The Gambia opposition is dead: A graveyard of promises, no agenda, no foresight 

By Musa Bassadi Jawara

The political situation in this country is very sad. It is the sadness of a nation that wakes up each morning with more questions than answers, more wounds than remedies, and more leaders than leadership. We have mistaken noise for vision, rhetoric for reform, and presence for purpose. The republic exists, but the idea of the republic has been abandoned.

December elections are fast approaching. This is not just another electoral cycle. It is a referendum on survival. Yet as the nation braces for a decision that will shape the next five years, there is no single opposition party with a coherent economic plan, a development plan, a social development plan, a security plan, or an international and multilateral agenda that addresses all aspects of the national question. We are being asked to choose, but there is nothing to choose from.

This is the graveyard condition: a political class that mastered campaigning and forgot governing. Opposition parties exist in name, but not in function. They have offices, banners, and press conferences. What they do not have is a blueprint. No roadmap for jobs. No strategy for energy independence. No design for healthcare beyond slogans. No vision for education beyond complaints. A nation cannot be built on grievance alone.

The laziness is structural. They have had years between elections and filled them with press releases instead of policy papers. Inefficiency is their doctrine. Meetings without minutes. Rallies without research. Promises without personnel to execute. Weakness is their signature — weak research units, weak policy desks, weak ideological spines. They are experts at identifying what is wrong and amateurs at designing what is right.

The gravity of this vacuum cannot be overstated. Elections without alternatives produce not democracy, but rotation. And rotation without reform is just the same decay wearing a new face. The Gambian people are being shortchanged twice: first by the failures of incumbency, and second by the emptiness of the alternative.

They underestimated and under-rated President Barrow as inadequate, cavalier, uneducated, incompetent. The opposition leaders, especially the UDP leadership, believed this. They thought power would fall into their hands by default because the man did not speak their grammar or walk their corridor. He surprised them. He studied them. And he dealt them a mortal political blow. That miscalculation is why we are here.

Address poverty, and you find hopelessness staring back. In health, our hospitals are spaces of endurance, not healing. In education, our children are graduating into unemployment. In agriculture, the backbone of our rural economy, farmers still gamble with rain while policy sleeps. The underprivileged remain underprivileged because no political force has designed a system to lift them.

The opposition thrives on scandals, complains, and press conferences. That is their full progressive agenda. No alternative budget. No shadow cabinet with portfolios. No plan that answers “how” and “when.” They are loud in opposition and empty in preparation. Barrow, despite his failings and peccadilloes, has no rival. Because you cannot defeat a government with outrage alone. You defeat it with organisation.

The pain and suffering of the people is not abstract. It is the mother who cannot afford a bag of rice. It is the youth who crosses the desert not because he wants to, but because he sees no future here. It is the farmer who watches crops fail while politics fails harder. Poverty is not just material. It is spiritual. It is the slow death of belief.

And here is the major punch line: the incumbent will retire them all. He will retire the old guard, the gerontocracy, the men who mistake age for wisdom and tenure for talent. He will retire them because they never built anything to retire with. No movement. No institution. No succession plan. Just personalities and pride. That is the political obituary the opposition wrote for itself.

Every year when Eid or national feasts arrive, we suffer in pain. Prices rise, salaries collapse, and dignity is discounted. Then the feast passes, the prayers are forgotten, and we return to silence. We never address the underground causes. We treat symptoms once a year and call it compassion. This is sick. A society that only remembers its poor during holidays is a society that has not yet decided to live.

The Gambia is a country of two million people. Senegal is 18 million. The scale of our infrastructural needs is, by every measure, more manageable. Roads, clinics, schools, water, power — these are not fantasies for a nation our size. They are choices. And choices require planning. Yet here we are, in this day and age, still dependent on Senegal for electricity. That dependence is not destiny. It is design failure.

This is not merely the failure of the Barrow administration. The blame must be shared with the opposition and the entire political establishment. Because opposition is not just to oppose. Opposition is to propose. To present a credible alternative that forces the government to compete for ideas. When opposition abandons that duty, incumbency becomes complacent. We are witnessing that complacency now.

