By Dave Manneh
Between March and July this year, the Gambian state stood accused of two opposite failures, in unrelated cases, months apart. In March, it re-arrested two acquitted citizens minutes after a court set them free. Between June and July, at least four men died in separate stabbings the police failed to prevent. A state needs its citizens to accept its rulings and trust its protection, and the Gambian state is losing its grip on both.
Start with the Bojang case. On 30 March 2026, Justice Jaiteh acquitted Ousainou and Amie Bojang at the Banjul High Court, over the 2023 killing of two police officers at Sukuta-Jabang Traffic Lights. Within minutes, prosecutors from the Attorney General’s Chambers won an order sending the siblings straight back to Mile Two, pending an appeal the state had not yet filed in full. Protests broke out at Westfield and spread to Brufut. Only after two days of tear gas and water cannon did the state relent and release the siblings again.
Max Weber, in his 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, defined the state as the institution that holds “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” within its own territory. That monopoly survives only as long as citizens accept it as legitimate, and acceptance depends on predictability. Reverse your own court’s verdict within minutes of losing it, and citizens learn that no verdict is final unless the state happens to like it, a lesson far more corrosive than the original case ever was.
There is a sharper mechanism still. Citizens obey the law less from fear of punishment than from a belief that legal authority acts fairly, and that belief rests on process rather than outcome, a chance to be heard, a consistent rule, a reasoned decision made before enforcement.
The Bojang order met none of these tests. The siblings had no hearing before it, no explanation accompanied it, and the appeal it pre-empted did not yet exist. A citizen with no opinion on the Bojangs’ guilt still learns from the sequence itself that a verdict here holds only until the state changes its mind.
Now turn to the killings. On 10 June, Musa Sabally, twenty-three, died in Brikama after a group of young men attacked him. Five days later, Yunusa Mbye, a former students’ union leader, bled to death in Fajara after a bottle attack turned an altercation fatal, a case that has since drawn petitions from students demanding a speedy trial.
Over the following three weeks, two more men died in near-identical circumstances, stabbed after arguments that turned violent within hours, one in urban Latrikunda German, the other far upcountry in Central River Region. The insecurity spans Gambia’s urban sprawl and rural interior alike. In each case, residents organised their own search for the suspect before police made an arrest.
This pattern has a name: the “code of the street,” what happens when people stop expecting the law to arrive on time. Where formal justice feels slow, arbitrary or absent, an informal code steps in, one that settles arguments through retaliation and self-help rather than through courts.
A mob manhunt and an organised march sit on opposite sides of the law. What they share is a cause: citizens stepping into a role they no longer trust the state to perform on its own.
The government has answered this distrust with statistics. None of this makes the numbers false. Inspector General Seedy Touray told a national press conference on knife crime, held 1 July, that overall crime had fallen 7.29 per cent in the first quarter of the year against the same period in 2025, and that a joint operation across Kanifing Municipality and the West Coast had produced 615 arrests in three weeks, zones that never reaches Central River Region, where one of the four killings happened. Officers, he said, cannot be “everywhere at every given time.”
True, and also beside the point, no one is asking the police to stand in every garage or on every street corner. They are asking why the state’s grip feels loosest in the settings where ordinary disputes turn fatal.
Weeks later, Minister of Information Ismaila Ceesay rejected calls to lift the country’s moratorium on the death penalty. “There is no empirical evidence which suggests the death penalty curbs crime,” he told Coffee Time with Peter Gomez. The evidence backs him, death-penalty states in America still post high murder rates.
But the sentence answers a question nobody asked. The public’s confidence that the state catches and holds people, the deterrent it thought it already had, is what has cracked. Ceesay also argued that isolated incidents were being amplified into a false sense of national collapse, a version of “moral panic”, where a society’s fear of disorder outgrows the disorder itself.
That reading earns serious treatment here, and it now faces a genuine rival claim. A Standard newspaper editorial, “Rising Crime in The Gambia: A National Alarm That Demands Action,” published 30 June, argued the opposite case, that armed robbery, motorbike snatching, burglary and gang violence across urban and peri-urban Gambia amount to a connected national pattern. Two credible readings of the same numbers are competing in public right now, and that live disagreement is the most sociologically honest place to leave it.
What both cases show, from opposite ends of the same crisis, is that legitimacy rests on the same thing in a courtroom and on a street corner: a process citizens can see and trust, whether that means a judge’s reasoning or a police response that arrives on time. Overturning a verdict on a technicality and failing to prevent a mob killing weeks later are different failures with different mechanics, but they teach the public the same lesson: handle it yourself.
Ceesay is right that parents, community leaders and religious figures have a role to play. Shared responsibility only works once the state holds its own end first.
A state that will not bind itself cannot keep asking its citizens to stay bound.
