By Lamin Dave Manneh,
Research Lead
Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
In December, I described the Gambian state as predatory by design, built to break us. In February, I exposed its survival mechanism: ritual compliance. Citizens perform legitimacy daily without knowing it. Both pieces asked diagnostic questions. This piece asks the necessary third. If the architecture depends on our performance, what happens when we stop feeding it?
Three refusals that starve the panorama
The panorama depends on universal performance, and that universality is also its weakness. Each refusal targets one of the three conditions the February article identified: civic illiteracy, cultivated innocence, and manufactured ignorance. Together they close the gaps the architecture depends on. No single act of refusal is safe in isolation. The architecture can punish one elder who declines to press a thumbprint. To punish an entire network of villages acting simultaneously, it must expose the coercion it hides behind procedure. Collective refusal forces that exposure. Isolation sustains the machine; solidarity breaks it.
First, refuse the thumbprint without verification. Insist that elders who carry boundary knowledge review all terms before signing or marking any document. The architecture exploits the gap between what elders know and what documents say. In the February article, I named this mechanism the automatism of allocation: routine administrative acts that produce dispossession without explicit command. Intergenerational collaboration closes that gap: elders hold the boundary knowledge; literate youth translate and explain document contents. Communities that demand verification across villages at the same time transform individual vulnerability into collective protection.
Second, refuse English-only processes. Over forty per cent of Gambian adults cannot read or write. Publishing gazette notices exclusively in English compounds that exclusion by design. Communities must demand plain-language summaries of all land notices in indigenous languages. When the state refuses, document the refusal. Publish it. The architecture depends on opacity. Transparency starves it.
Third, refuse the performance of gratitude for dispossession. When a delegation seeks return of clan land, the architecture reframes their demand as demonstrating loyalty. Communities must name this reframing publicly: we came to demand restitution of land lawfully ours, not to express gratitude for development on stolen ground. This refusal requires precision: speaking truth without rancour, and without concession.
Communities find these refusals harder to perform than to name. The architecture does not need to forbid them. It only needs citizens to feel that performing them is unreasonable. Understanding why they feel unreasonable unlocks the capacity to perform them. These refusals embody Saama Kanto: securing the landed inheritance of generations yet unborn. This is sacred responsibility.
Why refusal feels like sacrilege
Refusal feels transgressive because the architecture has made colonial engineering feel like inherited culture. The December article identified the fusion of mansayaa with the presidency as a foundational distortion. The February article showed how this naturalisation suppresses the impulse to question.
The point to press here is simpler and more personal. When a community elder declines to press a thumbprint, he rejects a bureaucratic procedure invented between 1894 and 1901 and dressed in the language of custom ever since. The chieftaincy that administers land allocations today began as a colonial instrument of control; the postcolonial state inherited it without examination and presented it as tradition.
Naming this distinction matters because the architecture depends on citizens never making it. When communities understand that refusing the thumbprint asserts genuine ancestral practice against a colonial imposition, refusal ceases to feel like sacrilege and begins to feel like fidelity. That passage from sacrilege to fidelity opens a second front: reclaiming the knowledge the state has suppressed.
Epistemic reclamation
The state displaces ancestral knowledge as the primary record of land relations. Communities reverse this hierarchy by asserting precedence over state-imposed records.
Participatory mapping, conducted through our Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) framework with elders as co-researchers, records boundaries held in living memory. These maps carry greater authority than colonial survey lines because they encode relationships rather than administrative abstractions.
As an indigene of Brufut, I understand land as lineage because my ancestors never framed it otherwise. Every landowning community in Kombo and The Gambia carries the same understanding: that belonging to a place precedes every document the colonial and postcolonial state has ever produced about it. Reclaimed knowledge anchors the strongest claim communities can make: that dispossession was unlawful and the state owes restitution.
