By Kebelo Demba Nyima
Perhaps the most tedious argument against a woman becoming president of The Gambia is also the least examined: that ours is a conservative society and therefore somehow unsuited to female political leadership. It sounds plausible until one bothers to look beyond our borders.
Pakistan is hardly a secular Scandinavian republic. It is a deeply religious Muslim-majority country, shaped by powerful conservative traditions and a political history in which women have had to negotiate formidable social barriers. Yet as far back as 1988, Pakistan could accept Benazir Bhutto as prime minister. Britain, with its own long history of male political dominance, had already elected Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Since then, women have led governments across continents, cultures and religions. The world did not wait for misogyny to disappear before women began governing; women governed, and in doing so helped demonstrate how intellectually feeble the old assumptions about leadership had always been.
The Gambia therefore has no persuasive cultural alibi.
If Pakistan could contemplate female leadership nearly four decades ago, it is rather difficult to argue that Gambians in the twenty-first century must continue treating State House as though it were a “Gentlemen Only” residence.
This is where Mariama Khan becomes interesting.
And there need be no hypothetical language about whether she might one day enter the presidential contest. She has entered it. Khan has publicly declared that she is running for president in the 2026 election. She therefore has the same democratic right as every other presidential aspirant to seek the office, present her programme to the electorate and ask Gambians to entrust her with the presidency.
Her candidacy should be judged accordingly.
If The Gambia is genuinely interested in identifying people with the intellectual and professional attributes one might reasonably associate with national leadership, why should Mariama Khan not be part of that conversation?
Consider the breadth of the woman.
Khan has already reached the summit of the Gambian civil service, having served as secretary-general and head of the civil service. She did not encounter government from the spectator’s gallery. She worked within its machinery, including in senior policy and administrative positions, and acquired the sort of institutional knowledge that cannot be obtained from campaign platforms or political WhatsApp groups.
That matters because there is an enormous difference between understanding politics and understanding government.
The former may teach a person how to obtain power. The latter teaches what an extraordinarily complicated nuisance power becomes once one has it.
Government is budgets, competing ministries, stubborn bureaucracies, imperfect information, personnel, regulations, international obligations, policy choices and consequences. The presidency may be the most visible office in the republic, but the state beneath it is an enormous administrative organism. A former Head of the civil service has at least seen that organism from remarkably close quarters.
Yet public administration constitutes only one dimension of Khan’s life.
She is also an academic and university teacher. She has written and researched questions concerning politics, development, culture, regional integration, gender and African society. She has produced poetry and documentary work. Her published scholarship includes substantial examinations of The Gambia’s relationship with Senegal and of the political cultures of The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau.
This is where Khan becomes considerably more interesting than the conventional political résumé.
There is something of the philosopher about her.
Not philosopher in the cheap contemporary sense whereby somebody discovers three quotations on the Internet and begins dispensing wisdom before breakfast. We mean the older disposition: an interest in why societies organise themselves as they do, how authority acquires legitimacy, how history inhabits the present, and how culture influences the relationship between those who govern and those who consent to be governed.
Her scholarship on precolonial influence upon the postcolonial state is especially revealing in this respect. It asks questions that lie beneath the daily noise of party politics: questions of legitimacy, political memory, inherited authority, leadership and the survival of older political ideas within supposedly modern institutions.
These are not trivial preoccupations for a declared presidential candidate.
The Gambia has never suffered from a shortage of people who want power. We have rather fewer people who appear to have spent serious time thinking about the nature of power.
And there is another quality worth mentioning: Khan has lived intellectually beyond government.
This is important.
Public office can produce a peculiar form of intellectual captivity. After years inside government, some officials become incapable of imagining the country except through the institutions they once administered. Others leave office and spend the remainder of their lives explaining why everything good that occurred was their achievement and everything disastrous was somebody else’s responsibility.
Khan’s trajectory has been different. Government was followed by scholarship, teaching, books, literature and cultural inquiry.
She has therefore experienced the state both from inside the bureaucracy and from the comparative distance of the scholar.
That combination is rare.
None of this means she would necessarily make a good president. Intelligence does not guarantee judgment. Academic qualifications do not immunise anybody against political folly. Libraries contain books written by brilliant people who would probably be catastrophic heads of government.
Nor should Khan be transformed into a saint merely because we find her profile interesting. Her period in public service is part of the historical record and should be scrutinised like that of any other senior official. If there are decisions deserving criticism, criticise them. If there are policies deserving interrogation, interrogate them.
But there is also something to be said for a long public career that is not popularly synonymous with personal enrichment or some spectacular corruption scandal. One must phrase such matters carefully, because absence of an accusation is not proof of moral perfection. Still, public reputation matters, particularly in a political culture where the relationship between office and private accumulation has too often generated legitimate public suspicion.
Now conduct a simple experiment.
Remove the name Mariama.
Replace it with a man’s name.
Give this imaginary gentleman the same biography: former secretary-general and head of the civil service; senior experience within government; international academic exposure; university teaching; published scholarship on Gambian politics and regional affairs; literary work; poetry; cultural engagement and years spent thinking about the African state.
Would anybody consider it eccentric to describe him as presidential material?
Hardly.
Indeed, by now somebody would probably have created a movement in his honour.
And therein lies the point.
The obstacle is frequently not the absence of qualified Gambian women. It is our persistent inability to imagine them occupying the highest political office.
Gambian women are permitted almost everywhere in the political process except at its imagined summit. They are indispensable when votes must be gathered, rallies populated and parties organised. They are praised endlessly as mothers of the nation, pillars of society and custodians of our communities.
Fine words.
But praise can itself become a cage when society celebrates women for every role except the one involving ultimate authority.
Britain discovered long ago that Downing Street does not require a male occupant. Pakistan demonstrated that Islam and female political leadership are not mutually exclusive propositions. Other societies have supplied their own examples.
The Gambia need not copy anybody. It merely needs to abandon the conceit that masculinity constitutes an unwritten presidential qualification.
Mariama Khan has decided to enter the contest. She should receive neither indulgence nor hostility because she is a woman. She should be asked the difficult questions.
What is her economic philosophy? How would she reform the Civil Service she once helped lead? What would she do about youth unemployment? What is her conception of constitutional government? How would she approach relations with Senegal? What does she think about corruption, education, agriculture, healthcare and the institutional weakness that continues to frustrate Gambian development?
Those are presidential questions.
Whether a woman is capable of sitting behind the presidential desk is not.
History answered that one long ago.
And perhaps that is ultimately why Mariama Khan makes such an intriguing presidential candidate. She represents something Gambian politics does not discuss often enough: the possibility that experience, intellectual curiosity, administrative knowledge and cultural understanding might coexist in a candidate who happens not to be a man.
She has declared that she wants the job.
She has every right to ask Gambians for it.
Now let her make her case, let her opponents make theirs, and let the electorate judge her by the same unforgiving standard by which every serious candidate for the presidency ought to be judged.
Not as a woman seeking a man’s office.
But as Mariama Khan seeking the presidency of her country.