Opinion

By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) Mustapha K. Darboe, Awa Macalo and Talibeh Hydara, in The Republic's investigation 'Soil for the elites' (30 October), went through more than 900 state land allocations the Ministry of Lands made between 2017 and 2025. Against a rule of one plot per person, they found office-holders and their relatives, alongside connected businesses, holding several plots each. Lawmakers across party lines received p

Before The State - Part Five: Who Holds the Seat? By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) 26 October 2026 Clan heads in the Western Region have been selling lineage land without telling their families. The World Bank's 2013 land governance assessment called it "a major concern". Some clans split their land among families to stop the sales. The sales went on. Part Four turned the colonial seat of 1894 to face the kabilo, as the Community

By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) 15 October 2026 In June 2025 I wrote twice about the draft National Land Policy (NLP) 2026 to 2035. I wrote that 'The Ministry listened!', and I counted 'pathways for restitution' among the gains. I measured those gains against the May 2025 Validation Copy, the text that went to national validation at Bijilo on 10 June 2025, where SFLRAC had a representative in the room. This postscript sets that copy

Public debt and fiscal management emerge as the leading issues in online political discourse, while persistent electricity challenges and calls for faster transitional justice add to pressure on the incumbent government. Public debt, persistent electricity supply challenges and demands for faster transitional justice have emerged as major themes in The Gambia’s online political discourse, according to a new analysis by Narrative Control covering the seven days ending October

By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) The Ministry of Lands has written a new rulebook for the day the state comes for your land: the Draft National Resettlement Policy 2027 to 2036, the country's first. Resettlement is the polite word for the state moving you off your land to make way for a road, a scheme, or an investor. The draft says it ‘gives effect to the National Land Policy’, so the land policy sets the principle and this draft su

The relay still signs. Part Two found it in the state's own record: the seyfo and the alkalo administer the land the state claims ownership of, and no transfer of it moves without their mark. The office that endorsed the Kombo Coastal Belt leases in 1970 endorses transfers today. It never stopped. Part One asked by what right the state claims the land. This essay asks the narrower question, the one that falls on the men whose mark moves the land. By what authority was their

By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) August 10, 2026 On 22 and 23 July, at the DPPH hall on Marina Parade in Banjul, the Ministry of Lands convened a workshop on the legal review of The Gambia's land tenure and land administration laws. The consultant leading the review set out its purpose from the front of the room. The task, the slides said, is to 'harmonise and modernise' the statutes that govern land in The Gambia. Fragmentation acro

Here is the uncomfortable truth about coalitions: they are rarely built on friendship. They are built on arithmetic. UDP is not my political home. I do not support the party, and I am unlikely to support it in the future. That is precisely why I think this deserves to be said without partisan emotion. If UDP has walked away from the coalition talks because it refuses to surrender leadership, I think the party may have made the right calculation. Consider what we often miss wh