By: The Fatu Network Editorial
Momodou Sabally, Special Adviser to President Adama Barrow, has strongly rebuffed allegations made by Lare Sisay, a prominent figure in the opposition United Democratic Party (UDP), that the president plans to declare a state of emergency to retain power beyond the 2026 elections.
In a detailed statement obtained by The Fatu Network and posted on his social media this morning, Sabally characterized Sisay as a “disgruntled retired conspiracy theorist” making “outlandish allegations” without factual basis.
“My initial reaction to Lare Sisay’s claim that President Barrow plans to rig the 2026 election was to ignore the outlandish allegations of a disgruntled retired conspiracy theorist,” Sabally wrote, adding that he felt compelled to respond due to the potential for misinformation.
The rebuttal comes just one day after Sisay, identified as a UDP supporter in an interview with Kibarro Network, claimed President Barrow had developed a three-pronged strategy to maintain power.
“President Barrow has three strategies ahead of the 2026 presidential election. The first strategy is to steal the election just like he did in 2021 but the Masembeh by-election has revealed that is no more possible for him,” Sisay stated on Sunday. “His second strategy is to buy the election and again the Masembeh by-election has shown that is not possible. Now what is left for him is to appoint someone at the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) or to use our security to put them in place so that if anything happens he can declare a State of emergency.”
Sabally, a former Secretary General, Presidential Affairs Minister, and ex-Campaign Manager of the UDP, dismissed Sisay’s predictions based on the Massembeh Ward by-election, calling them statistically insignificant.
“Taking the 1213 total votes cast in the Massembeh Ward by-election as a percentage of the total of 859 thousand votes cast in the 2021 election yields 0.1%,” Sabally wrote. “Who, in his right mind, would consider that a reliable sample size that would yield the desired confidence level, and margin of error to make any respectable prediction in this age of data science in a knowledge economy?”
Sabally further stated that after joining the NPP and touring the country, he has become convinced that “the NPP actually has more supporters among the eligible voter population than the opposition parties combined.”
In his interview, Sisay also claimed the Barrow administration was primarily concerned with securing their wealth rather than governing effectively, stating, “They no more care about the country, this is how they are thinking.”
