By Dr Malang Faye
Last night, the darkness did what no opposition party has managed to do in years. It brought ordinary Gambians onto the streets (middle of the night), in their own numbers, under no party’s flag, chanting that President Barrow must go. There were no UDP buses, no NPP T-shirts, no coalition banners. Just citizens, candles in one hand and frustration in the other, demanding the departure of a president they re-elected less than five years ago. If the Barrow campaign is not alarmed by what it saw last night, then it has not understood the first thing about elections. Elections are not won in December. They are lost in the months before December, one blackout at a time.
Let us be clear about what happened. For months, Gambians have endured some of the worst power outages in the country’s recent history, with some communities reportedly going more than 48 hours without electricity and power returning only briefly before the next outage. Nawec’s own explanation tells us everything we need to know. Nawec says it has a generation capacity of about 104 megawatts with an installed capacity of 31.7 megawatts at Kotu Power Station. We were told some engines are operational while the others undergo rehabilitation. This is not technical failure, rather they have suffered a failure of strategy and management.
The Senegal Gamble: A strategic error of historic proportions
My take is this that the government’s decision to anchor the country’s electricity supply on Senegal was not merely a procurement choice. It was a strategic error of historic proportions. The bill for it has now arrived just three months before election. The strategic mistake? In 2017, Nawec signed an agreement with Senegal’s Senelec to import 50 megawatts of electricity through the OMVG substations at Soma and Brikama, alongside the Karpowership contract for 30 megawatts. After nearly a decade temporary arrangement has become the backbone of our grid. We did not build redundancy. We did not build autonomy. We built a socket in our national wall and plugged it into Dakar. No serious government does such arrangement because energy is not an ordinary commodity. It is the bloodstream of a modern state. Our hospitals, water systems, telecommunications, banks, cold storage, security installations, all of it runs on electricity.
A country that outsources the majority of its power supply has outsourced its ability to function as an independent actor. Germany should have served as a lesson. For nearly two decades, Berlin built its industrial model on cheap Russian gas flowing through Nord Stream, ignoring warning about strategic dependence. When the tap was threatened in 2022, Germany did not face an inconvenience. It faced a national emergency. They spent months to rewired its entire economic policy. Europe largest economy still could not absorb the shock gracefully. Since 2017 the technocrats should have warned the president that energy dependence and security dependence follow the same iron law. The supplier eventually becomes the sovereign. And The Gambia has now placed both levers in the same hands. This is the point that should keep the Barrow campaign awake at night.
Now consider what last night’s protest actually means for December because its significance goes far beyond the energy sector. The political science scholar VO Key Jr, in his classic work The Responsible Electorate, highlight that voters are not fools who are manipulated into the polling booth. They appraise the past and they reward or punish incumbents based on their lived experience. The voter who spent six hours yesterday wondering whether the meat in the freezer has spoiled does not need a manifesto. She has already made her decision. She will communicate it in December. What is really alarming for Barrow is not the anger. It is the absence of organisation. When citizens march without a political party busing them in, without a campaign paying for their placards, without a candidate’s face on their t-shirts, they are practising something far more dangerous than protest. They are practising independence. They are telling every citizen in this country that the government’s weakness has reached the point where the state can no longer credibly claim that dissent is manufactured by opponents.
The man on the street last night was not an opposition activist. He was a voter who had had enough. What should terrify the incumbent is that the man who marches without a party is the easiest man in the country to convince to vote without a party. That is the protest vote. It is the most underpriced asset in Gambian politics right now. Floating voters, the great uncommitted middle of the Gambian electorate, do not move because of rallies. They move because of cumulative grievance. Every night of darkness is a deposit in an account that will be withdrawn on polling day. Nawec raised tariffs by up to 36 per cent and Gambians were told the money would fix the system. The system failed anyway. That combination, paying more and receiving less, is the precise chemistry of electoral punishment.
As December gets closer, the arithmetic is changing rapidly because a credible second and third option now exists. For years, the incumbent’s greatest shield was the fragmentation of the opposition. The absence of an alternative that floating voters could rally behind without feeling they were wasting their votes. That shield is now gone. Talib now stands as a viable option for precisely the voters we saw on the streets last night. They are unaffiliated, unimpressed, and unafraid. Floating voters behave like water. They flow to the lowest point of resistance. The candidate who offers change without requiring them to first declare a party. The protester who chanted “Barrow must go” without wearing any party’s colour is the exact profile of the voter who will tick Talib’s box without ever attending his rally.
President Barrow has three months to turn this around. That is not nothing. Incumbents command resources, and the same state machinery that converts nationwide tours into campaign assets can still be mobilised. Now the window is narrower than it looks, and the required remedy is not a press conference or another two-week promise from Nawec. It is visible, structural change! A serious investment in domestic generation capacity so that no Senegalese switch can ever again hold this country hostage. Nawec should provide a clear timetable for energy independence as a matter of national security, not utility management. The president should acknowledgment to the Gambian people that the outsourcing of their electricity was a mistake. Without that, the verdict of last night will simply be transferred to the ballot box. There is a straight line from the fuse box in Dakar to the ballot box in Banjul and the government has spent nine years drawing it. In December, the people will simply follow it. The lights went out, and the people came out. If the government does not understand the connection between those two events, December will teach it.
The author, Dr Malang Faye, is a public policy and political analyst. He lectures at the University of The Gambia Political Science Unit.