By Kebeli Demba Nyima,
Atlanta, USA
It is often said that The Gambia is a small country, but nothing is smaller than the sudden courage of privileged men who discover their political voice only when it becomes fashionable to criticise the president. And so here we are again, another Jawara relative emerging from the long shadow of the First Republic to lecture the nation on democracy, term limits and political morality, as though the Jawara surname were itself a political credential.
The historical record is unavoidable. The Jawara family enjoyed thirty uninterrupted years of power, a period in which they built no university for Gambian children, no national television station, no effective healthcare system and no real infrastructure to speak of. The same family that now urges Barrow to protect his legacy failed to give Gambians the basic tools of modern statehood. For three decades, Jawara governed like a polite British colonial officer, knighted by the Queen, adored by London and Washington and praised by scholars who preferred romantic myths of African democracy to the harder work of telling the truth.
To describe Sir Dawda as a democrat is to indulge in polite fiction. He governed not as a servant of the people but as a Western boy-boy, a dependable ally for London and Washington whose primary political instinct was to please external partners rather than deliver development at home. That is why cronyism blossomed, corruption mushroomed and the People’s Progressive Party became less a political organisation and more a dynastic machine. For thirty years Gambians were told that the country was too poor for national development but somehow wealthy enough to sustain a small political aristocracy.
Now, in 2025, a new generation of Gambians, educated, worldly and unafraid, are being asked to take lectures from the same dynasty that failed them. We are told to listen because the speaker is a nephew of Jawara, as though lineage were a substitute for logic. But Gambians are no longer the quiet villagers of 1970. We are not impressed by titles, family names or self-published memoirs announcing global views from Washington.
And if Musa Bassadi Jawara possessed even the most elementary grasp of political arithmetic, he would recognise the absurdity of his own sermon. Jawara ruled The Gambia for thirty years. Barrow will have served ten years in 2026. Even if Barrow were to secure a controversial third term, bringing his total to fifteen years, that is still only half of what Sir Dawda occupied. In the simplest mathematical equation: 15 ÷ 30 = 0.5. A fraction. A half. Not the excess Musa dramatises. One would imagine that anyone invoking term limits would understand ratios before rhetoric. Yet here we are, confronted by a Jawara nephew who appears unable to process what any secondary-school pupil can. This inability to handle basic numerical reasoning reveals something far deeper: the entrenched entitlement of the Jawara boys, still moving as though the country operates under outdated aristocratic politics where lineage substitutes for logic and ancestry stands in for argument.
It is the same entitlement that led another branch of the family, Papa Faal, into the bizarre delusion that taking up arms against the Gambian state was a patriotic calling. In reality, he was drawn into an ill-fated and mercenary enterprise bankrolled by Cherno Njie, a wealthy Texas-based real-estate broker whose “revolutionary” enthusiasm extended no further than paying less than four thousand dollars to deploy men into a reckless political adventure. It was not a noble struggle against dictatorship; it was the work of individuals more hungry for power than the very dictator they claimed they were trying to remove. And yet this, too, reflects the Jawara family’s long-standing belief that the nation must rearrange itself around their impulses, however reckless or irrational those impulses may be. Gambians have seen enough of this dynastic arrogance, from governance to armed adventurism, and they are no longer buying it.
The irony, however, is richer than that. Musa Bassadi Jawara now positions himself as the moral compass of the nation, advising President Barrow to step aside to secure his legacy. Yet this is the same man who praised Barrow in the past, defended the administration publicly and benefitted from the political environment he now decries. Today, he reinvents himself as the darling of the opposition, hoping that selective amnesia will cloak his intellectual inconsistency.
Worse still, while preaching moral doctrine from the rooftops, a Jawara family member currently serves as a Permanent Secretary in Barrow’s own government. If the family truly believed Barrow is endangering the nation, honour demands resignation first, lectures later. Instead, they enjoy government privilege with one hand while writing sanctimonious open letters with the other.
This is not moral leadership; it is intellectual hypocrisy of the highest order.
If Musa Jawara wishes to participate in national debate, he is welcome. But he must do so as an individual citizen, not as an heir of a political dynasty that presided over stagnation, patronage and developmental paralysis. He must speak with honesty about the Jawara era: the absence of universities, the lack of roads, the collapse of agriculture, the inadequacy of public hospitals and the long habit of pleasing London and Washington at the expense of Gambian progress.
Most importantly, he must understand that the era of PPP paternalism is over. Gambians are educated now. They read. They analyse. They question. They cannot be dictated to by those who believe a surname gives them the authority to decide who should rule and who should retire.
If Musa Jawara truly believes in democratic transition, he should start by applying those principles to his own family’s political mythology. Let him acknowledge that Sir Dawda was far from the democrat many imagined. Let him admit that the First Republic failed to lay the foundations of a modern nation. Let him concede that the Jawara dynasty enjoyed power without delivering development.
Until then, Gambians will treat his open letters not as national guidance but as yet another attempt to revive a fading family brand in a political marketplace that has moved on.
In this new Gambia, no dynasty, past or present, will define the future for us. We define it ourselves. So while Musa Jawara’s argument collapses under its own historical weight, the conclusion he attempts to reach still stands for a different reason. Not because of dynasty, and not because of self-appointed moral guardianship, but because Gambians deserve better.
In 2026, Barrow must go, for he has failed to deliver the goods and that is the political science of it. This is not a quarrel about term limits, because there is no such clause in the present constitution; the issue is performance, plain and simple. Everything Musa Bassadi Jawara is shouting about misses the point entirely. He bellows like a town crier who has forgotten the message he was sent to deliver. The principle is not difficult. A leader who delivers results earns renewal, and one who does not is removed by the electorate. Barrow has not delivered, the record stands in full view, and that is why his time is up.
