to serve a three-year transitional term, his falling out with the UDP, allegations of corruption and ineptitude, as well as his alliance with the APRC who had vigorously defended former President Jammeh against charges of killings and abuse of human rights, President Barrow had a resounding victory in the 2021 presidential elections, with 53 percent of votes.
Although the UDP has launched a legal challenge to the election results, local and international observers, including the African Union, ECOWAS, the EU and the Commonwealth endorsed the results, and some contestants congratulated President Barrow on his victory. For all practical purposes, the die is now cast, and President Barrow will serve his second five-year term.
So President Barrow and his supporters celebrated wildly and into the night following their election victory. Although I did not hear youths chanting “We need Barrow” as they said they needed Jammeh in 2011, there were many and loud chants of “Weew Barrow!”, “weew” being a corruption of the French word “vive” meaning “Long live.” And I wonder when (if indeed) the very crowd which celebrated President Barrow’s victory would turn against him, like the youths did against former President Jammeh.
In his victory speech, President Barrow promised he would make life better for all Gambians, a huge task, even in the best of times. The Gambians President Barrow promised to improve lives in one of the poorest countries in the world, having been ranked 172nd in 2020 out of 189 countries in terms of the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI). As difficult as the task ahead of President Barrow might seem, history shows that it is indeed doable, as the records of China, Rwanda and Singapore (to name a few) show.
China, the world’s most populous country, with a population of 1.4 billionin 2019, became the world’s second largest economy (after the United States) in 2010, and the world’s largest economy in 2020. In 1990, The Gambia had a per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $2,265; seven times that of China. Thirty years later, China’s per capita GDP had increased 33-fold to $10,500 in 2020, or about five times per capita GDP of $2,159 for The Gambia. Furthermore, China lifted 770 million people out of extreme poverty between 1978 and 2020, with 99 million of these being lifted people out of extreme poverty between 2012 and 2020.
In 1994, Rwanda suffered a horrific genocide in which some 800 thousand people were killed. Despite this, Rwanda, under the leadership of President Paul Kagame increased its GDP (in 2015 constant $ terms) four-fold from $2.7 billion in 1990 to $10.8 billion in 2020, less than 30 years after the genocide. In contrast, The Gambia’s GDP increased a relatively small 2.4 times from $0.7 billion in 1990 to $1.7 billion in 2020.
Singapore’s founding father and first Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, had good reason to cry following Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965; the same year The Gambia got its Independence from Britain. Yew focusedon Singapore’s survival as a nation and creating better lives for its people. Toward this end, Singapore adopted an export-led industrialization, and sought global multinational corporations to drive its industrial growth. As a result, Singapore increased its per capita GDP from $500 (about $3,600 in 2011 USD terms) in 1965 to $22,666 in 1990, and $68,408 in 2018 (both in 2011 USD terms). Singapore was ranked 11th out of 189 countries in terms of its HDI in 2020, ahead of the UK, the US and Canada.
Nobody expects President Barrow to, by the end of his second term in 2026, turn The Gambia into another China, or Rwanda, or Singapore in terms of economic development. However, he is in a unique position to lay the foundation for The Gambia to achieve economic development and eradication of poverty. To do that, he needs to make a good-faith effort to implement the recommendations of the Truth Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), the Draft Constitution prepared by the Constitutional Review Commission (CRC), and Janneh Commission on former President Jammeh’s financial dealings. In addition, he should complete reforming the security sector, and curb corruption in his administration and among his inner circle.
President Barrow needs a solid team that will help him deliver on his promises to the Gambian people. In this regard, he should reform the entire upper echelon of the civil service by recruiting a new team based on merit. As things are now, I have never met a senior government official (Directors, Deputy Permanent Secretaries, and Permanent Secretaries) who could tell me s/he was in office because of his or her CV, or through a competitive and open hiring process. Besides, many of them (some Ministers included) are holdovers from the Jammeh administration, prompting many to lament that Barrow’s first term was more a regime change, than a system change.
