Kebeli Demba Nyima
I have read Mr Bakary Bunja Dabo’s latest defence of the PPP government’s failure to establish a national university, and I regard it as one of the weakest exercises in retrospective excuse-making to enter Gambian public discourse in recent years. His argument is elegant in tone but threadbare in substance. He contends that Sir Dawda Jawara’s government did not build a university chiefly because of resource constraints, and that the PPP nonetheless deserves credit because it left behind the policy blueprint later used by Yahya Jammeh to establish the University of The Gambia. If one accepts Mr Dabo’s logic, then the man who doodles a bridge on paper should share the glory with the engineer who actually spans the river. That argument asks the public to confuse intention with achievement and historical sympathy with empirical judgment.
The first problem with Mr Dabo’s defence is that it reduces a thirty-year governing record to a permanent alibi of scarcity. States are not judged only by the obstacles they faced; they are judged by the priorities they chose under those constraints. I believe that thirty uninterrupted years in power provided sufficient time to plan, prioritise, and gradually build major national institutions. A university is not built overnight, but neither does it require a political generation simply to move beyond the planning stage. When an institution remains unrealised after thirty years, it is reasonable to question whether the obstacle was purely financial or whether priorities lay elsewhere. Indeed, the priorities of the PPP were to take care of the ruling class rather than the working class.
A World Bank education sector report prepared at the end of the Jawara era makes the position plain: In 1988–89 The Gambia still had no national university, higher education beyond Gambia College required studying abroad, and the country’s post-secondary sector remained tiny, with roughly 350 students at Gambia College and about 500 at the Gambia Technical Training Institute. The same report also showed that recurrent spending per post-secondary student was already very high relative to lower levels of education. In other words, the state was spending money in the tertiary space but was not building the institution that would have anchored that spending at home.
That is why the “resource constraint” argument collapses under inspection. Poverty can explain delay; it cannot explain three decades of political hesitation. The country was too poor to build a university for working-class families, yet it was not poor enough to stop ministers from sending their sons and daughters to the most expensive universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe. BB Dabo’s own children were educated in London while the average Gambian child could barely even gain access to high school education. The World Bank report did not describe an abandoned state with no external support. It described an education sector with a formal policy framework, donor-backed reform structures, and continued prospects for external assistance. If a government could prepare long-range policy, negotiate with development partners, and maintain overseas scholarship schemes, then the issue was not simply the absence of money. It was the absence of a decisive political choice to translate educational aspiration into a national university.
Mr Dabo’s second line of defence is even weaker. He says Jammeh found the blueprint there and merely “jumped on it”. Very well. Let us accept that, for the sake of argument. What follows? Not that the PPP should be absolved, but that it had reached the point of knowing what needed to be done and still failed to do it. In public policy, a blueprint is not the same as an outcome. A government does not earn historical praise because it considered reform in theory while leaving the next regime to claim the concrete act.
And this is where the public is entitled to be angry. The issue is not merely whether some policy paper existed. The AFPRC came to power with a legitimacy problem, a hostile external climate, and none of the political comfort enjoyed by the old civilian order. Yet under that supposedly worse environment, university-level education became no longer a dream but a reality. During the transition period the AFPRC was able to bring formal university programmes to the doorsteps of Gambians. For the first time in history, Gambian students were able to pursue academic degrees locally through Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, and later through the University of The Gambia itself.
An official UTG page states plainly that the university’s creation in 1999 fulfilled a “long-standing desire of the people of The Gambia”. A longstanding desire is not the same thing as an already-built institution unjustly denied its praise. It is, rather, a desire that had been left unfulfilled for too long. One may loathe Jammeh’s later tyranny and one should but hatred is not a substitute for chronology. The institutional record is the institutional record.
There is a deeper point here that Mr Dabo’s interview glides over. Sending students abroad to Fourah Bay College and other foreign institutions may have helped some Gambians acquire advanced training, but it was never a substitute for domestic university formation. A scholarship model trains individuals; a national university builds a system. One produces scattered graduates; the other produces faculty, research culture, professional networks, national accreditation pathways, and a durable intellectual centre.
Nor does Mr Dabo rescue the PPP by shifting to the claim that missionary schools were largely government-funded through grant-in-aid. That is a different argument about secondary education finance, not an answer to the university question. Subsidising schools built or run by others is not the same as constructing the central national institution of higher learning that generations of Gambians lacked. It is rather like a landlord boasting that he helped pay the rent on neighbouring houses while never building his own. One may acknowledge the value of grant-in-aid without pretending it solves the separate problem of state unwillingness to establish a university.
Comparative African history makes the PPP excuse still harder to sustain. Other African states with severe economic constraints, fragile administrative capacity, or small populations still moved to establish universities or national higher institutions much earlier. Malawi established its university system in the 1960s. Sierra Leone had Fourah Bay College long before independence and expanded university education decades earlier. Liberia’s university tradition dates back to the nineteenth century. These countries had their own limitations and crises, yet they understood that higher education was not a luxury to be postponed indefinitely until some mythical day of perfect fiscal comfort. It was part of state-building itself.
This is where the PPP defence becomes politically revealing. It rests on a theory of government that forgives strategic omission so long as good intentions can be retrofitted later. But political science does not reward sentiment. It asks what institutions were built, when they were built, and at what cost to national development when they were delayed. A country that depends entirely on external universities for its advanced manpower formation pays several penalties at once: it narrows access to those who can win scholarships or afford travel, it exports scarce talent pipelines, and it delays the emergence of a national academic class capable of training teachers, civil servants, lawyers, journalists, scientists, and administrators at scale. The cost of not building a university was therefore not merely symbolic. It was developmental.
One must also say plainly that Mr Dabo’s argument contains an unintended confession. If the PPP had already identified the need, begun preparing options, and even developed a blueprint, then by the late Jawara period the university question was not unknown, not premature, and not conceptually impossible. It was already on the table. What remained absent was the political will to move from memoranda to masonry. Governments are remembered not for the ideas they entertained in committee rooms, but for the institutions they left standing in the national landscape.
The truth is simpler than the nostalgia. The PPP did some good in education. It supported grant-in-aid schools, financed scholarships, and maintained a modest post-secondary structure through Gambia College. Those points may fairly be acknowledged. But none of them erases the central fact that, after nearly thirty years in power, The Gambia still had no national university. The evidence from historical records, development reports, and the university’s own institutional history all point to the same conclusion.
A government that had three decades, donor access, political stability, and full awareness of the need cannot seek refuge in the claim that it meant well. History is a stern examiner. On this question, the PPP did not merely arrive late; it left the exam hall without submitting the paper.
In conclusion, the public may be disappointed, but I do not think anyone is surprised. Disappointed because BB Dabo was a technocrat who served as one of the longest-serving ministers and later vice president under the PPP government, which naturally makes him one of the most knowledgeable figures about the inner workings of that administration. Indeed, as an economist and banker by training, his argument is particularly troubling because it ignores what every student of public administration understands about the public policy cycle: governments plan, prioritise, allocate resources, and implement long-term national projects over time. A university is precisely the type of institution that emerges from sustained policy commitment, not from prolonged planning unaccompanied by execution.
Yet the public is not surprised either, because politics often encourages an unfaithful relationship with the truth. Politicians will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to defend the legacy of their governments, even when the historical record speaks plainly. But there comes a point when nostalgia must give way to honesty. Mr Dabo and other veterans of the PPP era should resist the temptation to pander to the masses with historical revisionism. The Gambian people deserve a sober and truthful account of their past, not comforting myths designed to rescue reputations long after the facts have already rendered their verdict.