Consider the main opposition party, UDP, and its leadership. In 2017 and 2018 they were in power. They controlled key government ministries and institutions. They occupied diplomatic and foreign services. They commanded a super majority in the National Assembly. This was not potential. This was power. Real, constitutional, historic power.

The Gambian people were failed at that moment. UDP government failed to deliver a new constitution after 22 years of autocratic rule. The 2020 draft constitution, the closest we came to closing that chapter, was defeated by a UDP-led National Assembly. NPP had no single assembly member at the time. The Gambia had tasted a UDP government. That is the hard reality history will record.

Instead of consolidating that moment, the UDP leader was occupied with replacing the Barrow presidency through a ferocious weekend campaign onslaught. It was a lapse in judgment, greed, egocentric ambition, megalomania. What he failed to realize was that it was the closest the country had come to making structural change for future generations. Personal ego clouded strategic vision.

He had absolute control and influence over President Barrow at the time. Any meaningful reform was possible. Constitutional reform. Security sector reform. Judicial independence. The window was open. Then the acrimonious split of 2019 occurred. Barrow surrounded himself with remnants of the old order. And the result is res ipso loquitur — the thing speaks for itself. Back to square one. Back to the vestiges of dictatorship without the name.

Political science teaches us that opposition has three functions: to scrutinize, to propose, and to prepare for governance. Scrutiny without proposals becomes noise. Proposals without preparation becomes fantasy. Preparation without vision becomes bureaucracy. The Gambian opposition has failed all three. It scrutinises without depth, proposes without detail, and prepares without a philosophy of state.

This is why political support theories matter. In mature democracies, opposition is the “government in waiting.” It mirrors ministries, publishes shadow budgets, and debates foreign policy. In The Gambia, opposition is a “government in waiting for outrage.” We wait for scandals, not solutions. We wait for anger, not alternatives. That is not opposition theory. That is opposition decay.

The tragedy is that the people know this. They feel it. They see through the cycle. Government fails, opposition shouts, government survives, opposition disappears until the next election. The electorate is not fooled. They are exhausted. And an exhausted electorate defaults to the known, even when the known is flawed. That is how incumbency survives without performance.

With all the failings of the Barrow administration — economic hardships, deepening poverty, infrastructural gaps — the opposition has not presented a superior alternative. No seismic policy shift. No national agenda that answers the question: what happens on Day 1 after you win? Without that answer, elections become exercises in familiarity, not transformation.

Unless there is a major and seismic upset, the current government led by incumbent President Barrow is likely to continue after the December presidential elections. Not because the government is invincible, but because the opposition is invisible. In politics, emptiness does not defeat failure. It enables it.

This is the diagnosis. The Gambian opposition is dead. It died not on election day, but in the years between elections, when it should have been building. It died when it chose personalities over policies, campaigns over constitutions, and ego over institutions. What remains is a graveyard of promises. Headstones for every pledge made and abandoned.

The nation deserves better. Two million people deserve more than this cycle of pain and forgetting. They deserve an opposition that thinks, plans, and governs on paper before it asks to govern in reality. Until that happens, December will come, votes will be cast, and the republic will remain a project unfinished. The last rampart has been abandoned. And the graveyard grows.

I have been on record on numerous occasions that I’m not running for political office, but I will not be silent as our nation and the very idea of the republic crumbles into ashes. As Martin Luther King Jr warned: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” And as Albert Einstein reminded us: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” Silence in this moment is complicity. And I refuse to be complicit while a generation inherits ruins.

My book Village Life discussed at length the issues raised above — politics, poverty, education, agriculture, dignity, and the slow erosion of hope in our communities. I wrote it not as an academic exercise, but as a cry from the soil that raised me. If these words reach one young Gambian, one tired mother, one disillusioned elder, and remind them that we deserve better than this cycle, then the pen has done its work. The Gambia is not finished. The people are not finished. And as long as there is breath, there is duty. Let December judge us. But let history record that when the last rampart was abandoned, someone still stood and spoke. For The Gambia. For the future. For the ages.

Musa Bassadi Jawara is an economist and author. He lives at Bintou’s Point, Kerewan, Kombo North.