By Dr Lamin K Janneh
In my previous interventions on Gambian coalition politics, I have argued that political aspiration, however desirable, cannot substitute for institutional design. I made that argument before the fragmentation of Coalition 2026 and returned to it when the weaknesses within that process became more visible.
The purpose was never simply to predict fragmentation. Political analysis has little national value if it stops explaining why something happened. The more consequential responsibility is to ask what can still be constructed from the political reality that fragmentation has produced.
That reality has now changed substantially.
Coalition 2026 has selected Talib Ahmed Bensouda as its flagbearer. The UDP and its partners have now formalised a separate political framework through the Gambia First Coalition. PDOIS is participating in the Team Gambia process, which continues to advocate wider political convergence. Other political actors and initiatives remain part of an increasingly fluid opposition landscape.
The problem is therefore no longer simply disagreement within one proposed coalition.
Fragmentation has produced separate centres of political organisation, each asserting its own basis of legitimacy, representation and political direction.
The immediate challenge is consequently not to create yet another coalition.
It is to establish one negotiating framework through which the existing political formations can determine whether meaningful convergence remains possible.
That distinction may now be critical. Unity cannot begin by demanding surrender.
Calls for opposition unity have become almost ritualistic in Gambian politics. Political leaders are repeatedly asked to put the country first, abandon personal ambition and support one candidate.
The sentiment is understandable. The difficulty is that it treats unity principally as a moral problem when the obstacles are also institutional and strategic.
These political actors have significant disagreements. They concern leadership, electoral strength, candidate selection, representation, political history, institutional trust and the exercise of power after an election. Personal relationships and accumulated grievances may also influence the political environment.
Pretending that these disagreements do not exist will not make them disappear. Nor must political leaders necessarily trust one another before they can cooperate.
Indeed, the absence of trust makes institutional design more important, not less.
Where personal trust is weak, agreed rules must carry more of the political burden.
Reconciliation in this context does not mean that parties must erase their differences, resolve every historical disagreement or become politically indistinguishable. It means establishing sufficient political accommodation for competing organisations to act together where their interests and national objectives overlap.
That process cannot begin by demanding that one side surrender to another.
Coalition 2026 cannot reasonably be asked to behave as though it has not selected a flagbearer.
The UDP and its partners cannot reasonably be asked to participate in a wider arrangement while pretending that their electoral strength, organisational history and political constituencies are irrelevant.
Team Gambia cannot contribute effectively to convergence if participation in its process is interpreted as acceptance of a predetermined candidate, institutional model or political outcome.
Smaller political organisations cannot be expected to enter negotiations merely as decorative participants.
The starting principle should therefore be simple:
No existing political formation should be required to dissolve itself, abandon its candidate or surrender its political position merely to enter negotiations.
Participation in dialogue should not constitute concession.
That would lower the political cost of engagement and create a politically credible route back to serious negotiation.
The immediate objective should be one negotiating framework This is where the present debate may need to change direction.
The immediate objective should not necessarily be one candidate. It should be one negotiating framework.
A common candidate may ultimately emerge from political convergence. But a common candidate should not be confused with convergence itself.
If negotiations begin with the presidency, every major organisation will naturally protect its candidate, bargaining position and political investment.
If negotiations begin instead with the rules governing cooperation, the leadership question becomes part of a wider political settlement. That would transform the nature of the discussion.
Instead of asking:
Who should join whom?
Who should withdraw?
Whose candidate should prevail?
The political actors would confront a different set of questions:
What minimum national programme can we jointly support?
What institutional reforms should bind any government emerging from our cooperation?
How should political weight be recognised?
How should disagreements be resolved?
What obligations should bind whoever ultimately exercises presidential authority?
And only after sufficient agreement develops:
What form of common leadership, if any, is both necessary and legitimate?
This is a more difficult process than announcing another coalition. But it may also be considerably more durable.
