Life after the witchcraft-practising despot
Colin Freeman reports from Banjul on Gambia’s escape from the tyranny of Yahya Jammeh
In the days of Yahya Jammeh’s tyrannical rule as president of Gambia, running the country’s top football club could be a frustrating business. No sooner had Banjul United won the national cup in 2014 than coach Omar Touray noticed that one by one, his players were going missing.
They were not going into victorious retirement but taking the so-called “Back Way” – the perilous route across the Sahara and Mediterranean in search of a better life in the West.
The players knew they stood a good chance of receiving asylum in Europe, allowing them to seek their fortunes in the continent’s lucrative leagues.
In the end, nearly half of Touray’s cup-winning squad vanished, leading to the club’s demotion to Division 2 the following season.
Now, a year on from Mr Jammeh’s downfall, Banjul United are back at the top of Division 1 and this time Touray’s players are staying put.
“Today they can see a future by playing in Gambia,” he told
The National at his home in the capital, Banjul, near where his team’s dusty training ground.
“With the dictatorship gone we are hoping investors will start putting money into the game here, too. I tell the players that this is the new Gambia. Anything can happen.”
Until a year ago, such optimism was thin in the Muslim-majority country. Under Mr Jammeh, a witchcraft-practising despot, the tiny West African nation had stagnated for more than two decades. Mr Jammeh jailed and murdered opponents, shut down independent newspapers and revelled in defiance of the outside world, withdrawing Gambia from what he called the “colonialist” British Commonwealth of Nations and ignoring human-rights critics.
Many of his two million people bet their futures on the rickety people smugglers’ boats going to Europe, where Gambians were disproportionately represented.
That all changed in December 2016, when Mr Jammeh unexpectedly lost the presidential election to Adama Barrow, a little-known opposition figure who once worked as a security guard in London.
He tried to cling to power anyway, with claims vote-rigging, before being forced out by fellow West African leaders who threatened to send in troops if he did not go peacefully.
In a year where Brexit and the rise of US president Donald Trump shook faith in democracy for many, Gambia appeared to tell a different story.
Since January last year, Mr Jammeh has been living in exile in Equatorial Guinea, while Mr Barrow has set about turning his country back into a democracy – a task that many a well-intentioned leader in similar circumstances before him has found harder than expected.
It has meant reforming security services packed with Jammeh henchmen, reviving a sluggish economy and maintaining a ruling coalition whose only shared ground was hatred of the former leader.
All this in the glare of a newly independent media, which is now free to carp and criticise.
For now at least, fears that the new government might lapse into the same authoritarian habits as the old appear unfounded. It has not collapsed into infighting and there has been little sign of the feared backlash from Jammeh loyalists.
“The new government has made good progress overall and has made genuine commitments around human rights and good governance,” one western official said.
One notable break with the past involves Gambia’s national intelligence agency, which used to act as Mr Jammeh’s answer to the KGB. Ousman Sowe, the agency’s newly-appointed director general, has taken the rare step of touring the country to meet community leaders and tribal chiefs, telling them that the organisation’s days of killing and torture are over.
“We want to be an institution that has people’s confidence,” Mr Sowe said.
So far, much of the progress made by Mr Barrow has largely involved cleaning up Mr Jammeh’s mess.
He has reversed his predecessor’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court and applied for Gambia to rejoin the commonwealth, which may happen this year.
As for the rather knottier issues of the demands for Mr Jammeh to face trial one day and of rebuilding the economy, it remains a case of wait and see.
Although Mr Barrow has promised a truth and reconciliation commission to hear evidence of past human rights abuses, he has so far shown little interest in prosecuting Mr Jammeh.
His fear is that it would reopen more wounds than it would heal, but that justification will probably not satisfy the families of the thousands who were tortured, jailed and in some cases killed by Mr Jammeh’s henchmen.
“It is fine now to have peace but sooner or later we also want justice,” said Lamin Sonko, 59, who spent three years in jail following an anti-government protest.
Meanwhile, many Gambians are still trying the “Back Way” to Europe, despite Mr Barrow’s pleas for them to stay and help him to rebuild.
As Mr Sonko points out, freedom may taste good but it does not fill stomachs.
“People in opposition no longer disappear any more, so things have improved in that respect,” he said. “But so far our livelihood hasn’t improved much.”