By Kebeli Demba Nyima
The People’s Progressive Party has returned to the political arena with renewed vigour, like a Victorian quack hauling an old bottle from beneath the counter and insisting it cures a modern illness. A party that governed for three decades, delivered little structural change and infrastructural development, now presents itself as the remedy for ailments it once had an opportunity to address. We are told that under Jawara it was the best of times, and that everything since has been the worst of times. All that remains, apparently, is for Gambians to vote correctly in 2026 and watch history obediently reverse.
Only the credulous will buy this.
Like the village healer who insists the medicine failed only because the patient doubted, PPP apologists argue that the party did not truly fail. Yet the development record from the late Jawara era sits stubbornly in the bottom tier of comparative measurement. UNDP’s Human Development Index time series places The Gambia in the category of low human development by 1990, with an HDI value of 0.331, below the low human development group average of 0.346. This reflects weak outcomes in education, longevity, and living standards by the end of the PPP’s long incumbency. Empirically, this is what political scientists mean when they distinguish administrative continuity from developmental capacity. A state can keep offices open, budgets tidy, and institutions running, yet still fail to convert authority into broad-based productivity, mass human capital formation, and structural transformation. In this reading, the claim that the PPP exceeded expectations collapses into a familiar post hoc narrative device that confuses quantity with quality.
In a recent article published in The Point, Abdoulie Baks Touray, an economist by training and a politician by imagination, produced a list of “11 historic truths” purporting to catalogue the remarkable achievements of the PPP government. It is an impressive inventory, carefully assembled to dazzle the unwary reader but not an educated mind.
Listing institutions is easy. Proving that they delivered development is not.
Yes, The Gambia maintained a functioning civil service. But how functional was it when corruption was widespread, when state ministers could own multiple properties, purchase houses for mistresses, and send their children to expensive universities abroad while the domestic public education system remained starved of investment and opportunity?
Yes, the government ran balanced budgets at various points. But fiscal discipline, when divorced from strategic investment, tells us little about development. Budgetary restraint that coincides with stagnant skills, limited mobility, and narrow opportunity structures is not evidence of sound economic management. It is evidence of underinvestment.
Yes, the state owned ships, airlines, hotels, cooperatives, and export schemes. But in serious political economy, state ownership is not itself a measure of national success. Development economics draws a clear distinction between asset possession and productive transformation. What matters is not whether the state owns enterprises, but whether those enterprises raise productivity, deepen value chains, transfer skills, crowd in private investment, and generate sustainable fiscal returns. Public assets that operate at a loss, rely on subsidies, or serve narrow elite interests do not constitute development. They merely transfer costs to taxpayers. From a structuralist and developmental-state perspective, state-owned enterprises are justified only insofar as they correct market failures, accelerate industrialisation, and expand domestic capacity. Where they fail to do so, they become symbols of ambition without impact.
What matters, ultimately, is whether these policies and institutions altered the economic structure and improved lives.
On that test, the Jawara era fails.
Yahya Jammeh was a dictator, and no serious observer disputes the repression, brutality, and human rights violations that defined his rule. But political analysis does not allow moral judgment to substitute for empirical comparison. It was under Jammeh that The Gambia established its first national university, introduced a state television broadcaster, expanded the health sector, and modernised key infrastructure, including the international airport. These developments do not absolve authoritarianism, but they do expose the weakness of the claim that the PPP represented a superior developmental era. Jammeh governed badly and often recklessly, but he governed a state that, for the first time, began to invest in institutional depth that the PPP had deferred for decades.
Adama Barrow, for his part, entered office framed as the embodiment of democratic renewal and reform. That promise has steadily eroded. Under his administration, governance has drifted, corruption has become normalised, and reform momentum has slowed. Yet even these shortcomings do not rehabilitate the PPP by default. The failures of the present do not transform the limitations of the past into virtues.
Treating the Jammeh and Barrow administrations as a single, homogeneous failure while presenting the PPP as a lost golden age assumes that all post-1994 political and economic developments are irrelevant to historical evaluation. Such an assumption obscures meaningful variation across regimes and distracts from the structural deficiencies of the PPP period itself, which failed to prepare the state for the demands of modern governance.
A party that struggled to govern a population of fewer than one million cannot reasonably be expected to manage a nation of nearly three million in an era where the scale and complexity of challenges facing states have multiplied.
The truth is therefore straightforward. The PPP did not preside over a golden age interrupted by misfortune. It presided over a prolonged period of caution, missed opportunity, and structural inertia. That failure created the conditions for rupture in 1994 and left successor governments to govern a state already behind the curve.
The PPP is entitled to participate in democratic politics. It is not entitled to rewrite history. Gambians are entitled to opposition. They are not obliged to reward historical misrepresentation.
The PPP was not a safe past.
It was a long delay.