Political weight must be recognised, not weaponised
One of the central questions I raised in my earlier analysis concerned the relationship between participatory equality and substantive political weight. That problem remains unresolved.
Political parties should enter negotiations with equal political dignity. But equal dignity does not mean that differences in electoral support, organisational reach, parliamentary or local representation, national mobilisation and political infrastructure should simply disappear.
Equally, political strength cannot automatically confer an entitlement to determine leadership for everyone else.
Both principles must coexist.
The UDP must therefore be able to participate in a framework where its political weight is recognised without assuming that such recognition alone settles the leadership question.
Coalition 2026 must be able to defend the legitimacy of its own selection process while recognising that a substantially broader political arrangement, if genuinely achieved, may raise questions that its internal process could not settle for actors outside it.
Team Gambia, if it wishes to facilitate wider convergence, must demonstrate that no participant will control the outcome simply by controlling the process.
Smaller parties and movements must be able to secure meaningful participation while accepting that political influence may reasonably reflect more than formal equality at the negotiating table.
Political weight itself should not be asserted unilaterally. If it becomes relevant to decision-making, it should be assessed according to transparent and mutually agreed criteria.
These questions will be uncomfortable.
That is precisely why institutional design matters.
Political institutions exist not because interests naturally coincide, but because they frequently do not.
Compromise must be reciprocal and politically dignified
Coalition-building also has political psychology.
Leaders will resist compromise if compromise is presented to their supporters as humiliation, defeat or political marginalisation.
A serious convergence framework must therefore allow participants to reconsider positions without destroying their political standing.
No process should require Ousainu Darboe’s political humiliation. Nor should Talib Bensouda’s selection be treated as though it carries no political meaning.
PDOIS should not be required to abandon its political principles merely to demonstrate commitment to unity.
Smaller organisations should not be reduced to symbolic participation. But political dignity cannot become another word for inflexibility.
No participant can enter a genuine convergence process while demanding that its preferred outcome be protected in advance.
Unity without reciprocal concession is not coalition-building. It is absorption.
And absorption is unlikely to produce a durable political settlement among organisations that already possess their own constituencies, ambitions and institutional identities. The more productive question is therefore not simply what others should surrender.
It is: What is each political actor prepared to contribute, restrain or reconsider in order to make convergence possible? The answer must be reciprocal.
Putting The Gambia first cannot require unilateral sacrifice while leaving another actor’s preferred political outcome intact.
Agree on the presidency before agreeing on the president
Perhaps Gambian coalition politics repeatedly begins with the wrong question.
Who should be the candidate?
A more consequential question should come first:
What exactly would the agreed president be agreeing to?
Before determining common leadership, political actors should establish the institutional and political obligations that would bind any presidency emerging from their cooperation.
What constitutional reforms must be pursued?
What political commitments should limit or guide presidential authority?
How should coalition partners participate in government?
How should major disagreements be managed?
What accountability mechanisms should apply?
What happens if commitments made before an election are abandoned afterwards?
These questions should not again be deferred until power has been secured.
Coalition 2016 and Coalition 2026 now provide complementary warnings.
Coalition 2016 demonstrated that electoral unity can transfer political power without sufficiently institutionalising the governing settlement that follows.
Coalition 2026 demonstrated another vulnerability: even pre-election cooperation can become unsustainable where leadership, representation, political weight and governing expectations remain contested.
Any new convergence process must learn from both. It must be capable not only of competing together, but of governing together the morning after.
The logic should therefore be reversed.
Do not design the political settlement around a personality.
Design the political settlement first, then determine who can legitimately lead within it.
A framework above the existing frameworks
This may present Team Gambia with an opportunity to make a particularly important contribution, although no participating political formation should be presumed to own such a process.
In my earlier exchanges concerning Team Gambia, I argued that the idea would acquire substantive meaning only if it developed beyond political rhetoric into a framework for national dialogue, transition and institutional reform.
That proposition now carries greater urgency.
