Statecraft & Independence
Landmark
Adama Barrow
born 1965
Ended twenty-two years of Jammeh's rule at the ballot box
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the The Gambia Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A property developer who stood as the united opposition candidate in 2016, won, and had to be sworn in at an embassy abroad before Jammeh would leave.
Adama Barrow worked as a security guard at an Argos store in north London while studying, went home to The Gambia and built a property business, and was an unknown quantity in national politics until the opposition needed a candidate nobody could object to.
With Ousainou Darboe and most of the United Democratic Party leadership in prison, seven opposition parties agreed in 2016 to run a single candidate, and chose Barrow — who resigned his party membership to stand as an independent for the coalition.
He won the election of 1 December 2016. Yahya Jammeh conceded on television, congratulated him, and then a week later announced he rejected the result and would not go. What followed was a month of constitutional crisis: Barrow left for Senegal for his own safety, ECOWAS assembled troops on the border under a regional mandate, and on 19 January 2017 Barrow was sworn in as president at the Gambian embassy in Dakar — a head of state inaugurated outside his own country. Jammeh flew into exile two days later.
He returned to a state with no functioning institutions of accountability, and his government established the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission that documented what the previous twenty-two years had contained. He was re-elected in 2021.
He has been criticised at home for reneging on a promise to serve only three transitional years, and for the slowness of the reforms and the prosecutions the commission recommended.
With Ousainou Darboe and most of the United Democratic Party leadership in prison, seven opposition parties agreed in 2016 to run a single candidate, and chose Barrow — who resigned his party membership to stand as an independent for the coalition.
He won the election of 1 December 2016. Yahya Jammeh conceded on television, congratulated him, and then a week later announced he rejected the result and would not go. What followed was a month of constitutional crisis: Barrow left for Senegal for his own safety, ECOWAS assembled troops on the border under a regional mandate, and on 19 January 2017 Barrow was sworn in as president at the Gambian embassy in Dakar — a head of state inaugurated outside his own country. Jammeh flew into exile two days later.
He returned to a state with no functioning institutions of accountability, and his government established the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission that documented what the previous twenty-two years had contained. He was re-elected in 2021.
He has been criticised at home for reneging on a promise to serve only three transitional years, and for the slowness of the reforms and the prosecutions the commission recommended.
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