In every functioning democracy, the power of the purse is not merely a ceremonial privilege but a solemn covenant between institutions entrusted with oversight and the people who vest them with legitimacy. In The Gambia, this covenant has not simply been neglected, it has been scandalously dishonored. The National Audit Office and the National Assembly, constitutionally enshrined as the twin sentinels of fiscal probity, have failed spectacularly to scrutinize budgets, interrogate national expenditures, and defend the electorate’s trust. Their dereliction has left the nation financially porous, administratively reckless, and morally wounded. Gambians trusted these institutions with oversight, and oversight has betrayed them in return. The citizenry deserves better. The republic deserves better. Our collective dignity demands better.
The Constitution of The Gambia mandates the National Assembly to exercise oversight on national expenditures, ensure rigorous budget scrutiny, and hold every spending officer accountable. Simultaneously, the National Audit Office is empowered to audit, report, and flag financial anomalies with uncompromising candor. These institutions were never designed to be spectators to fiscal imprudence. They were intended to be auditors of truth, examiners of value for money, defenders of accountability, and guardians of national resources. Yet today, they resemble hollow citadels of unfulfilled promises. They have been generously equipped by the state, furnished with resources, conveniences, salaries, allowances, international travel privileges, institutional autonomy, and enviable administrative comfort, but their outputs have not matched their provisions. Their appetite for institutional luxury has far outpaced their zeal for institutional responsibility.
It is a lamentable irony that while these oversight bodies have ensured that their own budgets are robustly approved, rarely questioned, and amply financed, they have failed to extend that same rigor to the national budget they are elected to scrutinise. They secured vehicles, per diems, refurbished offices, sitting allowances, committee budgets, foreign capacity building excursions, and every conceivable institutional amenity, while the hospitals lacked basic medical supplies, schools strained under infrastructural decay, and rural communities languished without essential services. The institutions meant to audit the nation became experts at auditing their own comfort. This is not governance. This is self enthronement at the expense of public stewardship.
Budget scrutiny, as practiced in serious legislative ecosystems, is a meticulous and forensic exercise. It requires line by line interrogation of allocations, performance benchmarking, justification hearings, cost benefit analyses, and outcome projections. In The Gambia, however, budget scrutiny has mutated into perfunctory recitals, ceremonial approvals, and mechanical endorsements. The Assembly has failed to ask the hard questions, the uncomfortable questions, the morally obligatory questions.
When ministries present inflated allocations for travel, hospitality, consultancy, or non essential administrative overheads, there is little resistance, little scrutiny, and almost no recalibration. Yet when allocations for social safety nets, rural development, disaster response, or audit enhancement itself arise, they are either diluted or deprioritised. The Assembly has not just failed to protect the public interest; it has failed to even appear interested in protecting it.
The National Audit Office, equally, has produced audit reports, yes, but reports without enforcement are merely literature of lamentation. Audit reports that do not provoke sanctions, recoveries, prosecutions, policy amendments, or systemic reform are not audit instruments, they are archival ornaments. The Audit Office has too often delivered findings that evaporate into bureaucratic limbo, recommendations that dissolve into institutional indifference, and disclosures that fail to rattle the corridors of power. Auditing is not about compiling infractions. It is about correcting them. If the auditor flags corruption and nothing happens, then the auditor becomes part of the inertia that protects corruption. If audit findings reveal theft and the thieves remain unbothered, unpunished, and unreformed, and then the audit function is no longer oversight, it is silent complicity.
Consider the repeated queries over unretired imprest, unverified procurement, inflated invoicing, and unaccounted project disbursements across multiple government institutions. Year after year, audit findings cite similar infractions, a clear indication of institutional learning disability, yet there is no commensurate institutional outrage, no systemic disruption, no financial deterrence. A nation that audits the same problem annually without fixing it has stopped auditing corruption and started chronicling it.
The oversight function providers have woefully failed us as a nation. They have not merely failed in small measure; they have failed in a manner that suggests structural surrender. Their performance is not a stumble, it is an institutional capitulation. Gambian citizens entrusted these bodies with oversight, not ovation. We empowered them to inspect national spending, not merely respect it. We elected them to defend accountability, not merely depend on it when it serves them.
A glaring example of oversight collapse lies in capital project scrutiny. The Gambia has undertaken several national infrastructure projects, financed through loans, grants, and public funds. Many of these projects present persistent red flags: opaque procurement processes, questionable contractor selection, cost overruns, delayed delivery timelines, poor project monitoring, and ambiguous valuation of deliverables. In any prudent legislative environment, these would trigger emergency hearings, suspension of disbursements, commissioning of independent technical audits, and restructuring of project governance frameworks. In The Gambia, they trigger little beyond polite concern and institutional lethargy.
