By Lt Col (Rtd) Samsudeen Sarr
In recent times, beneficiaries and defenders of The Gambia’s former People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government have grown increasingly vocal in portraying their 30-year rule as the best government the country has ever had, especially when contrasted with the APRC (1994–2017) and the NPP (2017–present). This claim is not only misleading but intellectually dishonest. It relies on ahistorical comparisons that ignore radically different political eras, global contexts, and levels of public consciousness.
My polemical intervention challenges that romanticized view by putting Gambian political history back into proper context.
The PPP came to power in 1965 at independence, during what is often idealized as the First Republic. Its primary task was not institutional innovation or democratic deepening, but the orderly transfer of authority from British colonial rule to indigenous elites. This transition unfolded on a terrain fully designed by the colonial power.
At independence, everything that defined the state, the constitution, judiciary, civil service, security forces, economy, currency, and education system, was already entrenched by Britain. Continuity, not transformation, was the expectation. The post-colonial constitution bore unmistakable British fingerprints, and the new political elite was trained to preserve the inherited order.
Globally, this was the height of the Cold War. Only two ideological systems dominated world politics: Western capitalism and Eastern socialism. Leaders of newly independent states who attempted to chart alternative or radically nationalist paths such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Sékou Touré in Guinea, Patrice Lumumba in Congo were overthrown, assassinated, or economically strangled. African leaders learned quickly that deviation came at a high price.
Against this backdrop, Sir Dawda Jawara, like Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, chose the safer route of alignment with former colonial powers. This earned him international approval and personal honors, including knighthood from Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. It also ensured that the colonial system remained fundamentally intact, Africanized in personnel but totally Western in substance.
The independence Gambians proudly celebrate was largely cosmetic. Names, flags, and faces changed, but structures endured. The “Burr Banjul’s or colonial governor’s mansion became the seat of power for Presidents Sir Dawda Jawara, Yahya Jammeh, and Adama Barrow alike, a potent symbol of continuity disguised as change.
The same Western-designed educational, judicial, economic, and security institutions persisted. After three decades in power, the PPP had not transformed the state but had mastered the art of managing it within routine colonial and international frameworks. Governance became an exercise in maintenance, not imagination.
PPP nostalgia also ignores the critical reality of extremely low level of political awareness during Jawara’s era. There was no local university throughout his rule. Communication was limited to handwritten letters, a handful of telephones for the privileged, and transistor radios. There was no television, no internet, no social media, and virtually no access to international publications outside Banjul.
The population did not challenge the government, not because governance was exemplary, but because most citizens lacked the tools, information, and exposure to do so. This absence of pressure is now misrepresented asevidence of national contentment.
Even then, the so-called golden era produced a violent rebellion in 1981 that nearly overthrew the government. Only Senegalese military intervention saved the PPP. From that moment on, the regime survived on borrowed time until it was finally overthrown in the popular 1994 coup.
The APRC military regime initially enjoyed popular support because it dismantled entrenched PPP elite networks and several interest groups. Yahya Jammeh altered personnel but retained the inherited colonial institutions. Unlike Jawara, he favored technocrats and formally educated elites in his cabinet, often Western-trained, provided they were personally loyal.
Jammeh ruled through fear, dismantled old patronage systems, and replaced them with a personalized state centered on himself. He preached discipline while treating public resources as personal property. Yet his regime did expand infrastructure: schools, a university, a television station, and an expanded airport, exposing the stagnation of the PPP era.
Still, Jammeh governed from the same colonial mansion and enjoyed near-monarchical privilege.
Today, President Adama Barrow is rightly praised for greater tolerance and democratic openness. But this reflects the times more than personal virtue. In an age of mass political awareness, internet access, and diaspora engagement, authoritarianism is harder to sustain.
Like Jammeh, Barrow appoints technocrats and formally educated ministers, breaking with Jawara-era practices. Yet structurally, his government remains embedded in the same neo-colonial political, economic, and security architecture. The system endures. Only styles change.
To claim that the PPP was the best government is to confuse historical circumstance with excellence. Low resistance was mistaken for legitimacy; continuity was mistaken for stability; colonial approval was mistaken for success.
Had the PPP governed in today’s environment of heightened awareness and scrutiny, it would not have survived even a month operating as it once did.
The real task before Gambians is not to romanticize the First Republic or demonize its successors, but to confront the unfinished project of decolonization. The challenge is to dismantle the inherited neo-colonial state and construct an indigenous political and economic order rooted in Gambian realities.
Until that happens, debates about which government was “the best” will remain distractions from the only question that truly matters: what kind of state do Gambians want to build next?
