By Dr Jimmy Henry Nzally
The anger that spilled onto the streets of The Gambia on 7th September did not begin that morning. The burning tyres, blocked roads and confrontation with security forces were the visible expression of a frustration that had been building quietly inside homes, markets and businesses for months. The immediate trigger was prolonged electricity outages, with reports that some communities had gone without power for as long as 48 hours. In parts of the Greater Banjul Area and elsewhere, residents demanded answers from the National Water and Electricity Company, Nawec, while the police responded with tear gas in some locations. The streets may have quietened, but the underlying question remains: why does a country that has invested heavily in improving electricity access still struggle to provide a service that ordinary Gambians can reliably build their lives around?
That question cannot be answered simply by pointing to a failed generator, high temperatures, rising demand or maintenance problems. Those may explain the immediate outage, but they do not explain the vulnerability of the wider system. The deeper story is about a poor country attempting to modernise an electricity sector that has been structurally weak for decades, while the population has very little financial capacity to absorb the consequences when infrastructure fails. In The Gambia, electricity unreliability is not merely an inconvenience. It is an additional economic burden imposed on people whose incomes, businesses and household budgets are already fragile.
The historical context is important. When the Yahya Jammeh era ended in 2017 and Adama Barrow’s government took office, the electricity situation was among the most visible failures inherited by the new administration. Nawec was financially distressed, electricity generation was inadequate and much of the available equipment was old or unreliable. The World Bank recorded that available generation capacity in the Greater Banjul Area was only around 27 megawatts in October 2017, even though the country had significantly higher installed capacity on paper. Electricity was being produced far below what the system nominally possessed. Blackouts were so frequent that electricity became a daily source of frustration and one of the clearest symbols of the country’s infrastructural weakness.
The subsequent improvement was significant and should not be dismissed. Between 2017 and 2019, available capacity increased dramatically, reaching roughly 80 megawatts by October 2019 against peak demand of around 70 megawatts. The World Bank described the transformation as a move from approximately two or three hours of electricity per day in 2017 to almost continuous supply by 2019 and 2020. For ordinary Gambians, this was not an abstract development statistic. It meant businesses could operate for longer, households could plan their days with greater certainty and public services could function more normally. The improvement demonstrated that serious intervention could make a difference.
But it also created a new challenge that has received less attention: maintaining the gains after the emergency had passed.
The mistake would be to interpret the post-2017 improvement as proof that the electricity problem had been solved. In reality, much of the early effort was about stabilisation including bringing additional generation into service, improving supply and preventing an immediate collapse. Stabilisation was necessary, but it was not the same as building a resilient system. As more households gained access and economic activity increased, electricity demand also grew. The system therefore had to move from simply catching up with a historical deficit to continuously expanding capacity, maintaining equipment and strengthening the network as consumption increased.
This is where The Gambia’s economic limitations become critical. The country is poor, and the state operates within severe financial constraints. The African Development Bank has classified The Gambia as a low-income country, with gross national income per capita of around $830 in 2023. For households living on modest and often irregular incomes, there is little room for unexpected expenses. The same is true for the small businesses that dominate much of everyday economic activity. When electricity fails, these people cannot simply purchase expensive backup systems and carry on as if nothing happened.
A wealthy household can buy a generator. A large company can install solar panels, batteries and backup generators. A hotel can maintain its own power system. A small Gambian trader may have none of these options. This creates an important inequality in the electricity crisis: money buys resilience. Those who can afford alternative power can protect themselves from Nawec’s failures; those who cannot are forced to absorb them.
The hidden economic cost is therefore much larger than the value of the electricity that was not supplied. A vendor selling cold drinks needs refrigeration. A restaurant needs to preserve food. A tailor needs a sewing machine. A barber needs electric clippers. A welder needs power. A small office needs computers and internet equipment. A mother preparing porridge or another food product for sale may depend on electricity for preparation, storage or early-morning production. When the power disappears, the immediate loss may be small in national accounting terms, but for someone earning just enough to survive from one day to the next, losing one day’s income or stock can have consequences that continue long after the lights return.
This is the problem with viewing blackouts only as an energy-sector statistic. A megawatt that is unavailable at a generating plant is measurable. The income lost by thousands of small traders is not. The food discarded from household refrigerators is not. The business transactions that never occur are not. The hours of study lost by children in homes without alternative lighting are not. The fuel purchased by households to run generators is not normally counted as the cost of a blackout. Yet these losses accumulate, and in a low-income economy they can represent a meaningful drag on productivity and household welfare.
The financial structure of Nawec makes the problem even more difficult. Historically, the utility has faced high generation costs, dependence on expensive fuel, technical and commercial losses and weak financial performance. The World Bank has identified financial sustainability and system losses as continuing challenges, even as reforms have improved the utility’s position. This creates a difficult triangle between affordability, reliability and financial sustainability. If tariffs are too low, Nawec struggles to maintain infrastructure and invest. If tariffs rise sharply, poorer consumers face additional pressure. If government subsidies cover the gap indefinitely, the burden shifts to public finances.
There is no painless option. That is precisely why the sector requires structural reform rather than repeated emergency interventions.
One of the more successful elements of that reform has been regional electricity integration. Connecting The Gambia to regional power systems has allowed Nawec to access cheaper electricity than some domestic thermal generation. The World Bank says regional power integration has helped Nawec return to profitability and generated approximately 42 per cent in cost savings, partly through access to Guinea’s hydropower. This is an important achievement and demonstrates the economic value of regional cooperation.
