By Bankie Grey-Johnson
Sometimes the decisions we Africans make in the name of “law”, “order”, and “justice” make absolutely no rational sense… and when you look closely, they don’t serve any useful purpose either. They certainly don’t help the poor… they don’t help the youth. Aand they definitely don’t help the communities struggling just to survive.
The recent destruction of cannabis farms on Jinack island is another painful example of what I call poverty by force – when the state itself actively destroys the few economic lifelines available to its own people. Let’s slow down and think about this for a moment.
Cannabis grows naturally in The Gambia. It thrives in our soil with very little irrigation, minimal fertiliser, and almost no technical infrastructure. In agricultural terms, it is one of the lowest maintenance, highest yield crops we could possibly cultivate. Yet instead of studying it, regulating it, taxing it, and building an industry around it, we send armed officers to burn farms to ashes.
And then we turn around and ask ourselves why rural communities remain poor.
This makes no damn sense!
The Gambia has been farming peanuts since colonial times – a crop introduced by the British not because it would make Gambians rich, but because it fed British industry. Over 100 years later we are still stuck in the same agricultural structure. Peanuts, peanuts, peanuts! Low margins, high labour, unstable global prices, and very little value addition.
Meanwhile right under our noses grows a crop that could generate many times the income per hectare for rural farmers and we criminalise it!
Think about that level of contradiction. This so called “war on drugs” does not stop cannabis, it does not eliminate cannabis, it simply criminalises the poor people involved in it.
Close to 90% of the Gambian prison population are youths, and a significant portion of those cases involve marijuana possession or distribution. Not armed robbery, not violent crime, not corruption. We are locking up our youth for weed!
Young men from places like Sukuta, Bakau, Bundung, Brufut – communities already struggling with unemployment and lack of opportunity – are being thrown into Mile 2 for years over marijuana possession, distribution even for ONE seed! Think about that.
A 17- or 18-year old kid makes a mistake, gets caught with marijuana, and suddenly he is spending three to five years in Mile 2. Three years of development gone. Three years of education gone. Three years of opportunity gone. And what happens inside Mile 2? Does he get vocational training? Does he get education? Does he come out rehabilitated? Anyone who has been there will tell you the answer. No! Mile 2 is not designed to rehabilitate, it is designed to destroy!
You take a teenager with no violent history, throw him into a prison environment with hardened criminals, strip him of opportunity, then release him back into society with a criminal record and no prospects. And then we act surprised when crime increases. What exactly did we expect? This so-called war on drugs does not protect society, it manufactures criminals. The young man who goes in for marijuana possession comes out unable to get a job, unable to continue school, unable to rebuild his life. So what happens?
He survives the only way he can. Robbery. Fraud. Street crime! Now the community is actually less safe than before. All because we decided to criminalise a plant. The rest of the world has moved on! Even the United States, a country that spent decades aggressively prosecuting the war on drugs based on racial lines in a capitalistic society, has realised the damage it caused.
Countries around the world and in Africa are now legalising cannabis and taxing and exporting it for medicinal purposes. Billions of dollars in revenue, new industries. New jobs. Agriculture, processing, pharmaceuticals, retail, tourism.
Countries like Canada, Germany, South Africa and Thailand are already building legal cannabis economies. And what are we doing in The Gambia? Burning farms, locking up youth. destroying livelihoods. The situation in Jinack Island exposes the madness of this policy.
Jinack is not some wealthy agricultural hub full of investors, these are fishermen, farmers, and ordinary families trying to survive in a rural economy with very few options. When authorities burn those farms they are not dismantling some sophisticated international cartel, they are destroying the livelihood of poor Gambians.
And then we pretend we are fighting crime. What we are actually fighting is survival. Let’s also be honest about something most people are afraid to say openly. This war on marijuana has never really been about public safety. It has been about control and opportunism. Everyone knows stories of selective enforcement. Everyone knows about extortion. Everyone knows who gets targeted and who gets left alone. Poor youth, poor farmers and poor communities suffer the most.
Meanwhile the economic potential of the crop continues to be ignored. Cannabis could be a transformational crop for rural Gambia if handled properly. Legalisation does not mean chaos; it means regulation. Licensing, agricultural standards, export controls, medical production and taxation is the way to go for God’s sake!
Imagine licensed farmers producing regulated cannabis for medical markets. Imagine processing facilities. Imagine agricultural cooperatives. Imagine rural communities generating real income instead of barely surviving on peanuts. Instead of burning farms the government could be collecting millions in tax revenue. This is what makes the situation so frustrating. Our poverty is not always caused by external forces, sometimes it is self-inflicted through irrational policy.
We destroy productive farms. We imprison our youth. We waste taxpayer money on enforcement. We overcrowd prisons. We create criminal records that destroy futures. All to fight a plant that grows naturally in our soil. That is not justice. That is not policy. That is stupidity! That is poverty by force! If The Gambia truly wants to build a modern economy we cannot continue enforcing policies that actively sabotage our own people.
We cannot burn our way to prosperity. We cannot imprison our way to development. And we cannot keep repeating colonial economic mistakes while the rest of the world moves forward. The Jinack incident should be a wake-up call. The choice is simple. We can continue forcing poverty on ourselves… Or we can finally turn a new leaf. Legalise cannabis. Regulate it. Tax it. And allow Gambians to benefit from what already grows naturally in their own land!!
