By M Sajo Jallow
It is a question best answered by farmers and workers themselves, as a matter of principle, and practical self-determination. That is, if we only care to ask. But let us look at the context.
From Business Insider Africa’s senior reporter, Mr Chinedu Okafor, in listing the “10 African countries with the highest IMF [International Monetary Fund] debt at the start of 2026,” 21st January, 2026, observed that “Recent developments … demonstrate how reliance on IMF programs influences economic policy, budgetary space, and political decision-making throughout Africa.” And that “IMF-backed reforms often involve cutting government spending, eliminating subsidies, or raising taxes. While these actions are intended to stabilize economies, they may worsen citizens’ distress.”
In Senegal next door, despite a hidden debt with supposedly wide-open IMF “eyes” looking at its national accounts, the nouveau regime is fiercely resisting the IMF’s infamous structural adjustment programs. The result: down-graded ratings with higher borrowing costs, frozen funding support of close to two (2) billion US dollars, and therefore, “citizens’ distress” due to limited incomes for farmers and workers. It is a cocktail recipe for social disaster, and of course, a political risk for regime change.
Here in The Gambia, the current regime has also decried IMF advice that constrains national interests, especially in funding infrastructure, agro-industry, and social services. Here, too, it is resistance to foreign micro-control by an unelected authority; and a reminder that he who “pays the piper, calls the tune,” especially under national debt distress.
There were times when debt defaulters were sold into enslavement, but nowadays impoverished states lose national assets, and are forced to dance to foreign policy tunes. The context is two (2) so-called global institutions, the IMF and its twin controller the World Bank, that can only be led by Europeans and North Americans, respectively. They impose citizens’ distress, and deny support selectively as they deem fit, based on the general of rule one-size-fits-all, with deemed exceptions. Of course, Africans and others are co-opted, and compromised, in decision-making. The Gambia chairs their African caucus lobby group, having taken over from the Central African Republic. The career and political elite, thus, aid and abet their own citizens’ distress, in exchange for the privileged salaries and/or benefit allowances. He, or she, who pays the piper, …, the rest is left to one’s imagination; in Wolof, lichi dess, hel ako motali.
Salary and benefit review
Citizens have expressed distress over the permanent cost-of-living crisis, expressed in mass poverty figures routinely published by these same institutions and other pollsters. The same disaster messaging is echoed in the United Nations reports, and those of the rating agencies. Yet, the chief finance overseers, and reporters, are not accountable for what they publish with damning effect. Witness the routine disclaimer in writing subject matter notes, or reports, for example, on system-changing digital finance – “tokenised finance”: “…The views expressed in IMF Notes are those of the author{s), although they do not represent the views of the IMF, or its Executive Board, or its Management.”
Yet, farmers and workers are accountable for their sufferings. They expressed distress at home quietly, or loudly on the streets, reflecting the fact that incomes have not kept pace with the rise in the costs of living, even where inflation figures have fallen from double to single digits. For example, Gambian groundnut farmers have decried the stagnation of prices, and workers have asked for relief and decent incomes, all without much success. On the contrary, the elite have succeeded in increasing their pay packages in the executive, judiciary, and parliament. Fairness must reign in the distribution of incomes between farmers and workers, on the one side, and the exploiters of labor and the managers, on the other side. An urgent review of wealth and income shares is needed.
Sovereign, democratic decision-makers
Farmers and workers, or their associations and unions, know what is needed for a bare minimum to survive, and not what is imposed on them, especially by foreign entities. Not a forced sell-off of national assets, but a new system for their accountable and efficient, democratic management to meet sovereign public interests. That is, a bottom line of improved living conditions for working people.
For the majority of groundnut farmers, what is the trouble, or wahala, about, in financing the payments of close to two (2) billion dalasis, when deposits in financial institutions are about 100 billion dalasis, or the economy’s gross domestic product value is close to 200 billion dalasis. Seriously, is 1-2 per cent of national financial strength worth it?
Moreover, the share of groundnut farmers’ income from the export price averaged only about 20 per cent, or one-fifth, in close to 60 years, from a cited case-study by Mr Baseedy Bojang. Evidently, a reversed matching grant of 80 per cent in favor of the elite exploiters and managers; and certainly, a deficit for the farmer in the value-chain, and in the democratic order. It is not enough for the elected mandate to cry foul, but it must resist by carrying out system change to benefit its sovereign, democratic decision-makers. That is, the farmers and workers toiling on farms, factories, and other workplaces; and have clearly spoken.
