By Adama Faye
In August 2024, Gambia signed a 500 million-dollar port expansion agreement with the Dubai-based DP World, which promised Banjul a modernised gateway and made it a major maritime hub in West Africa. Government officials celebrated it as a breaking point in development—the type of development that could lead to better trade efficiency and increased investment and the integration of the country deeper into regional value chains. But in the background of the festivities, lots of Gambians were silently asking themselves, was this mega-deal an indication of national development or a further commitment to international capital that erodes sovereignty? This conflict of ambition and vulnerability reflects the very dynamics that have been discussed by scholars of international political economy for a long time.
In order to know what is at stake, we can refer to the mercantilist logic of contemporary geopolitics. Modern states are more like firms in a competitive international market, as Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press 2018 put it, mapping the ways to acquire strategic resources in other countries to build their power and minimize vulnerability. International investments in ports, energy infrastructure, and telecommunications are hardly neutral; rather, they are bound up in national strategy. This strategic thinking is evident in the widening footprint of DP World in Africa, including Dakar, through Berbera to Maputo. Ports are not only logistical parks but also power tools, which influence trade routes, income streams, and political influence. The Port of Banjul in this respect is becoming integrated into a wider geopolitical system whereby the strategic interests of an external actor determine the lines of Gambian development. The opening of the economy that seems liberal is, on a better examination, the penetration of Gambia into a mercantilism project by another state.
The Gambian government, of course, puts the deal in another light. Political leaders introduce it as an argument of economic nationalism, a practical adoption of foreign investment to face the limitations of resources and modernise faster. Eric Helleiner 2002 is able to remind us that economic nationalism is not necessarily protectionist; small states often utilize liberal instruments of the economy, including privatisation and foreign investment, to achieve national objectives. Based on this reasoning, the outsourcing of port expansion is not a loss of sovereignty but the exploitation of foreign competence to attain national dreams. However, the more important question is, is it global capital that is using Gambia, or is it Gambia that is using global capital?
There is a sobering critical IPE perspective. Globalisation does not destroy power structures, as Andreas Bieler and Adam Morton (2003) argue; it just restructures them. Peripheral states are in a relationship formed by structural inequality instead of mutual gain once they rely on foreign companies to provide their basic infrastructure. The DP World acquisition belongs to a more extended historical trend in which African economies are modernized without localizing power. Technology, administration, and top-level decision-making tend to be peripheral, whereas local workers take precarity and elites conclude the conditions of interaction. Automation of dockworkers is already a subject of concern to Gambian dockworkers, who worry about the loss of jobs, loss of union influence, and loss of local know-how. Modernisation, according to this perspective, comes with the re-creation of class structures that favor world capital and local elites at the expense of workers.
Theorists of dependency such as Samir Amin would say that the expansion of the Gambian port is indicative of the structural form of the unequal world economy. The infrastructure becomes better, and the dependency becomes stronger. The creation of values is local, but they are external. It makes the country more closely linked to the world of global trade, but in the majority of aspects it is structurally subordinate to it. This reading is echoed in Gurminder Bhambra, reminding us that modern capitalism can no longer be detached from its colonial roots. The Port of Banjul itself was constructed to access the extraction of the empire; the contemporary modernisation of it is under the threat of reviving those extractive logics on the pretext of development.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that Gambia is not vulnerable. The agency of small states involves making partners more diverse, finding superior terms, and leveraging the infrastructural improvements to effect broader economic change. Such strategic diversification can be seen in the flow of interactions the government has with various external actors, not to mention the Chinese, Turkish, or the Gulf, but it is a realist effort to avoid being over-dependent on any particular sphere of influence. Agency is, however, not equal to autonomy. Bargaining power becomes less as the debts of the population increase and the financial opportunities become stricter. The problem is not just developing modern infrastructure but making it serve the national interests and not making it a system of foreign domination.
The future of the DP World deal is conditional on political decisions that are yet to be taken. Will it be transparent and fair in regard to revenue sharing? Will Gambian employees have access to stable and skilled jobs? Will the port be a trigger to domestic industrialization or merely a linking point in foreign-dominated value chains? With these questions, the project will either fortify the sovereignty of the countries or be another episode in a long history of dependency.
With the world economy becoming increasingly unequal and mercantilist strategies resurrected by global powers, Gambia is at the crossroads. The modernised Port of Banjul would be able to put the economy of the country on its own feet—or, even better, put on its chains to the international systems over which it has no control. It is yet to be seen in the years to come whether modernisation has opened the way to authentic autonomy or the country has exchanged one form of dependency for another.
Adama Faye is a Gambian scholar, a Master Fellow at the Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia. She is a scholar of the themes of the intersection of diplomacy, governance, and international political dynamics, with a specific interest in Africa and the Muslim world. Regarded as an analytical clarity and adherence to critical inquiry, she remains a contributor to new debates in global politics and international relations.
