Adama Barrow

Adama Barrow beat Yahya Jammeh in the 2016 Gambian election, was sworn in at an embassy in Senegal while Jammeh refused to leave, and took office when West African troops crossed the border. He had worked as a security guard at an Argos in north London while studying, returned to run an estate agency, and was chosen as the candidate of a seven-party coalition assembled because no single opposition party could beat a president who had ruled for twenty-two years and had said he would stay for a billion. Jammeh conceded on television and then reversed himself a week later, citing irregularities. Barrow was inaugurated in the Gambian embassy in Dakar on 19 January 2017; ECOWAS troops entered the country the same day with African Union and UN backing, and Jammeh flew to Equatorial Guinea two days later, reportedly with a good deal of the treasury. It is the clearest case of a regional bloc enforcing an election result on the continent. Barrow's government set up a truth commission that documented killings, torture and a fake AIDS cure programme under Jammeh. He then broke with the coalition partners who had put him there, dropped the three-year transition he had promised, and won again in 2021. Jammeh's asset recovery commission traced property, cattle and aircraft, and some has been sold. The truth commission recommended prosecutions and a special tribunal was agreed with ECOWAS in 2024, though Jammeh remains in Equatorial Guinea. Gambian politics since has been ordinary rather than heroic, which for a country that had one ruler for twenty-two years is the point.

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