But it also exposes another vulnerability. Cheaper electricity is not automatically more secure electricity. Dependence on regional supply can reduce costs while increasing exposure to disruptions outside the country’s direct control. Regional integration therefore needs to be accompanied by sufficient domestic reserve capacity. The strategic question is not whether The Gambia should import electricity; it should. The question is whether the country has enough alternatives when imported power or a major domestic generating unit becomes unavailable.
The move towards solar energy and battery storage is similarly promising but cannot be treated as a complete solution. The Gambia has invested in its first large-scale solar facility, including 23 megawatts of solar capacity, while battery storage and new transmission infrastructure are being developed. These investments can diversify the energy mix and reduce exposure to fuel prices. But generation is only one part of the electricity chain. Power still has to be transmitted, distributed and managed. A country can build a solar plant and still experience blackouts if its distribution network is weak or if it lacks sufficient capacity to balance supply and demand.
That is why the latest crisis is so revealing. Nawec has cited increased demand during the hot season, high temperatures and a technical incident affecting a major generating unit among the causes of the current disruption. These are reasonable explanations for what happened, but they also raise the more uncomfortable question of why a predictable seasonal increase in demand and the failure of one major unit can produce such severe consequences. Equipment will always fail. Demand will always fluctuate. The purpose of a resilient electricity system is to ensure that one failure does not become a national crisis.
The real weakness, therefore, may not be the absence of individual projects but the lack of sufficient redundancy across the system. The Gambia needs enough reserve generation, transmission capacity, storage and operational flexibility to absorb shocks. It needs maintenance that happens before equipment reaches crisis point rather than after failure. It needs accurate demand forecasting and stronger financial management. Most importantly, it needs to stop treating electricity shortages as isolated emergencies and start treating reliability as a measurable national economic objective.
The consequences extend beyond businesses and households. Nawec’s responsibility for both electricity and water means that instability in the power system can affect other essential services. Water pumping and treatment require energy, while hospitals and clinics depend on electricity for equipment, refrigeration and basic operations. Schools increasingly depend on electricity for lighting, computers and connectivity. Telecommunications and digital services are equally dependent on a stable energy supply. The electricity crisis therefore has a multiplier effect: when power fails, other systems begin to experience pressure.
Security also becomes more complicated during prolonged outages. Dark streets and markets reduce visibility and can make movement after dark more difficult for residents and security personnel. It would be irresponsible to claim that every blackout automatically causes crime, but prolonged darkness can weaken the basic conditions in which communities feel secure. In a country where public infrastructure is already limited, an extended outage can therefore create a sense that several essential systems are failing simultaneously.
This accumulation helps explain the political significance of 7th September. Electricity has become one of the most immediate ways citizens judge whether government is functioning. People may disagree about economic forecasts or development statistics, but they know when their businesses cannot operate and when their homes have no power. That makes Nawec particularly important as The Gambia approaches the 5th December, 2026 presidential election. President Barrow is seeking a third term, and opponents will inevitably use the electricity crisis as evidence of shortcomings in government performance.
Yet reducing the issue to electoral politics would be too easy. The electricity problem is older than the current administration, and the Barrow government can legitimately point to improvements in generation, regional integration, solar investment and access. At the same time, those achievements do not give the government an unlimited excuse for continued unreliability. An inherited problem eventually becomes the responsibility of the government that has had years to address it.
The most useful electoral question is therefore not who can most effectively blame Nawec or the government. It is who can offer a credible path from crisis management to resilience. Any party seeking power should be required to explain how it would finance Nawec, reduce losses, maintain infrastructure, diversify generation, manage regional dependence and protect poor consumers while improving reliability. Promising uninterrupted electricity without explaining how the system will be financed is not a policy. It is an election slogan.
The September protests should consequently be understood as a warning rather than simply an isolated episode of public anger. They demonstrate what happens when infrastructure failure becomes an economic burden for people who have little capacity to absorb it. In a poor country, electricity unreliability can quietly deepen poverty because every outage forces households and businesses to spend scarce resources compensating for a public-system weakness.
That is the central contradiction facing The Gambia. The country has made real progress in expanding electricity access and attracting major investment into the sector, yet too many citizens remain unable to organise their economic lives around the assumption that electricity will be available when they need it. Development cannot be measured only by how many people are connected to the grid. It must also be measured by whether that connection is reliable enough to support a livelihood.
The next stage of reform therefore cannot be another cycle of outage, explanation, emergency intervention and temporary relief. The Gambia needs a system in which the failure of one generator does not cripple supply, in which maintenance is preventative rather than reactive, in which Nawec’s finances are sustainable, and in which investment produces reliability rather than simply infrastructure on paper.
For a wealthy country, a blackout can be an inconvenience. For a country as poor as The Gambia, it can be an economic event. It can mean food lost from a freezer, a day’s income lost at the market, fuel purchased with money meant for household needs, a small business forced to close, a student unable to study and a public service pushed onto expensive backup power.
The real cost of the crisis is therefore not the darkness itself. It is everything that stops working because of it.
And that is ultimately the question The Gambia must confront beyond the September protests and beyond the December election: can the country build an electricity system strong enough to help people escape poverty, rather than one that repeatedly forces poor people to pay for the system’s weaknesses? Until the answer is yes, every new project will remain only part of the story. The real measure of progress will be much simpler: whether Gambians can switch on the light and trust that it will stay on.
Dr Jimmy Hendry Nzally is a political scientist specialising in African politics, democratisation and decolonisation. He holds a PhD in Political Science, with doctoral research on the fall of authoritarian rule and democratic transition in The Gambia following the 2016 presidential election.