Following his recent victory at the polls, President Barrow and his supporters are understandably still euphoric. The reality, however, is that he has a stark choice ahead of him: he either does a good job of leading the development of the country, or he dashes their hopes, as he did with his first term in office. In the latter case, he can be sure that the very youths, and indeed all Gambians who are celebrating his victory today, will turn against him, and get out in the streets calling for his head. And he would have nobody to blame, but himself.
A Piece of Advice to President-elect Barrow
By D. A. Jawo
Now that President-elect Adama Barrow has received a strong mandate from Gambians to rule this country for another five years, everyone is anxiously waiting to see how he is going to handle his new mandate. Is he going to continue with the same lackadaisical attitude, with corruption and malfeasance being the hallmark of his last administration, or are we going to see more positive developments, with head-on confrontation against corruption and mis-management?
Regardless of who voted for him and who did not, and the obvious fact that there were some irregularities in the elections, Barrow is still president for all Gambians, and as such, we should all pray for the success of his administration, because it means ultimate success for the Gambia.
It is a well known fact that several non-Gambians who had no business in our elections were mobilized to vote and they indeed voted. However, apparently because of their over-confidence in their poise to win the elections and trying to ward off the label of being anti-foreigner, the United Democratic Party (UDP), in particular, did not see it necessary to take the matter to the revising courts. Therefore, it is now too late in the day for anyone to contemplate challenging such irregularities, thus making all those non-Gambians who were illegally registered, acquire Gambian citizenship through the back door. This indeed has some negative implications for this country as some of those people may be criminals and other undesirable elements and giving them our citizenship on a silver platter just for political expediency by a few politicians bent on winning the elections by whatever means necessary, could come to haunt us in the long run.
It is unfortunate however that the UDP never had the chance to bring out in open court whatever evidence they claim to have had with regards to election fraud. It was also a disappointment to many UDP supporters that, with all their large reservoir of experienced lawyers, they apparently failed to do their homework before bringing their case to the Supreme Court, only to be thrown out on a technicality.
Whatever the case however, we need to move on as a nation and we expect the opposition to work hard towards the National Assembly elections to ensure that this country is not, by default, transformed into a single-party nation, which would spell disaster for our nascent democracy. It would be a big mistake if Gambian voters decide to give the National People’s Party (NPP) absolute control of the legislature, giving the Barrow administration the power to do whatever they want. If that happens, the very first thing they are likely to do would be to bring in a watered down new constitution that would help him consolidate his control over every aspect of the governance structure which may not be for the general good of the country.
While President-elect Barrow is waiting to be sworn in on January 19, we expect him to also use the window to choose a new team that would help him run the country for the next five years. Unlike his first five years when he was constrained by the coalition agreement that required him to satisfy the different component parties of Coalition 2016, we expect him this time round to have a much freer hand to run his own show rather than allowing any individual or interest group to hold him to ransom. Even though he has an extremely long queue of small political parties and other individuals lining behind him, apparently all of them looking for jobs and other parochial interests, but we expect him not to compromise the national interest just to satisfy a few people. He should focus on his legacy and get an efficient team to help him achieve that rather than trying to satisfy anyone’s individual interest.
On particular area that everyone expects President Barrow to address in his new administration is the unnecessarily large number of advisers he has surrounded himself with. Of course everyone agrees that he needs some advisers, but they should be seasoned people who can
speak with authority on the subject area they are supposed to advise the president not just any party militant. We certainly also do not need all those advisers, particularly people who lack the pedigree to advise even a village head let alone a head of state. It is seen by many people as sheer waste of public resources to pay people for doing virtually nothing for the public.
Also, the very fact that the next legislative elections would still be held with the 1997 Constitution, which requires him to nominate five members of the National Assembly, he should avoid the mistake he made in 2017 when for the first time in the history of our legislature, there was not a single member of the Christian community in the National Assembly. He had the opportunity to address it but he failed to do so. Let us therefore hope this time round he would take cognizance of such anomaly.
Among the most urgent things that we expect the in-coming Barrow administration to tackle head on include implementing the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) report to its fullest. We certainly do not expect a repetition of the selective way they handled the Janneh Commission when they had to cherry pick those they wanted to protect. Also, the public is still in the dark as to how much had been recovered from the recommendations of the Janneh Commission, including what had happened to former President Yahya Jammeh’s assets that the Commission recommended to be seized by the state.
