The Gambia knows the cost of a silenced press. For 22 years under Yahya Jammeh, newsrooms were raided, editors were jailed, and journalists were murdered. The trauma of that era is not academic. It is a lived memory for every reporter who still lowers their voice before naming a minister, and for every citizen who learned to read between the lines because the lines themselves were unsafe. That history is why any plan by the government to “control” the media cannot be treated as a technical reform. It must be treated as a test of whether the Barrow administration understands the republic it was elected to lead.
In recent months, signals from Information Minister Dr Ismaila Ceesay have been unmistakable. Draft amendments to the Information and Communications Act, new licensing conditions for broadcasters, proposals for a statutory media council with government appointees, and renewed threats of criminal defamation charges against online publishers all point in one direction: tighter state supervision of who can speak, what can be said, and what punishment follows. The stated justification is familiar. Officials cite “misinformation,” “national security,” and “professional standards.” Those are real concerns. They are also the oldest pretexts in the handbook of media control.
No one serious denies that The Gambia’s media landscape has problems. The rapid growth of online platforms has lowered the barrier to entry, and with it, the average standard of verification. Unedited audio files circulate as fact. Anonymous pages monetise outrage. Political operatives run pseudonymous sites and call it journalism. Reputable newsrooms, meanwhile, struggle to pay salaries, defend lawsuits, and survive advertising droughts. In that environment, the government argues that regulation is not censorship. It is quality control. A statutory council, it says, will protect the public from harm and protect journalists from their own worst impulses.
That argument would carry more weight if the state were a neutral party. It is not. The government is the single biggest news subject in the country. It awards contracts, controls spectrum, licenses frequencies, and commands the police. When the primary subject of coverage also writes the rules of coverage, the conflict of interest is not theoretical. It is structural.
Control rarely arrives as a ban. It arrives as friction. A license renewal that takes 11 months. A defamation law that makes truth an incomplete defence. A “code of conduct” that bans “insulting the authority of the state” without defining insult. A subsidy scheme for community radio that is only available to stations that join a state-approved association. A cybercrime clause that criminalises “false news likely to cause public alarm” and leaves the definition of falsehood to the minister. Each measure is defensible in isolation. Together, they build a cage.
The Gambia has been here before. The 2004 Newspaper Amendment Act raised registration bonds to punish independent papers. The 2013 Information and Communication Amendment Act criminalised online criticism of the government. Both were introduced as modernisation. Both were used as weapons. A government that is serious about not repeating that history would start by repealing those weapons, not building new ones.
A free press does not exist to make journalists comfortable. It exists to make power uncomfortable. It is the only institution whose daily duty is to ask the government to explain itself, with documents and on the record.
If the government wants a stronger media, it should do four things, and none of them involves control.
1. Repeal, not amend, the criminal laws that target speech. Criminal defamation, sedition, and false news provisions have no place in a democracy. Civil remedies for defamation are sufficient. If a minister is lied about, let him sue like any citizen, and let him prove damage in court.
2. Get the state out of media regulation. A press council should be independent, industry-led, and voluntary. The state’s role is to ensure courts are functional, not to seat its appointees on ethics panels. Statutory control of standards becomes political control of content.
3. Stop licensing journalism. Broadcast spectrum needs technical management. News websites do not. Any requirement that a blogger or online newspaper obtain prior permission from the state to publish is prior restraint. It violates both the Constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
4. Fund public interest journalism without owning it. Create a transparent, competitive, arms-length fund for investigative reporting, court coverage, and local news. No editorial conditions. No ministry sign-off. If the government fears bias, let a panel of retired judges, scholars, and working editors administer it.
This editorial is not an exemption for the press. Too many outlets pirate stories, ignore right of reply, and confuse commentary with reporting. Too many owners demand positive coverage of advertisers. Too many reporters take envelopes. The answer to that is better journalism, not state supervision. The Gambia Press Union’s ethics mechanisms need teeth, training must be continuous, and newsrooms must publish corrections with the same prominence as the original error. Trust is earned. But it cannot be earned under a licensing regime that treats journalism as a privilege the state bestows.
You were elected to govern, not to manage the news. The test of your democratic credentials is not how you treat the praise you receive. It is how you treat the criticism you deserve. If your plan to “control” the media proceeds, you will get the quiet you want for six months. You will get the scandal you cannot contain for six years. The Gambia’s history is clear on this point. Repression is not stability. It is deferred chaos.
The government should abandon any plan that gives it power to license, suspend, or discipline media houses. It should replace control with competition, secrecy with transparency, and threat with law. A free press will still get stories wrong. It will still embarrass ministers. It will also, over time, build a country where facts are contested but available, and where power knows it is watched.
