By Kebeli Demba Nyima
John Stuart Mill, in the opening pages of On Liberty, reminded the English-speaking world that the true test of a free society is not its tolerance for agreeable speech but its capacity to withstand the words it finds most irritating, unsettling or outrageous. Mill argued long before our modern civil-society noisemakers appeared that silencing such speech is a form of intellectual cowardice, a confession that one fears the argument rather than its consequences. It is difficult to read the public and police reaction to Borry S Touray’s remarks without recognising how urgently this classical British insight is needed in our present Gambian political landscape.
For what Mill considered the lifeblood of a free society, robust and unfiltered public expression, has now been recast by certain actors as a privilege to be rationed, supervised and sanitised. No one embodies this cramped and domesticated view of liberty more consistently than Madi Jobarteh, whose conception of free speech resembles a guarded doorway through which only those who adopt his preferred tone may pass. In his lectures, freedom of expression shrinks into something like a school rulebook: permissible if polite, legitimate if bland, and commendable only when it is directed at those unlikely to retaliate.
For the sake of poetic indulgence, we can grant the EFSCJR its sermon that political speech must be issue-based, responsible, measured and ethical. Very well. Let us accept their catechism for argument’s sake. The problem is that Borry Touray did exactly that. He stayed within every line of the very doctrine they now pretend to defend, yet he was hauled before the court of public hysteria as if he had committed a capital offence in speech. It is the sort of farcical injustice that would make even a Victorian hanging judge blush. The man followed their rules, and they sent him to the rhetorical guillotine for his obedience.
Any student of political science learns early that democracy is not a curated salon of polite conversation but a noisy, fractious and often uncomfortable contest of competing ideas. British thinkers from Dicey to Hart warned repeatedly that regulating speech by moral taste rather than legal principle produces not stability but paternalism, a kind of soft authoritarianism wrapped in civic virtue. Those advancing this theory in The Gambia misunderstand both the constitutional framework they invoke and the democratic tradition they claim to defend.
Touray’s critique was not synthetic anger. He spoke plainly about President Barrow’s creeping third-term ambition and linked it to the institutional failures, corruption and administrative rot that have swallowed this government whole. He reminded Gambians that Barrow violated the MOU he signed with the Coalition, a document binding him to three years, only to stretch it to five. He then completed his first full term, sought a second and now signals a hunger for a third. Touray merely placed this chronology before the public and asked whether a country drowning in mismanagement should sit idly while one man converts the presidency into personal entitlement. British courts, guided by centuries of jurisprudence, would dismiss any attempt to treat such political critique as criminal. Only fragile democracies mislabel truth-telling as threat-making. The Gambia’s own constitutional jurisprudence, particularly the interpretation of sections on free expression and political participation, recognises that political speech enjoys heightened protection and cannot be criminalised without a clear and demonstrable violation of public order. No such violation exists here.
Lawyer Touray also stated a historical reality no honest scholar disputes. Nations have liberated themselves at great cost and civic resistance has often drawn blood. The idea that this observation constitutes criminality is absurd. It is repeated in scholarship across Africa, Europe and the Americas. To criminalise free speech is to criminalise citizenship and to corrupt the very idea of republican duty.
Touray has defended this country for three decades. He has spoken in courtrooms, conferences and public gatherings long before the current chorus of weekend activists discovered the performance value of condemnation. To portray him now as a threat to democracy is deliberate disinformation, a script written by those who cannot answer his argument and therefore seek to silence it.It is an old political tactic described often in British commentary: when one cannot defeat an argument, one attempts to discredit the speaker.
Touray’s speech lies squarely within the constitutional protection Mill celebrated and which modern legal literature affirms. His critics reveal themselves as advocates of obedience, not liberty, moral theatrics rather than constitutional principle. This controversy exposes a recurring truth: those who shout loudest about democracy are often the first to demand silence when confronted with an uncomfortable fact.
Madi should therefore abandon this exhausting performance of moral grandeur, this habit of leaping into national controversies with the eagerness of an understudy desperate to impress. His interventions are never anchored in law, scholarship or serious reading. They float above the facts like a cloud of righteous vapour, impressive to the unwary but quick to dissolve upon scrutiny. When asked for the legal clause, the constitutional violation or the jurisprudential principle he invokes, he supplies nothing because he knows nothing. This is not activism. It is theatrics dressed as authority.
The decision of the police to charge Touray is built on sand because it rests on no stable legal foundation. When examined carefully, it collapses into nothing more than discomfort with his speech. There is no criminal intent. There is no incitement. There is no statutory violation. Every serious legal analyst, from Dworkin to Robertson, would categorise this as a fundamental category error. It is the confusion of disagreement with danger and the treatment of political critique as criminal conduct. A prosecution that begins without a crime cannot end in justice. By choosing to charge Touray, the police placed themselves on unstable ground, exposed to legal embarrassment and public ridicule. It is a prosecution without substance, and therefore a prosecution that cannot stand.
Security literature reinforces this assessment. David Bayley, Lawrence Sherman and other leading scholars warn that policing loses legitimacy when law enforcement appears to police emotions rather than threats. By charging Touray, the GPF risks appearing not as a guardian of public order but as a custodian of political sensitivity. This is a perilous posture for any security institution, especially one seeking to rehabilitate its image.
And this is precisely why the police, who currently enjoy the highest public confidence rating in years, must not allow themselves to be dragged into the glimmer and glamour of social media theatrics. Sir Robert Peel would warn that public trust, once squandered, returns at the pace of a British winter sunrise, slow, reluctant and never guaranteed.
As such, the police can correct course without humiliation. A lawful withdrawal of the charge would demonstrate maturity and respect for constitutional boundaries. It would show the public that the GPF understands the difference between dangerous conduct and provocative speech. It would reaffirm the principle that policing serves the law, not fleeting sentiment or activist theatre. A public statement clarifying the constitutional protection of political speech would help repair the damage. Such a course correction is not a retreat. It is an assertion of institutional dignity and legal fidelity.
The unavoidable conclusion is straightforward. The prosecution of Borry Touray is built on sand. It sinks under scrutiny. It collapses upon contact with the law. If allowed to proceed, it will stain the police, erode public confidence and constrict the democratic space at precisely the moment the Republic must guard it with vigilance. For the integrity of the police, the credibility of the state and the health of our democracy, the charge must be withdrawn.
A prosecution built on sand cannot stand, and the police must not allow themselves to stand with it.