Restitution as legal remedy
The disinheritance of Kombo’s landowning communities constituted an illegal act. Restitution is its mandatory legal consequence. Communities wield the constitution’s emancipatory guarantees as instruments of accountability. Section 22 protects the right to property lawfully acquired; indigenous tenure, which Gambian law recognises as customary tenure, constitutes lawful acquisition. Every alienation of ancestral land without free, prior and informed consent violated Section 22 directly. A state that violates its own Constitution bears the legal obligation to remedy that violation. Restitution discharges that obligation; it does not fulfil a discretionary commitment.
We demand a Joint Technical Committee for Land Justice (JTCLJ), co-chaired by community representatives and state officials. Its mandate should include identifying dispossessed clan land, verifying true ownership through ancestral records and participatory mapping, and determining appropriate restitution for each documented claim.
Across Kombo, the pattern is consistent. The Jammeh regime gifted ancestral land belonging to landowning clans to private developers without the communities’ free, prior and informed consent. Compensation, where offered at all, bore no relation to market value. Clans rejected it. Several have initiated legal proceedings that document both the dispossession and the rejection. Where developers have built on that land, physical return in the original form is impossible. Restitution must therefore match what the dispossession took. The JTCLJ must determine, case by case on documented evidence, what that requires: equivalent land, compensation at current market value, equity participation in the developments built on ancestral land, or a negotiated combination of these.
In Kombo’s Coastal Belt, SFLRAC pursues a separate but related challenge that turns on two sequential legal questions. The first concerns the 1970 leases themselves. The District Authorities (Seyfolu-in-Councils) for Kombo North and Kombo South granted Lease P18/1970 and Lease P14/1970 to the minister responsible for Lands and Provinces for a 99-year term running from 1969 to 2068. These district authorities held no authority under the Provinces Lands Act Cap 103 to alienate indigenous land; they served as administrators only, while landowning families and kabilolu retained ownership. For years, the government told researchers, the Janneh Commission, and the public that the leases had disappeared after the Bamfo Commission of Inquiry. That claim was false. The documents existed in Ministry of Justice archives throughout. Citizens, not officials, recovered and provided SFLRAC with certified true copies, a precise example of the hidden sphere breaking into the open.
The second question is analytically independent of the first and stands regardless of how courts resolve the validity of the 1970 leases. The original leases describe the land solely as the Coastal Belt, 7.7 miles long and half a mile wide. They make no reference to tourism and no reference to a Tourism Development Area. No documented legal instrument has ever converted the Coastal Belt lease into the TDA. The state consulted no community before that conversion. The GTBoard administers the TDA as if it were a legally distinct entity with authority to allocate plots to private developers, yet the origin of that authority remains undocumented. The TDA is an administrative invention the GTBoard constructed on leases of contested validity and repackaged without legal instrument into a commercial vehicle for elite land capture.
Both questions lead to the same principle. A lease, regardless of its duration or the body that granted it, confers use rights only. No lease extinguishes ancestral title or converts temporary administrative control into permanent ownership. The landowning communities of Kombo’s Coastal Belt hold that title still. The JTCLJ will provide the process mechanism for documented restitution claims. The Community Land Rights Act will provide the legislative framework to make it permanent.
The Community Land Rights Act (CLRA): Replacement, not amendment
The National Land Policy 2026–2035 proposes amending the State Lands Act 1991. Amendments tweak the machinery; abolition dismantles it.
On 1st April 2026, at his office in the Quadrangle, Banjul, I met with Hamat Bah, Minister of Lands, Regional Government and Religious Affairs. He confirmed that Section 6.7.2 appeared in the validation draft. Communities formally endorsed that provision at the 10th June 2025 workshop. Cabinet excised it from the approved version of 22nd December 2025 on grounds of financial implications. He positioned this as a forward-looking choice, one that treats restitution as historical grievance and ignores the legal obligation it carries. That framing is itself the panorama operating at ministerial level.