This time round, therefore, everyone is closely watching every move that the government takes, particularly when some of those adversely mentioned in the report are known to be ardent supporters of President Barrow. In fact, everyone had expected that those adversely mentioned and sanctioned in the report and still serving in the government would either take the most honourable step and quit or the government would interdict them pending the issuing of the white paper.
Another area that the administration should address is the high level of corruption prevalent in almost every sector of the government. We have all heard or seen the leaked audit report on the Ministry of Health in which millions of Dalasis of public money had allegedly been squandered without any justification. Despite the public outrage over the report, there has still not been any reaction either from President Barrow or his government, apart from the rebuttal from the Ministry of Health, blaming the Standard newspaper for publishing it and the National Audit Office for releasing it to the public.
Of course the public have a good reason to be agitated about the audit report because there have been examples of previous corruption scandals that seem to have been swept under the carpet. A good case in point is the Gambia National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) scandal which resulted in a serious fuel scarcity, and which seems to have been removed from the radar and apparently put on the back burner, with hardly anyone now talking about it.
There is also the huge shipment of hard drugs that was intercepted at the Port of Banjul almost a year ago and no one seems to know what had happened to it and whether anyone had been arraigned for it. We have been hearing the name of one Banta Keita being bandied around with regards to the shipment, but such a huge haul of drugs cannot just be tied to one individual. It must have been a big network and therefore, it does not make sense to assume that only Keita could be culpable, and no one else should be held responsible. There is certainly something quite fishy about the case.
In view of the socio-economic closeness of the Gambia and Senegal, President Barrow has the misfortune of being compared to Senegalese President Macky Sall in their development trajectories. For instance, a few days ago, we all applauded President Macky Sall when he inaugurated the Regional Express Train (TER), which is one of the flagship projects of his Plan Senegal Emergent (PSE) initiated by him at the beginning of his first term, with the objective of pushing Senegal to the status of a middle income country. It will definitely have a very positive socio-economic impact on ordinary Senegalese, particularly those living within the Dakar metropolis.
Of course, there is absolutely no doubt that our own President Barrow has also registered some remarkable infrastructural development successes during his first five years in office, including the roads and bridges in the Upper River Region and some other parts of the country. However, his development strides cannot be compared with those registered by Macky Sall, particularly in the area of projects that directly impact on the lives of the ordinary people. We can imagine, for instance, the direct positive impact that the Regional Express Train, which we are told departs Dakar for Diamniadio every 20 minutes carrying more than a 1000 passengers, would have on ordinary Senegalese, and it is said that plans are underway to extend it to the new airport in Diass, about 40 kilometres from Dakar.
While President Barrow’s roads are no doubt quite important, but what is the benefit of having good roads when public transport is virtually neglected by the government and the ordinary people can hardly move from point A to point B? We have all been witnesses to the daily hassle that ordinary Gambians go through to reach their various destinations. As a result of the apparent lack of attention given to the public transport sector by the Barrow administration, people seem to spend much more time on the road looking for transport to reach their places of work or other destinations. It is not uncommon to find people as late as midnight or even beyond still looking for transport to get home from work or other errands, including young school children returning from school. This is apparently because there is no proper attention given to the public transport system.
“Those who should address the problem do not seem to care because they and their families are allocated government vehicles and therefore, the daily struggles of ordinary Gambians do not concern them much,” complained a distraught commuter.
Another marked personality differences between President Macky Sall and President Barrow with regards to development is that while Macky seems to concentrate on carrying out his development work without much talk, President Barrow on the other hand makes a lot of noise about the projects he undertakes. While one would hardly hear Macky beating his chest about the development projects he had accomplished, but Barrow is always telling us how much development work he had done, claiming to have done much more than all his predecessors put together, despite the fact that many of those projects were initiated by his predecessors. While Macky would just appraise and execute his projects without much noise and publicity, President Barrow would not only go about promising every community that he would bring development to them, but he would also make so much noise about such projects. Humility should therefore be the watch word here.
A Happy New Year To Everyone