By Seedy Jobe
Senior opposition figures delivered a stinging assessment of the government’s economic performance this week, arguing that a decade under President Adama Barrow has left Gambians poorer, farmers unpaid, and key state institutions weakened.
Appearing on QTV, Dr. Ousman Gajigo, an economist and senior member of Gambia For All, argued that the true measure of an economy is not found in official statistics but in the daily experience of ordinary Gambians.
“I don’t need somebody from the Ministry of Finance to tell me the inflation rate is going down,” he said. “When our sisters and brothers go to the market, they face rising costs of living.”
Dr. Gajigo pointed to migration as evidence of the country’s economic struggles, saying that the continued willingness of young Gambians to risk their lives to leave the country reflects a broader failure to create opportunity at home.
He dispensed with technical caveats altogether, saying the Barrow administration’s economic performance had been poor enough to merit a failing grade. Remaining a low-income country for another 25 years, he cautioned, could not be described as success, regardless of what technical indicators might suggest.
Alhagie Mamadi Kurang, a chartered accountant and member of the United Democratic Party, turned his focus to agriculture, which he described as the backbone of the Gambian economy since 1965. For more than two centuries, he said, spanning British colonial rule and the administrations that followed independence, farmers were reliably paid in cash for their groundnut harvests.
That system, he said, has collapsed under the current government. “Up to today, there are farmers in this country who cannot get their money for peanuts that they sold in the last rainy season, and the current rainy season is already here,” he said. “That has never happened in this country.”
Mr. Kurang criticized the Ministry of Agriculture for attributing the payment delays to intermediary agents, arguing that the state has historically borne ultimate responsibility for compensating farmers for their produce. He called the current situation the worst the sector has faced.
Both men framed economic growth as inseparable from poverty reduction, citing Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and China as examples of countries that used sustained growth to lift millions of citizens out of poverty. The Gambia, Mr. Kurang said, has failed to follow a similar trajectory, accusing the government of neglecting the two sectors that historically drove growth: agriculture and state-owned enterprises.
He cited Gamtel, the National Water and Electricity Company, the Gambia Ports Authority, the Social Security and Housing Finance Corporation, and the Gambia Groundnut Corporation as institutions built with billions of dalasis in public investment to generate employment and revenue.
“Today, all of those projects are failing drastically under the Barrow government,” he said.
He added that tourism, which became a central pillar of the economy after the 1980s, and foreign direct investment have also declined, further narrowing the country’s economic options.
Taken together, the two men argued, the past decade has been defined not by expanding opportunity and reducing poverty but by rising costs, unpaid farmers and eroding institutions.
Comments are closed.