By Kebeli Demba Nyima
In December 2025, I wrote a rebuttal to Dr Ebrima Ceesay’s article, “Ba Tambadou and Amie Bensouda Exonerated,” because even then his argument struck me as analytically premature, legally careless, and empirically ungrounded. My objection was never emotional. It was methodological. As a political scientist, I found it astonishing that anyone could speak of “exoneration” before the completion of a competent institutional review, especially in a matter involving state assets, public finance, ministerial authority, and the integrity of post-authoritarian justice. The point I made then was simple: testimony is not exoneration, parliamentary appearance is not acquittal, and elite reputation is not evidence. The National Assembly’s adopted findings of 11th March, 2026 have now vindicated that broader caution. They do not amount to a criminal conviction, but they do demolish the lazy certainty with which some commentators rushed to sanitise conduct that had not yet been subjected to full institutional scrutiny.
What parliament has now done is politically significant and constitutionally serious. The Special Select Committee, established by the National Assembly in May 2025 to investigate the sale and disposal of Yahya Jammeh’s forfeited assets, was not a gossip club or a media tribunal. It was a formal oversight body created under the assembly’s constitutional and standing-order powers, with a clear mandate to examine legality, transparency, purchasers, and the management of sale proceeds. Its report was then presented to the plenary and adopted by lawmakers. That matters because in constitutional politics, adopted parliamentary findings occupy a different moral and institutional register from newspaper polemics or partisan talking points.
The committee’s findings are devastating because they point not to an isolated clerical lapse, but to what it expressly described as a “systematic pattern of violations” of the Public Finance Act 2014. According to the adopted report, former Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubacarr Tambadou presided over the opening of commercial bank accounts without authorisation, bypassed the accountant general, operated parallel financial arrangements outside the statutory framework, and sidelined the Ministry of Finance from a process in which finance law should have been central. The committee further found that he threatened then Finance Minister Mambury Njie after Njie insisted on compliance with the law, and it recommended criminal investigations and proceedings for alleged violations of the Public Finance Act, abuse of office, and economic crimes.
From a political science perspective, this is not merely about one man. It is about state formation, institutional credibility, and the difference between transitional rhetoric and democratic consolidation. Post-authoritarian states often commit a familiar error: they become so morally invested in punishing the sins of the old regime that they become careless about the procedural integrity of the new one. That is how reform coalitions drift into what scholars of governance call “exceptionalist administration”, where officials convince themselves that because their ends are noble, ordinary controls may be bent, bypassed, or treated as inconvenient formalities. But modern democratic governance does not work that way. The rule of law is tested precisely when the cause is emotionally popular. If a government cannot obey public finance law while disposing of the assets of a disgraced ex-dictator, then its commitment to legality is theatrical rather than constitutional.
The empirical significance of the committee’s findings is strengthened by the legal framework itself. The Public Finance Act requires that government receipts be paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund, and it restricts the opening of government bank accounts to arrangements authorised through the accountant general. Related Financial Regulations also stress that government bank accounts with commercial banks require approval on the recommendation of the accountant general, and that account operators must regularly submit statements and reconciliations. In other words, the controls parliament says were bypassed were not decorative bureaucratic rituals. They were precisely the safeguards designed to prevent opaque handling of public money.
That is why the “parallel financial systems” language in the committee report is so serious. In comparative politics, parallel systems are the hallmark of weak institutionalisation. They indicate a state in which formal rules exist on paper but real power is exercised through ad hoc networks, informal discretion, and personalised decision channels. When that occurs in the justice sector, the damage is multiplied, because the Ministry of Justice is not just another spending agency. It is supposed to model legality for the rest of government. The committee itself invoked section 72(2) of the Constitution, noting that the attorney general is the government’s principal legal adviser and therefore carries a heightened obligation to ensure that executive action remains within the law. If the legal gatekeeper is accused by parliament of disabling the gate, the problem is no longer administrative. It becomes constitutional.
The wider record also supports the view that this is not a trivial matter inflated by politics. The Republic reported that proceeds from some sales and dividends were paid into a commercial bank recovery account rather than the Consolidated Revenue Fund, that documentation gaps persisted around closures and transfers, and that Alpha Kapital Advisory was appointed without competitive bidding while earning substantial commissions. The same report notes lawmakers’ concerns that the Ministry of Finance was deliberately excluded so legal financial controls could be bypassed. Even if every recommended charge is not ultimately sustained in court, the pattern described is one of structural disregard for orthodox fiscal governance.
There is also an important democratic context. This inquiry did not emerge from thin air. It followed The Republic’s investigative reporting, widespread public outrage, youth-led protests, and a formal parliamentary decision in May 2025 to establish a special committee. President Barrow himself publicly acknowledged national concern, stated that some transactions were brought to his attention only later, and promised that his government would enforce the findings of the National Assembly and National Audit Office to hold accountable any individual or entity found culpable. That presidential statement now returns to him like a promissory note. The findings are in. The report has been adopted. The pledge can no longer remain rhetorical.
