When the sitting National Assembly Member for Niamina West suddenly died in Morocco on the evening of January 24th this year, the constitution mandated the Independent Electoral Commission to hold a by-election within ninety days. This past Saturday – 275 days later – the by-election was finally held. Blame the tardiness on Covid-19, if you would. The IEC certainly did.
After the hullaballoo and weeklong campaign razzmatazz, Birom Sowe, a civil servant, from Sowe Kunda village representing President Adama Barrow’s National Peoples Party won by 68% (1,716 votes) leaving his only contestant Yerro Jallow of the Gambia Democratic Congress, a full-time politician from Sareh Gainako village with a paltry (32%) 805 votes. In the area council by-election in Kerr Jarga Ward in Jokadu held on the same day, NPP’s Awa Gaye won 2,327 votes against Yama Cham of GDC’s 642 votes; Wuyeh Jarra of APRC’s 193 votes; and Modou Sillah of the UDP’s 219 votes. The NPP candidate doubled the combined votes of the GDC, APRC and UDP with 219 to spare.
There are 16 registered political parties in The Gambia but arguably, the Niamina West by-election is most important for only three of them and two of them, NPP and GDC did contest with the third party, UDP, tacitly backing GDC. The election was important to the president’s newly-formed party because it was a litmus test. It gives an insight into the political calibrations for the December 2021 presidential election. NPP were officially backed by NRP, PPP and other parties. GDC sources alleged that APRC leaders gave instructions to their supporters in the area to vote for the NPP candidate.
GDC on the other hand were officially supported by the UDP. The two parties have been engaged in a political romance fuelled by their common resentment of the NPP. NPP came to life as a breakaway faction of the UDP while its leader was the longstanding political nemesis of the GDC in their old political stumping ground in Jimara. Even though Niamina West was never a stronghold of the UDP, it had supporters in parts of big villages like Katamina and Sambang. That explained the presence in Niamina West of UDP bigwigs like parliamentarians Alagie Darboe, Madi Ceesay and Lamin Sanneh; women mobilisers from as far as the Kombos and veteran politicians like Abdoulie ‘Suku’ Singhateh to counterweight the NPP contingent of Ministers Hamat Bah, Bakary Badjie and political hawks Dou Sanno, Lamin Cham, Mambanyick Njie and Seedy Njie.
The voter demographic in the electoral constituency vis-a-vis the results is very telling. Niamina West has 35 villages, half of which are Fula majority hence the dominance of Fula politicians for a long time. This voting demographic has never parleyed to the UDP. Their support has always vacillated between the APRC, NRP and GDC. Now the NPP supported by GDC are hazarding a bet for the Fula vote. In fact, a political commentator writing in the columns of this paper last week observed that NPP is doing to GDC what GDC did to NRP, that is, decimate their traditional support base.
The victory of the NPP in the Niamina election can be attributed to a lot of factors, money being one of them. Politics has become a dollarised (monetised) enterprise and in places where ideologies are not the key underpinnings for political participation, money can become the most important determinant of which party wins an election. Although all the parties spent money and loads of it in the by-election, the NPP obviously spent far more. Even this fact was not lost on the GDC leader who said at one of his rallies that NPP has demonstrated that whoever wants to challenge it must look for a lot of money.
After all has been said and done, the results of the by-elections have shown that the NPP horse is rearing to canter up north and that the so-called big parties should smell the coffee and take the Barrow party seriously. On the other hand, NPP should not let its head grow too big with the Niamina and Jokadu victories. The by-elections were theirs to lose. The real test for Barrow, the NPP and his potpourri alliance of parties, will be in the West Coast Region area council chairmanship by-election which will be held someday barring an unlikely legal spanner in the electoral clockwork.