Perhaps Team Gambia’s most consequential role would not be to produce another competing presidential candidate, but to help initiate a structured convergence process in which existing political formations participate without first dissolving themselves.
But initiation must not become ownership.
No participating coalition or party should simultaneously become the sole architect, referee and beneficiary of the mechanism through which others are expected to reconcile.
The process must acquire legitimacy from the consent of those entering it. Coalition 2026 could participate as a recognised political bloc. The UDP-led framework could participate as a recognised political bloc. Team Gambia and other relevant political actors could participate according to agreed terms.
The first stage should not begin by reopening the presidential contest. It should establish whether sufficient common ground exists to justify deeper convergence.
The second should identify minimum national commitments.
The third should determine rules governing political cooperation, representation, candidate selection, accountability and post-election governance.
Only if sufficient agreement emerges should the formations determine whether a common leadership arrangement is both necessary and possible.
This is not political delay. It is sequencing.
And sequencing may determine whether another coalition process survives the very disagreements that damaged the previous one.
The political opening should not be wasted
There is still an important opportunity.
The existence of different coalition frameworks does not automatically mean that political convergence has become impossible. Public statements from within the opposition continue to leave space for dialogue and wider cooperation.
That space should be protected before political rivalry hardens into permanent institutional antagonism.
The longer separate coalitions develop, the more political capital their leaders and supporters will invest in defending them. Positions will become more difficult to reconsider. Compromise will become easier to portray as betrayal. Negotiating costs will rise.
This is why the present moment matters. The political task is not to force immediate unification.
It is to prevent today’s fragmentation from becoming tomorrow’s political permanence.
Supporters also have a responsibility.
If every concession is condemned as weakness, leaders eventually become prisoners of constituencies that demand unity while punishing the compromises required to produce it.
Recognising another party’s political strength is not surrender.
Accepting that one’s preferred candidate may eventually need to participate in a wider settlement is not necessarily defeat.
Likewise, supporting a larger party does not justify treating smaller political organisations as irrelevant.
Democratic cooperation requires political competitors to recognise one another as legitimate without requiring them to agree on everything.
The real test of unity
My earlier argument was that political aspiration cannot replace institutional design.
That proposition remains unchanged. What has changed is the level at which institutional design must now operate? The problem is no longer simply how to reconcile organisations within Coalition 2026.
There are now separate political formations, separate claims to legitimacy and substantial accumulated mistrust. The immediate objective should therefore be neither another coalition announcement nor an immediate battle over another common candidate.
It should be one credible negotiating framework in which no participant is required to concede defeat merely by entering the room.
If that framework can be constructed, the more difficult questions of political weight, candidate selection, presidential authority and post-election governance can then be negotiated according to rules accepted in advance.
Every major political formation can declare that The Gambia comes first.
The real test is whether that principle can survive contact with political interest.
Can political weight be recognised without becoming entitlement?
Can prior candidate selections retain dignity without becoming permanent vetoes over broader convergence?
Can those facilitating negotiations accept an outcome they cannot predetermine?
Can smaller actors accept proportionality without interpreting it automatically as marginalisation?
Can supporters give their leaders sufficient political space to negotiate?
These are difficult questions. But they are more useful than another declaration of unity.
The fragmentation of Coalition 2026 was foreseeable. Its permanence is not inevitable.
The next political chapter will depend upon whether Gambian political actors continue developing separate roads towards broadly similar national objectives, or whether they can construct a negotiating framework larger than their parties, candidates and existing coalitions.
The immediate challenge is not to agree on one candidate. It is to agree on one political table, one legitimate negotiating process, and rules under which everyone can enter without first surrendering who they are.
If that can be achieved, meaningful convergence remains possible. If it cannot, the problem will no longer be simply that Gambian political actors wanted unity but failed to achieve it.
The deeper conclusion will be that they could not agree on the institutions through which unity itself had to be negotiated.