By Kebeli Demba Nyima,
Atlanta, USA
Young democracies tend to watch their presidents, their police and their judiciary with understandable suspicion. The Gambia is no exception. The country’s political transition since 2017 has been accompanied by familiar anxieties about executive overreach and partisan policing. But democracies rarely collapse in the grand manner imagined by political science textbooks; they do not fall primarily through the dramatic show of force. They erode at the edges, often helped along by those who claim to be saving them. The Gambia, still adjusting to the responsibilities of plural politics, has reached the peculiar moment in which anyone who cares about plural politics, open argument and the messy business of democratic life should be alarmed.
In today’s Gambia a subtler and more corrosive danger has emerged from a place that claims the moral high ground: a civil-society actor who routinely demands that dissenting voices be sacked, prosecuted or banned from public life. That actor is Madi Jobarteh, operating through his one-man briefcase NGO, the Edward Francis Small Centre for Rights and Justice (EFSCRJ). He has increasingly fashioned himself as an informal regulator of public speech, behaving in practice as the country’s self-appointed speech commissioner with the imagined authority to determine what citizens may say and who should be punished for saying it.
In essence, the country’s most insistent defender of “rights” has become one of the most energetic saboteurs of democratic culture. And while it would be out of place to liken Madi to Orwell’s enforcers in 1984, from the Thought Police to the bureaucrats of Newspeak and the looming presence of Big Brother, his instinct to police speech rather than debate it reflects the same dreary urge to tidy the public mind by punishing the untidy parts.
This is not an argument about whether Jobarteh has done good work on other fronts. Nor is it a defence of intemperate politicians or uncouth ambassadors. It is a question of first principles. In any liberal democracy worthy of the name, speech is the oxygen of politics. Human-rights advocacy that habitually calls for dismissal and prosecution over words crosses a dangerous line from defending liberties to policing thought.
And the irony is that President Barrow is not, by temperament or record, a speech-policing autocrat. For all his administrative shortcomings, he has tolerated insults, mockery, harsh criticism and political ridicule that would have provoked swift arrests under previous regimes.
Likewise, the current Inspector General of Police, Seedy Mukhtar Touray, whom Jobarteh frequently accuses of bias or incompetence, presides over a police force that has, despite its flaws, allowed The Gambia more open expression than it has known in decades. It is therefore perverse that the strongest push toward speech repression comes not from the executive or the security services, but from an activist whose public method consists of demanding that the state do what he lacks the power to do himself: silence those he disagrees with. When such a man begins to shape the boundaries of permissible expression, democracy warps into something brittle and censorious.
This is why the danger he poses is so profound. Human-rights work is supposed to defend the public sphere, not curate it. It is supposed to widen democratic participation, not shrink it. Yet Jobarteh’s instinct is always punitive: dismiss, reprimand, arrest. He has made himself the country’s self-appointed speech commissioner, a role no free society requires, and no sovereign citizen ought to accept.
The Gambia’s democratic project will not fail because presidents speak carelessly or ministers make fools of themselves before a watching public. It will fail if we allow our most celebrated “rights advocate” to dictate who may speak and what consequences must follow.
If Gambians want a truly open republic, they must reject the notion that the activist is the enforcer, the NGO is the judge, and the police are the instrument. No democracy survives when moral authority concentrates in the hands of a single unelected voice. It is time to recognise, without apology or hesitation, that the greatest danger to our democratic culture is the man who has built a career demanding that others be punished for exercising the very freedom he claims to defend.
The evidence has shifted from isolated incidents to a consistent and observable pattern that functions as a doctrine of censorship framed as rights advocacy. This pattern is demonstrated in the response to several cases, which we now examine in a detailed, blow-by-blow analysis.
In May 2025, after the leaking of a private WhatsApp audio in which Ambassador Fatoumatta Jahumpa Ceesay made unflattering remarks about the UDP and named activists, Jobarteh and the EFSCRJ publicly urged President Barrow to summarily dismiss her from office. Whatever one thinks of her language, this was a private conversation, dragged into the public square by others. To treat such speech as grounds for immediate executive execution of a career is to erase both privacy and due process. It is not the language of rights; it is the language of punishment. The fact that Madi could make this demand despite the absence of any formal investigation raised concerns regarding the broader implications for civil liberties within a democratic framework.
The same script recurs with Agriculture Minister Demba Sabally. In May 2025, following Sabally’s hot-headed talk of “shedding blood”, Jobarteh published a piece bluntly titled “Resign, Dismiss and Prosecute Demba Sabally!”, insisting that the minister’s words were “real incitement to violence” and that he must leave office and face the courts.