Another practical example is the approval of supplementary budgets without rigorous justification. Supplementary budgets are not illegitimate by design, but they must be exceptional, justified, and anchored in fiscal emergency. Yet The Gambia has seen supplementary allocations presented and approved without exhaustive interrogation of why original allocations were insufficient, whether funds were mismanaged, whether planning was incompetent, or whether officers responsible for budget forecasting should be sanctioned. A legislature that approves supplementary budgets without scrutinizing supplementary failures is not exercising oversight, it is extending impunity.
Further, public debt servicing has not received the depth of legislative analysis it deserves. The Gambia’s debt portfolio has expanded over the years, with significant implications on future generations. Debt scrutiny should involve transparent assessment of loan conditionalities, repayment sustainability, debt financed project value, opportunity cost analysis, and scenario modeling. The Assembly has not been assertive in demystifying debt for the public or interrogating its long term national implications. Debt, therefore, becomes a silent burden rather than a scrutinised instrument of development.
Equally concerning is the Assembly’s failure to ensure that the Audit Office itself is sufficiently empowered to enforce recoveries and compliance. Oversight bodies must not merely audit failures but must also audit the architecture that allows failure. If audit institutions lack enforcement power, then oversight must legislate it. If audit officers lack forensic capacity, oversight must resource it. If spending officers lack financial guidance, oversight must mandate structured collaboration with the Ministry of Finance. If sanctions are weak, oversight must fortify them. Yet the Assembly has not been aggressive in reforming audit enforcement frameworks. They watch the audit struggle and applaud its independence without ensuring its potency.
Spending officers across the civil service also suffer from weak financial advisory support. Oversight should not merely condemn financial mismanagement; it should prevent it by ensuring structured financial guidance, capacity building, compliance frameworks, expenditure advisories, standardized procurement handbooks, and quarterly accountability coaching for every spending unit. The Audit Office and the Assembly should work synergistically with the Executive, not as fiscal cheerleaders, but as advisors on financial discipline. Collaboration does not mean collusion. Partnership does not mean permissiveness. Working closely with the Executive to guide financial governance is not weakness, it is strategic accountability. But they must do so without relinquishing their independence or becoming anesthetised by proximity to power.
The electorate is not a sponsoring audience. The electorate is the sovereign. These institutions do not own the resources they approve, they temporarily administer them. The Gambia is not a trust fund for oversight institutions. It is a living republic with citizens who endure the consequences of every dalasi misspent, every procurement inflated, every audit ignored, every budget unchallenged, and every oversight moment squandered.
Oversight failure is not only financial damage, it is moral erosion. When institutions entrusted to interrogate national spending choose silence over scrutiny, comfort over accountability and ceremonial function over constitutional obligation, they fracture public trust, delegitimize governance, and embolden financial impunity. A nation where oversight fails the people is a nation where corruption sleeps peacefully and citizens stay awake with unanswered questions.
Gambian citizens trusted oversight institutions and they deserve better. The market woman selling groundnuts in Serrekunda deserves better. The student studying under leaking roofs in Basse deserves better. The farmer tilling unmechanized land in Brikama deserves better. The nurse improvising medical care without essential equipment in Farafenni deserves better. The youth questioning the future while unemployment questions them back deserves better. Oversight was meant to defend them. Instead, oversight has abandoned them.
The National Assembly and the National Audit Office must therefore undergo not just procedural reform but moral awakening. Oversight must rediscover outrage. Audit must rediscover consequence. Scrutiny must rediscover courage. Accountability must rediscover enforcement. Public resources must be treated not as institutional entitlements but national inheritance. Budget approvals must be interrogations, not invitations. Audit findings must become triggers, not textbooks. Spending officers must be guided before being judged, and judged when guidance is ignored.
The path forward is not mysterious. It is obvious, practical, and urgent. Budget scrutiny must adopt public justification hearings for all major ministries with open session broadcasting. Audit recommendations must be tied to mandatory compliance timelines enforced by law. Procurement thresholds must trigger automatic legislative review. Supplementary budgets must be accompanied by supplementary accountability sanctions. Loan approvals must include long term debt sustainability scoring. Project disbursements must be linked to milestone verified payments. Every spending officer must undergo annual public finance compliance certification. Audit recoveries must be empowered with enforcement warrants. Legislative committees must prioritize value for money over administrative comfort. Oversight budgets must be benchmarked against oversight outputs.
The Gambia must no longer tolerate oversight that oversees nothing, audit that alters nothing, or accountability that accounts for nobody. Institutional luxury must no longer excuse institutional truancy. We must restore the dignity of oversight, the consequence of audit, the discipline of spending, and the supremacy of the electorate.
The Gambian people entrusted these bodies with power, not privilege. They deserve oversight that protects them, audit that avenges their trust, and accountability that honors their future. The hour for fiscal guardianship has long struck. What remains now is the echo of a nation asking its institutions to finally wake up and work.
