Abdoulie Fatty, Lawyer
By Abdoulie Fatty
Every democratic transition eventually confronts a test more difficult than removing the old regime: whether it can dismantle the habits, attitudes and institutional culture that regime left behind.
December 2016 was extraordinary precisely because it represented more than an electoral change. After twenty-two years of authoritarian rule, what began in December 2016 and culminated in the political transition of January 2017 was, in many respects, a national attempt at reconstruction.
There were two dimensions to that reconstruction. The first concerned the State: how government exercises power, how public institutions understand the limits of their authority, how the security sector relates to citizens, and whether institutions serve the Republic rather than the political interests of those temporarily entrusted with government.
The second concerned the country itself: its citizens, media, professional bodies, political parties and civil society, and how they understood their place in a democracy. After more than two decades in which fear distorted the relationship between citizen and State, Gambians had to rediscover that citizenship carried agency—the right to question authority, peacefully assemble, criticise government and demand greater public accountability.
The transition was therefore simultaneously an exercise in democratic rehabilitation and national reconstruction. The State had to learn to wield power differently, and the citizenhad to rediscover the confidence to interrogate that power.
One early episode captured this ambition remarkably well. During the run-up to the National Assembly elections in April 2017, President Adama Barrow publicly warned regional Governors against campaigning for political parties. The significance went beyond that particular election. The message was simple: Governors were servants of the State, not local political agents of the government or any political party.
Coming only months after the end of authoritarian rule, this was precisely the institutional reset the transition appeared to promise. Under the previous regime, the distinction between the State and the political interests of the incumbent had become profoundly blurred. Barrow’s instruction reflected the genuine national mood of the period: we were going to do things differently.
That early promise, however, proved difficult to sustain. The boundaries between State and partisan politics have not always remained as distinct as that 2017 instruction envisaged. Some of these started to manifest through the gradual re-emergence and normalisation of practices government initially sought to combat.
There is, nevertheless, much in contemporary Gambia that should encourage us.
Perhaps nowhere is the contrast with our past more striking than in the judiciary. Our courts have delivered several consequential judgments against the Executive and other public authorities, including in politically sensitive cases. Exercises of public power have been declared unlawful or unconstitutional in circumstances where such judicial assertiveness would have seemed almost inconceivable during much of the authoritarian period.
There is considerably more whistleblowing too. Citizens speak. Civil servants leak. Journalists investigate. Social media, notwithstanding its excesses, has made secrecy more difficult to sustain. Public officials operate under a level of scrutiny radically different from what prevailed under the previous regime. These are genuine democratic gains.
But transitions are vulnerable to something less dramatic than the return of dictatorship: familiarity.
Conduct that would have deeply troubled us in early 2017 has become easier to rationalise or accept. Sometimes our assessment begins to depend less upon the principle involved and more upon who is affected or where our political sympathies lie.
It was from our experience of dictatorship that “Never Again”acquired its particular moral force. It represented an undertaking that the systems and institutional failures that made authoritarianism possible would not be permitted to return. Removing the ruler does not automatically remove the political culture and system that sustained the ruler.
Perhaps the most visible symbol of our unfinished reconstruction is the Constitution itself. Nearly ten years after December 2016, The Gambia continues to be governed under the 1997 Constitution—a constitutional settlement conceived under the previous regime and repeatedly amended during its twenty-two years in power, including in ways that consolidated executive power.
This is not to suggest that everything in that Constitution is incompatible with democracy. It contains important guarantees of fundamental rights, separation of powers and judicial independence. But there remains something profoundly unfinished about a democratic transition which, nearly a decade after rejecting authoritarian rule, has still been unable to complete the constitutional renewal intended to give juridical expression to the aspirations of that transition.
A new constitutional order was supposed to absorb the lessons of excessive executive power and institutional weakness and strengthen safeguards against their recurrence. Its continued absence matters because constitutional renewal was supposed to help consolidate the transition.
When young Gambians peacefully assemble over genuine matters of public concern—including something as basic but consequential as the safety and reliability of our ferry services—and their encounter with the State ends in arrests, the question must extend beyond whether the police technically possess powers of arrest. A democracy must equally ask whether those powers are exercised necessarily, proportionately and consistently with the constitutional freedom of peaceful assembly. The democratic State should not instinctively fear peaceful civic mobilisation.
One troubling tendency in our contemporary discourse is to assess institutions according to the outcomes they produce. An institution is celebrated as independent when its decision accords with our position and condemned as partisan when it does not. Judicial intervention is welcomed when the judgment produces our preferred outcome and questioned when it produces the opposite. Civil society is courageous when it challenges those we oppose and troublesome when it scrutinises those we support.
Democratic responsibility does not stop at the doors of government. Opposition parties cannot condemn intolerance while condoning it internally. Civil society cannot demand accountability while resisting scrutiny of itself. Journalists cannot demand freedom while abandoning professional responsibility. Lawyers cannot demand fidelity to law from public officials while becoming indifferent to it when inconvenient. Citizens cannot condemn tribalism while promoting divisive ethnic rhetoric against another community. We cannot be outraged when an Imam makes an offensive generalization about a particular ethnic community, yet remain silent when individuals from that same community engage in divisive rhetoric against minorities, including, regrettably, some aspiring to high public office in their private WhatsApp groups. The standard must be the same.
Democracy is a social contract: political system that all of us either strengthen or weaken through our conduct.
Nearly ten years after December 2016, we must therefore raise our measure of democratic success. The question can no longer simply be whether The Gambia today is better than The Gambia under dictatorship.
Often, when assessing our political and even socio-economic progress, we instinctively compare the present with the worst excesses of the dictatorship. We remind ourselves that at least people are not disappearing, that there are no routine extra-judicial killings, and that one can leave home for work without the palpable fear of somehow ending up at the NIA’s infamous “Bambadinka”. These freedoms are enormously important. But these things were never supposed to happen in the first place.
That low threshold sometimes distorts how we assess everything else. High inflation, the soaring cost of basic commodities, expensive electricity and other hardships can almost become tolerable because, after all, we are free. The absence of fear becomes the answer to economic discontent: we resign our fate to whatever our present difficulties, at least this is not dictatorship, often gleefully.
Perhaps this is one of the lingering legacies of twenty-two years of authoritarian rule. Having experienced the extraordinary, we risk treating the ordinary obligations of democratic government as extraordinary achievements. Freedom from disappearance, torture or arbitrary state violence is laudable, but it cannot indefinitely remain the benchmark against which succeeding governments measure their performance.
A democracy must eventually be judged by the standards of democracy, not by how favourably it compares with dictatorship. That threshold is far too low.
Nor should every contemporary failing be equated with dictatorship. The Gambia today is obviously freer, more open and institutionally more independent. The courage demonstrated by our courts, journalists, whistleblowers, civil society and ordinary citizens is evidence of genuine progress.
The harder question is whether those gains are becoming sufficiently embedded to survive personalities, governments and political cycles.
That requires completing the constitutional transition; institutions confident enough to exercise their mandates without fear or favour; public officials who understand that State power is temporary and held in trust; and citizens prepared to defend constitutional principles even when doing so produces outcomes they dislike. Above all, it requires consistency.
December 2016 gave us the opportunity to ditch dictatorship. Nearly ten years later, the task is no longer simply to celebrate that achievement but to complete the reconstruction.
That, ultimately, is what gave “Never Again” its meaning: a national undertaking to recognise the system that once damaged our institutions, weakened our freedoms and diminished the citizen before the State—and to refuse to entertain it again.
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