Not Working: Why We Keep Fixing What Was Never Ours
By Baba Colley
We are exhausting ourselves repairing a machine that was never built to serve us. Around the clock, we tinker with mechanisms designed by colonial architects for colonial purposes, convinced that with just one more adjustment—term limits, perhaps—the whole system will finally work in our favor. But we’re asking the wrong questions entirely.
The Conversation No One Is Having
Walk through any village in the Gambia and ask people what they need. Their answers are immediate and concrete: food, water, a secure place to sleep. These aren’t abstract policy preferences—they’re the fundamental requirements of human survival. Our ancestors chose where to settle based on a simple calculus: Can we grow food here? Is there reliable water? This is as basic as human decision-making gets.
Yet somehow, our national political discourse has drifted far from these foundational concerns. The conversations dominating our airwaves and meeting halls are led by people whose own access to food and water is assured, who can afford to live anywhere they choose. For them, the urgent issues are education reform, healthcare systems, technological infrastructure, and modern development. These matter, certainly, but they are not what keeps most Gambians awake at night.
When we criticize the government for “not doing enough,” we need to ask ourselves: enough for whom? Enough of what? We haven’t yet mastered the basics of ensuring that people can feed themselves and access clean water. Yet we rush headlong into debates about advanced infrastructure and institutional reforms as if we can skip the foundational steps. This doesn’t work in mathematics—you cannot learn calculus without first understanding arithmetic. It doesn’t work in construction—you cannot build the roof before laying the foundation. And it doesn’t work in national development.
The Problem With Our Current Structure
The Gambia operates with a massively top-heavy governmental structure that serves no beneficial purpose for ordinary citizens. We have systematically moved responsibility, power, and resources away from individuals and communities, centralizing everything in Banjul. This concentration creates a system where politicians promise everyone a free ride rather than listening to what people actually need and empowering them to provide for themselves.
This dependency didn’t emerge naturally. The aid industry cultivated it deliberately, creating a relationship between our government and foreign donors that mirrors the beggar-giver dynamic. Our national budget contains a perpetual hole that we expect foreign aid to fill. Since government officials position themselves as supplicants on our behalf, they see nothing wrong with taking their share of what flows through their hands. This culture of extraction has become so deeply embedded that political ambition now centers primarily on positioning oneself at the top of this food chain to access these resources. Dambisa Moyo did a great job in breaking this down in her book, Dead Aid.
A Different Model: Building From the Ground Up
If we genuinely want to solve our problems, we need to completely reimagine how governance works in the Gambia. We need structures that support people where they are, doing what they need to do, rather than structures that extract from them. The current structure was put in place to extract from the people to the colonial masters in Banjul.
Village Autonomy: Every village and town should be capable of feeding itself. In areas with reliable water sources, communities should have clear control over their land, with local governments that establish and enforce rules about land ownership and set safety standards for food, water, and shelter. These local governments should be genuinely autonomous—not dependent on Banjul for their basic survival needs. This is not the level where Commercial farming is the topic of conversation. That will come at a later stage.
District Coordination: Villages should exist within districts that function as a second tier of government. These district authorities should primarily oversee relationships between the various villages—managing disputes, coordinating shared resources, facilitating trade and cooperation. Districts should also maintain substantial autonomy, capable of functioning independently while working collaboratively with their constituent communities.
Regional Authority: Districts, in turn, should be organized into regions with their own governmental structures. Regional authorities should focus on maintaining order and facilitating cooperation between districts, resolving conflicts, and coordinating initiatives that benefit multiple districts. Each level of government—village, district, and region—should jealously guard its domain while working cooperatively with others for the benefit of citizens.
Central Government’s True Role: The national government in Banjul should not be attempting to manage food production in rural villages or water systems in individual towns. Its primary responsibility should be ensuring that laws apply fairly and uniformly across the country, coordinating with regional and local governments rather than attempting to control them. The central government should facilitate cooperation, provide support when requested, and maintain national standards—not dictate every detail of local life.
Returning to the Land
No politician currently speaks about dismantling the structures inherited from the British Empire. No one discusses returning people to the land so they can build their lives from the ground up, developing genuine self-sufficiency rather than dependency. Instead, every political campaign promises more centralized services, more government jobs, more programs managed from Banjul.
This model is fundamentally unsustainable. It creates competition for control of a centralized state that everyone recognizes as the source of resources and opportunity. It encourages corruption because the stakes of controlling government are so impossibly high—when the central government controls access to basic needs, controlling government means controlling survival itself. We wonder why nobody wants to relinquish power, and why some people can never give up the pursuit of power.
What Real Change Looks Like
Any politician who genuinely wants to transform the Gambia must stop promising free rides. They need to start providing concrete answers to basic questions: How will people in each region ensure reliable access to food and water? How will local communities gain genuine control over their land and resources? How will we build governmental structures from the bottom up rather than imposing them from the top down?
This requires honest conversations about decentralization, about land reform, about agricultural support, about water infrastructure. It means investing resources in helping communities become self-sufficient rather than making them more dependent. It means creating local institutions with real power and real resources rather than hollow administrative structures that merely implement orders from Banjul.
The Real Issue
Term limits are not the problem. The problem is that we continue operating within a system designed to extract from us rather than serve us, a system that concentrates power and resources at the top while everyone else fights for scraps. Until we address this fundamental structure, we will continue working around the clock to repair something that has never worked for us in the first place.
The answer isn’t adding another rule to limit how long someone can sit at the top of a dysfunctional pyramid. The answer is building an entirely different structure—one that starts with the foundation of human needs and builds upward from communities that can sustain themselves, coordinate with their neighbors, and collectively create something that actually serves the people who live here.
We need to stop plugging in to play our own tunes on an instrument that was never ours and start building something new from the ground up. That begins with the most basic questions: How do people eat? How do they access water? How do they shelter themselves? Everything else must follow from there.
Let us know what you think in the comments.