By Kebeli Demba Nyima
When Adama Barrow won the 2016 election against longtime dictator Yahya Jammeh, he was seen not merely as a victor, but as a liberator. The language was biblical, the expectations messianic. After twenty-two years under the iron grip of Yahya Jammeh, Gambians wanted deliverance from the evil clutches of dictatorship. In fact, this is why Ousainu Darboe must be forgiven for hailing Barrow as Moses, the reluctant shepherd who parts the Red Sea and leads a traumatised people out of bondage. History, however, has a habit of stripping leaders of their borrowed robes. Time, that most pitiless auditor, does not accept symbolism as payment.
Barrow’s rise had all the elements of cinematic serendipity. He was the understudy who wandered onto the stage during the final act and found the lead actor already collapsing from exhaustion. The audience, desperate for the curtain to fall on tyranny, applauded the substitute as though he were the playwright’s original intent. In truth, he did not defeat Jammeh so much as inherit Jammeh’s defeat. Jammeh’s downfall came about through the collective efforts of coalition partners from different opposition parties, while Ecowas diplomacy, regional military pressure, and Jammeh’s own strategic miscalculations cleared the path without which that victory would not have come to fruition.
After the regional intervention and the wishes of the electorate prevailed, Barrow was installed, waving and promising a republic reborn. Yet he governed as though symbolism could be monetised indefinitely, as though the memory of dictatorship could be traded like an old war bond that never matures. His presidency has behaved like a depreciating asset: impressive at acquisition, unimpressive in use, and nearly worthless on resale.
From 2016 to the present, Barrow’s presidency has steadily revealed itself as intellectually thin and administratively inert. The economy has offered no structural relief to ordinary citizens. Living costs have climbed while incomes have stagnated. Youth unemployment has hardened into permanence, turning migration into a rational economic decision rather than a reckless gamble. Public institutions are swollen with loyalty appointments yet starved of competence. Anti-corruption rhetoric is plentiful; anti-corruption action is scarce. Transitional justice has been selectively embraced, then quietly diluted, its moral force traded for short-term political convenience. Foreign policy oscillates between dependency and incoherence. The state survives, but only in the way a patient survives on life support.
Simply put, Barrow’s great failure is not malice but vacancy. He has governed without animating ideas, without a governing philosophy robust enough to discipline power. Authority, in his hands, has been treated as property rather than trust. Ministers rotate not on performance but on proximity. Loyalty is rewarded, scrutiny resented. The presidency has come to resemble a warehouse of expendable commodities, where officials are shelved, discounted, and replaced without any discernible strategy beyond survival.
This is why the Moses analogy ultimately indicts rather than elevates Barrow. Moses, whatever one makes of theology, did not confuse liberation with possession. Moses did not merely extract the Israelites from Egypt and then preside over drift. He imposed law, structure, and discipline in the wilderness, precisely because liberation without order invites regression. Barrow, by contrast, merely erected a golden calf and asks the person to worship.He asks Gambians to vote not for a future, but against their own memory. He trades endlessly on Jammeh’s sins because he has too little to offer in his own name.
No Gambian of sound mind would vote for such a record if judged on its merits rather than its mythology. Elections are not gratitude ceremonies; they are performance reviews. And this one is damning. The question before the electorate is no longer who freed them in 2016, but who has failed them since. Time has done what propaganda could not. It has exposed the difference between a liberator and a custodian, between symbolism and substance.
History is unforgiving to leaders who confuse the moment of arrival with the work of governance. Barrow entered the story as a placeholder for hope. He now lingers as a reminder that deliverance, once achieved, must be followed by competence, courage, and conviction. Without these, even Moses would have been voted out of office.
