OP-ED: UDP WAS RIGHT TO WALK AWAY - Alhassan Darboe

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 when we discuss Gambian politics. We count personalities. We count press conferences. We count alliances announced in hotel rooms.

What we rarely count is the less glamorous work that determines political power: years of organizing, money spent maintaining structures, activists kept in the field, constituencies cultivated and an electoral machine that remains alive between elections.

That is where the mathematics becomes difficult to ignore.

UDP has spent decades building political capital. It has remained one of the country’s most visible and organized opposition forces through multiple election cycles. You may dislike the party. You may disagree with its leadership. You may never vote for it. None of those things change the underlying arithmetic.

You cannot spend years outside the political trenches, return when an election is approaching and expect a party that has carried the heavier organizational and financial burden to simply hand over the steering wheel.

That is not necessarily arrogance. Sometimes it is leverage.

And this is where the opposition needs to be careful. A coalition cannot be held together simply by the shared belief that Adama Barrow must be defeated. That is a negative objective, not a governing strategy.

Who leads? Who chooses the candidate? Who brings the voters? Who finances the machinery? Who has the organizational capacity to get people to the polls? What happens after victory?

Those are the questions that matter.

The 2016 coalition demonstrated that opposition parties can overcome their differences when political reality demands it. But coalitions work when the participants understand their relative weight.

UDP does not have to be my political home for me to acknowledge that it has earned a serious claim to leadership.

Politics is not a family reunion. It is a negotiation over power.

And negotiations become much clearer when everyone stops pretending that every participant arrives at the table with the same political weight.

A spade should be called a spade. The games around UDP serve no serious purpose.