Jobarteh’s pattern of reflexive punitive advocacy is further illustrated in his campaign against Presidential Adviser Saihou Mballow. On 22 August 2025, in a widely circulated commentary titled “Tribalism, Incitement and Hate Speech by Presidential Advisor Saihou Mballow: Will the IGP Act?”, he characterised Mballow’s remarks as “nothing other than incitement to violence, hate and promoting instability in The Gambia” and urged the Inspector General of Police to initiate action.
Most recently, in his commentary on UDP lawyer Borry S. Touray’s now-infamous “incendiary” remarks at Jambur, Jobarteh once again framed the matter in terms of criminalisation and state action, while accusing both NPP and UDP of hypocrisy and demanding that the IGP confront them. Days later, Touray was charged. The sequence is too neat to ignore: the activist demands criminalisation, and the state delivers. The activist now calls it “hypocrisy”, but the truth is far simpler; he authored the logic that brought us here. Across these cases, the pattern is unmistakable: the EFSCRJ is not content to criticise or to mobilise counter-argument. It seeks to enlist the presidency and the police as its enforcement arm, turning human-rights rhetoric into a bludgeon for professional destruction.
What makes this spectacle even more extraordinary is not that the state has begun to operate within the very punitive framework Jobarteh himself spent years normalising. It is his sudden outrage when the police merely follow the template he drafted.
For years he played the role of a self-appointed norm entrepreneur, insisting that speech he personally disliked should be met with police summonses, dismissals and prosecutions.
Now that the government enacts precisely this model of punitive populism, he behaves as though he has stumbled upon some new authoritarian threat. The irony would be quaint if it were not so predictable.
After all this time pushing the idea that politicians should be prosecuted for their speech, he now enjoys a level of respect and influence he has not earned. It is now common to hear government officials ask why Madi Jobarteh has not condemned this person or that statement, and the opposition repeats the same line, as if he were some elected official responsible for policing national behaviour. But he is no such thing. He is simply a man hiding behind a so-called NGO to build his own nest.
His hypocrisy speaks for itself. He condemns the July 1994 coup, yet he celebrates the 30 December coup plotters. He demands punishment for government and opposition figures over their speech, yet he has never found the moral courage to confront people like Melville Roberts, who faced multiple allegations of rape. Gambians should stop falling for this selective outrage, but unfortunately both the government and the opposition have given this one man far more moral and political capital than he deserves. He has been allowed to act as if he is the referee of national discourse, a role no constitution gives him and no electorate has endorsed.
This distortion of our democratic culture did not happen overnight. Western embassies, international NGOs and the Gambian media have, perhaps unwittingly, inflated Jobarteh into a kind of civic monarch: the dispenser of public virtue, the assessor of what is moral and what is deviant, the man whose Facebook posts carry the force of institutional verdicts. But when a civil-society actor becomes the gravitational centre of political discipline, demanding prosecutions one week, reprisals the next, the result is not a strengthened democracy but a fragile one. Democracies can survive bad presidents and sloppy cabinets; what they cannot survive is the normalisation of state punishment as the default response to mere speech. Yet that is precisely the culture Jobarteh has built.
This posture sits uneasily with the very traditions of liberal democracy that Western embassies and international NGOs claim to champion. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that even offensive or mistaken opinions must be heard, because silencing them deprives society of either the chance to correct error or to clarify truth. Modern human-rights instruments echo that instinct: Article 19 of the ICCPR protects the right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds”, subject only to narrow, strictly necessary limitations.
To call for summary dismissal or prosecution whenever a politician says something coarse or inflammatory is to expand those limitations far beyond what liberal theory or international law envisages. The remedy for bad speech, as American jurist Louis Brandeis famously put it, is more speech, not enforced silence. When a self-described rights advocate defaults again and again to state punishment, he ceases to defend the public sphere and starts curating it.
None of this is to argue for a free-for-all of tribal slurs, misogyny and explicit calls for violence. A serious democracy must police genuine incitement and must hold public officials to higher standards. But the test for a healthy rights culture is whether it can distinguish between the truly dangerous and the merely distasteful and whether its leading advocates instinctively reach for more argument rather than more handcuffs.
In conclusion, the Edward Francis Small Centre for Justice and Rights presents itself as a guardian of rights. Yet when it repeatedly urges the sacking, prosecution or public shaming of officials and opponents for what they say, it begins to look less like a guardian and more like a gatekeeper: an unelected authority deciding which Gambians may participate in public life and on what terms.
Western embassies and democracy foundations that embrace such a figure uncritically should reflect on this contradiction. The same capitals that revere Mill, quote Voltaire and fund global free-speech initiatives cannot, with a straight face, celebrate a partner whose instinct is to criminalise his countrymen’s words.