This is where the current government faces a genuine test. The Barrow administration cannot treat the report as a symbolic cleansing exercise and then quietly shelve the hard parts. If it does so, three consequences are likely.
First, it will deepen public cynicism. Citizens were told that the Jammeh era would be followed by a new constitutional culture of transparency and accountability. If a report of this gravity is adopted by parliament and then ignored by the executive, the public will draw the obvious conclusion: accountability exists only for the weak, the unknown, and the politically disposable. That is how anti-corruption regimes lose legitimacy.
Second, it will damage transitional justice itself. Tambadou is not an obscure official. He is closely associated with the post-2017 justice architecture. That makes due process especially important. The government must neither protect him because of his stature nor persecute him because he is symbolically useful. But refusing to investigate because of his historic role would be institutionally disastrous. Transitional justice cannot mean moral immunity for those who helped design it. If anything, the standard should be higher.
Third, it will undermine ongoing public financial management reform. IMF reporting on The Gambia has repeatedly stressed the importance of strengthening public financial management, including treasury controls and the Treasury Single Account, precisely to improve transparency, accountability, and control over revenue and expenditure. If a high-profile case involving unauthorised accounts and off-framework financial arrangements is allowed to evaporate, then reform documents will read like ceremonial literature rather than instruments of state discipline.
The recommendation concerning Dawda Jallow is also politically revealing. Parliament did not recommend criminal proceedings against him in the excerpted findings, but it did recommend reprimand on the ground that he failed to reverse or regularise the unlawful administrative arrangements he inherited. That is an important distinction. In governance terms, the committee is saying that continuity itself became culpable. Institutional decay often survives not because successors invent new abuses, but because they legitimise inherited ones through passivity. The report therefore casts the problem as one of broader ministerial and bureaucratic failure inside the Office of the Attorney General, not simply one individual’s overreach.
So what should the government do now, empirically and constitutionally?
It should first refer the matter immediately for criminal investigation through the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions, exactly along the lines recommended by parliament. This is not because guilt has already been established, but because a parliamentary finding of systematic statutory violations is more than sufficient to trigger a professionally independent criminal process. Delay would only create suspicion of political bargaining.
It should second publish, in full, the committee report and all non-privileged supporting schedules relevant to sales, bank accounts, authorisations, valuations, and transfers. In a scandal rooted in opacity, secrecy is not neutrality. Secrecy becomes complicity.
It should third request a forensic financial audit of every recovery account, escrow arrangement, sale receipt, commission payment, and transfer chain associated with the Jammeh asset disposals. Parliamentary oversight has identified the institutional problem; forensic accounting must now establish the transactional map.
It should fourth suspend, review, or where necessary terminate all residual administrative arrangements created outside treasury norms, and ensure that every current and future asset recovery process is routed strictly through the lawful public finance architecture. If proceeds belong to the Gambian people, then they must move through Gambian law.
It should fifth consider engaging the Anti-Corruption Commission where its statutory functions are relevant. The Anti-Corruption Act empowers the Commission to investigate acts of corruption and related offences, examine public-sector systems that facilitate fraud or corruption, and advise on recovery or protection of public property. A scandal of this sort is exactly the kind of case that tests whether the new anti-corruption architecture exists for real governance or for ceremonial optimism.
It should sixth protect the integrity of the process by avoiding triumphalism. The proper democratic posture is not vengeance but institutional sobriety. The government must say, in effect: Parliament has raised grave issues, the law will now take its course, and all persons remain entitled to due process. That is how mature states act.
My broader point remains what it was in December 2025. Serious analysts do not confuse temporary political comfort with empirical closure. Too many commentators in The Gambia mistake elite testimony for innocence, proximity to reform for virtue, and polished professional reputation for legal cleanliness. But institutions exist because reputations are unreliable. This week’s parliamentary findings do not prove every allegation in the criminal sense. What they do prove is that the earlier chorus of premature absolution was intellectually unserious. No competent scholar should have declared the matter closed before the institutions had spoken. Parliament has now spoken, and it has spoken in language that is grave, specific, and impossible to dismiss as mere rumour.
The Barrow government therefore stands at a fork in the road. One path leads to institutional seriousness: investigation, disclosure, lawful prosecution where warranted, administrative reform, and a reaffirmation that even the architects of the new order are answerable to the law. The other leads to selective accountability, elite protection, and the slow collapse of public trust. In political development, governments are rarely destroyed by the first scandal. They are weakened by the scandal they refuse to confront. This is now no longer only about Ba Tambadou. It is about whether the Third Republic intends to be governed by laws, or merely by the biographies of those who claim to embody them.
