Dear Minister Hamat Bah,
On 30 October 2026, The Republic published an investigation into the state land allocations the Ministry made between 2017 and 2025, based on official allocation records. It reports that senior office-holders, their relatives and connected businesses received many plots. By its account, members of two successive National Assemblies from different parties did too. It also reports that the Tanbi and Kamalo inquiries you set up found unlawful allocations, and that the Ministry has published neither report. The Republic says the Ministry did not answer its questions before publication.
SFLRAC writes to ask you one question in public, because the debate about who gets land cannot move forward until the Ministry answers it: when did the State buy or lawfully acquire the land it hands out in Kombo North, Kombo South and Kombo Central, and by what legal document?
SFLRAC does not accept that colonial laws, or the later laws that carried them forward, give the State authority over the land of the kabilolu. We cite those laws because the State relies on them, and they do not support its claim. SFLRAC’s published work traces this claim through every government since independence. We will put the same question to whichever government follows this election.
Officials have long answered with one word: designation. In 1994, a notice in the Gazette (Legal Notice 2 of 1994) declared the three districts State land from 1 March that year, under section 5(1) of the State Lands Act 1991. The Ministry treats designation as ownership. The Act treats it as a trust. Section 5(2) places designated land with the State “for the use and common benefit” of the community where the land lies. In plain terms, the State looks after the land on the community’s behalf.
When the Act means ownership, it says so. It gives the State land in Banjul and Kanifing “absolutely”, and it never uses that word for the designated districts. It also treats land the State has bought or acquired as a separate category from land it has designated. The 1994 notice mentions no purchase and no consent. SFLRAC sets out this reading in full in Before the State, Part Two, available at https://securing-futures.org/research.
Section 7 of the Act then declares that every person holding land in a designated district under their own community’s law becomes a tenant of the State. The kabilolu of Kombo signed no lease and sold no land to the State, and we know of no document in which they agreed to become tenants.
In our view, a clause that relabels owners as tenants cannot turn land the State holds for the community into land the State may give away as it pleases. If the Ministry disagrees, we ask it to say so in writing and name the document it relies on.
If the Ministry treats designation as ownership in Kombo, it relies on a title the State gave itself through a notice in the Gazette, without buying the land or seeking consent. The Act’s own words do not give the State that title. Even if the law allowed it, SFLRAC would still reject it.
The law does give the State a proper way to own land. The Land Acquisition and Compensation Act 1991 lets the Minister take land for a public purpose and requires the State to pay compensation. Where the Ministry used that law, it will hold the notices and compensation records, and SFLRAC asks it to publish them. Where it did not, the land it hands out still belongs to the community the State holds it for.
The allocation records behind The Republic’s investigation put that duty to the test. In Brufut alone, they list fifteen residential allocations. The Ministry granted two of them, under references SC 70/182/01/pt.VII(60) and SC 70/182/01/pt VII(6), to one person a week apart in 2020. You have said, as The Republic reports, that this person turned down those plots in favour of one in Fajara South Atlantic. Yet the State’s records, which The Republic has seen, still show both plots in that person’s name.
Two more plots sit in a Brufut Mini Layout. The other eleven sit in a layout the records call the “Brufut Forfiture (sic) Mini Layout”, and not one of those eleven entries carries a date or a reference number.
Section 5(2) allows the community to benefit “direct or indirect”. In SFLRAC’s view, anyone who holds land on behalf of others may use it only for their benefit, and must explain to them what it has done with it. So we ask: what did the Brufut community, which never sold this land to the State, gain from fifteen residential plots the Ministry handed to others, and where has the Ministry explained this? If the State took the land in the forfeiture layout from someone, we also ask from whom, and how that person came to hold Brufut land.
On 2 November 2026, SFLRAC sent the Ministry a formal request under the Access to Information Act 2021, addressed to the Permanent Secretary, Dr Ebrima Sisawo. It asks for any layout plan covering those fifteen plots, any document by which the State acquired the land, the forfeiture order behind the Brufut Forfiture (sic) Mini Layout, and any record of consent from, or compensation the State paid to, the kabilolu who hold it. The Act gives the Ministry twenty-one days to respond, and treats silence after that as a refusal. SFLRAC will publish the Ministry’s answer, or report its silence.
SFLRAC asks the Ministry to take two steps:
1. For each layout it has allocated in Kombo North, Kombo South and Kombo Central since 2017, name the document by which the State acquired the land, or state that it relies on designation alone.
2. Publish the Tanbi and Kamalo inquiry reports in full.
The National Land Policy 2026–2035 promises fair access to land. Sharing out land the State has not shown it owns spreads a loss the kabilolu never agreed to carry. SFLRAC looks forward to your answer.
By Dave Manneh
