By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
The Ministry of Lands has written a new rulebook for the day the state comes for your land: the Draft National Resettlement Policy 2027 to 2036, the country’s first. Resettlement is the polite word for the state moving you off your land to make way for a road, a scheme, or an investor. The draft says it ‘gives effect to the National Land Policy’, so the land policy sets the principle and this draft supplies the practice. The Ministry validated it in August 2026, and it now moves towards Cabinet. In Kombo, the day it governs has already come.
The draft runs to seventy-three pages on how the state will move people off their land, count what they lose, pay for it, and close the file. Read every page and you will not meet the word restitution once. A policy written to govern the taking of land holds no word for giving it back.
Restitution and compensation answer two different questions: compensation asks what the land was worth, then writes a cheque; restitution asks whose land it was, and what the taker owes. For a people whose bond to the land runs through lineage and burial and the generations still unborn, the first question processes the injury as a transaction. The second faces it. The draft asks only the first. Even the standard it quotes in its opening chapter promises, ‘where possible, with the option of return’, and the draft never offers it.
The erasure starts in the glossary. The policy defines an ‘Informal Occupant’ as a person using land ‘without formal legal title or documentation’ who ‘may qualify for resettlement assistance or other support’. In the Kombo I come from, a family that holds its land without a paper deed still owns it. In Before the State, Part Two, I set out why the deed never came.
Elsewhere the draft says the opposite. Its compensation rules promise that ‘those who can prove entitlement under the country’s customary laws’ will be ‘fully compensated for loss of land’. So the same family is an occupant owed assistance in one place, and a proven owner owed full compensation in another, and the policy never says which governs.
The words that decide are ‘can prove’. A kabilo holder owns without paper, in a country that keeps no register of indigenous title. Put the burden of proof on him, and the draft writes its generous clause for a proof the system withholds by design. What remains to him is the harder box, ‘resettlement assistance and non-land assets in place of compensation for land’. The contradiction resolves in silence, and it resolves against him.
The draft writes the removal of consent into its definitions. The glossary names the subject of the whole policy ‘Involuntary Resettlement’, and defines it as displacement ‘where affected persons do not have the right to refuse relocation’. Its opening chapter, meanwhile, quotes the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: no relocation ‘without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned’. The definition removes the right the principle grants, and the draft sets both to govern the same kabilo.
Then it builds to match. Section 7.1.3 hands the Alkalo, together with the Kabilo heads, the task of endorsing ‘all voluntary land donations’. Two offices sign; communal land leaves communal hands. The draft asks for no assembly of the owning lineage, no vote, no quorum, no recorded decision, no test that the donation was ever willing.
In Before the State, Part Three, I traced whose seat that is. That seat now answers to the state: under the Local Government Act, the Minister appoints the Alkalo and may remove any Alkalo from office. This draft arms it with the power to give the land away.
Its legal chapter even claims the Constitution returns land to its ‘original owners’ when the state abandons the purpose for which it took it. Section 22(6) says less: the former owner may buy the land back, on refund of the compensation. The draft dresses a right of repurchase as a right of return.
The land policy this draft serves lost its promise of restitution at the Cabinet table, after the stakeholders had validated it. The plan for the new Lands Act, put to stakeholders this week, keeps the same silence: the word restitution appears nowhere in it. This draft would set that habit in standing law.
The draft names its funder. Its foreword thanks the World Bank, through the WACA project, for financing the formulation. The same institution’s own mission record lists 61 gardens under GIRAV and GCAV, the Bank’s agricultural projects, for which donating families, district authorities and Alkalolu issued land documents. It now funds the national policy that would make that route standard.
The state will reply that it designated the Kombo districts as state land long ago, so nothing survives to restore. Its own land policy answers that: it concedes that the ‘pre-existing rights of bona fide customary owners must not be displaced without due process and adequate compensation in line with the Constitution’. On the state’s own account, designation left those rights standing.
In fairness, the draft is good in places: compensation at full replacement value without depreciation, payment before displacement, the road to court open at every stage. On procedure it is better work than the law it would replace.
The draft values land by its location, its use and the market, and stops there. It sets no separate worth for farmland and none for developed land, and it returns no share of the value the taking itself creates.
So the state pays for the community’s field. Its own rule pays ‘for loss of land’, and no owner pays another for the loss of its own ground: the payment concedes whose land it was.
Then it pays a field’s price. Once it acquires the land, services it and cuts it into plots, it is worth many times more, and every dalasi of that rise goes to the state and the investor, never to the family that held the ground. This is the oldest trade in Kombo land, and I set out one Brufut case of it in Beyond Jammeh’s Shadow. The draft would standardise it and call the result full replacement value.
The draft prizes land over cash, holding out ‘replacement land of equal or better quality’ for those whose living comes from the ground. It is a humane preference the state cannot keep. To hand a family replacement land, the state must have land to hand. Outside the former Colony it holds almost none it did not first designate as its own, and the draft names no reserve of land from which to draw it.
The draft’s own history shows what land-for-land has meant here. When the state moved the Kotu Quarry community, the draft records, it sent them to ‘Sotokoi/Allatentu’. Allatentu is land the Jammeh regime carved out of Sotokoi (also called Tintinto), in Brufut, and it belongs to the Jawara Kunda Kabilo. To rehouse one community, the state gave away the land of another. Land-for-land, in a state that owns almost nothing, is dispossession passed down the line.
The draft is careful work in the service of a false premise: that the land was the state’s to take, and the owner an occupant for the state to move. Quicken the payment, widen the grievance desk, refine the valuation tables, and you have improved the taking and left it standing.
So the demand is short, and it does not bend: Withdraw the draft. Rebuild it from the principle it will not state: indigenous ownership, and the remedy it will not name: restitution. Put the owning lineage, gathered in assembly, at the point where land moves, with the Alkalo standing as its witness rather than its replacement.
A resettlement policy is a statement of what a country believes it owes the people it moves. This one, as drafted, believes it owes them a cheque and a form. The state owes us our land, and the truth of how it took it.
Saama Kanto: the sacred responsibility that predates every statute, every gazette, and every ordinance that ever claimed authority over land our ancestors held before any of them existed. I offer this analysis in that spirit.
A Note on Sources: Every quotation from the policy comes from the Draft National Resettlement Policy 2027 to 2036, as validated on 25 August 2026. The glossary defines ‘Informal Occupant’ and ‘Involuntary Resettlement’. The compensation principles set the eligibility rules. Section 1.3 quotes the United Nations Declaration, and Section 3.1.2 recites the return to ‘original owners’. Section 5.2.5 governs valuation and land-for-land, Section 2.1.3 records Sotokoi/Allatentu, and Section 7.1.3 holds the donation clause. Sections 142 and 145 of the Local Government Act 2002 govern the appointment and removal of the Alkalo. The foreword records the World Bank’s financing. The concession on pre-existing rights sits in the National Land Policy 2026 to 2035, and the 61 gardens in the World Bank’s Sixth Implementation Support Mission for GIRAV (November 2024), page 20.
About the Author: Dave Manneh is the Founder and Research Lead of Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC), a Gambian think tank working on land tenure and land governance. The full research archive is available at https://securing-futures.org/research