The Janneh Commission placed Kombo’s land dispossession under Jammeh on the public record. The TRRC deferred the resulting claims to subsequent institutional mechanisms. Communities advanced those claims through the NLP validation process. Cabinet excised the remedy. A documented chain of institutional obligation becomes, in the minister’s framing, sentiment standing in the way of development.
The cost argument fails on two grounds. First, the Victims Reparations Act (2023), enacted by the National Assembly, establishes a statutory obligation for economic restitution. A minister’s cost assessment governs how and at what pace that obligation is discharged; the legislature, through the Act, determines whether it is discharged at all. Cabinet’s removal of Section 6.7.2 forecloses restitution as a category; it does not constitute a financial calculation. Second, the ledger the minister presented is incomplete. SFLRAC’s documented community consultations indicate that the market value of expropriated indigenous land across Kombo’s major districts runs into billions of dollars. The state extracted that value from communities who held it for generations. Framing restitution as a cost to the state, without accounting for the value the state extracted through dispossession, presents only one side of the ledger.
The TRRC Final Report (Volume 16, Section 0.6.2, 2021) acknowledged that the scale of land claims exceeded its two-year remit and deferred them to subsequent institutional mechanisms, leaving them open for resolution. The NLP validation process was that subsequent mechanism. Cabinet’s removal of Section 6.7.2 closed it without creating another. Looking forward while the TRRC’s unfinished business remains unaddressed perpetuates grievance under a different name.
In the same meeting, Minister Bah gave SFLRAC his assurance of non-obstruction should communities pursue legal initiatives to recover their land. SFLRAC’s formal letter of the same date records that commitment, and the Ministry has not responded with any correction.
The Community Land Rights Act must go where the NLP will not. It must repeal the State Lands Act 1991 in its entirety. It must recognise ancestral land relations as the primary form of land governance outside the former Colony. It must mandate Free, Prior and Informed Consent for any state use of communal land. It must establish community land boards with binding authority over allocation decisions. It must enshrine land as communal trust for lineage and belonging.
Change begins in kabilo meetings and ends in legislation. Community mobilisation creates the political conditions that make the law possible. When villages refuse the thumbprint together, demanding verification before any elder marks or signs a document, when community land maps fill the evidentiary gap that state records cannot close, when restitution demands arrive not as petitions but as documented legal claims grounded in the Constitution’s own guarantees, the political calculus shifts. Policy follows organised social reality. Halifa Sallah has demanded this system change for decades. Communities achieve it here, through the accumulated weight of organised truth, where electoral politics could not reach. The Community Land Rights Act transforms a sacred responsibility into legal guarantee, securing for future generations the inheritance of lineage and belonging. That inheritance depends on a decision no legislature can make for communities: to stop performing the lie.
The world that predates the lie
The architecture of predation cannot withstand truth. It was designed only to make truth seem impossible. Minister Bah’s admission confirms the trilogy’s central argument: the architecture resists reform through conscious decisions its highest levels make.
Our task requires withdrawing the consent that fuels it.
When enough of us refuse the thumbprint without verification, demand translation of English notices, map boundaries from elders’ memories, and insist on restitution as legal remedy for illegal disinheritance, the panorama shudders.
We have stood at this crossroads before: in 1965, in 1994, in 2017. Each time, we changed the operator and left the machinery intact. We now know, confirmed from within the cabinet itself, precisely what we have been leaving intact and why.
We remember that another world has always existed beneath its surface: a world where land breathes, ancestors speak, and justice flows as restoration. That world never disappeared. It waits only for us to stop performing the lie long enough to see it again.
The reawakening begins in Brufut, in Kartong, in Sanyang, in every community and every kabilo where citizens choose truth over ritual. Land is alive. Belonging is inherited. Justice means returning what was never lawfully taken. This is our sacred responsibility to generations yet unborn.
Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) is a Gambian think tank. We use community-based participatory action research to secure land rights and advocate for accountable governance and sustainable development policies.
