Dr. Ismaila Ceesay, Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, has once again chosen the oldest and most dangerous trick in the authoritarian playbook. When the public is angry about a failure of governance, attack the journalists who report it. In the midst of prolonged blackouts that have driven Gambians into the streets, he has framed coverage of the crisis and the protests it produced as the work of people inciting violence. That is not analysis. It is a lie. And it does more damage to the government he claims to defend than any headline ever could.
The facts are not complicated. For months, households, businesses, hospitals and schools have endured outages lasting many hours and, in some communities, up to 48 hours during the hottest season. Frustration boiled over on the night of 8 September. People burned tires, blocked roads and chanted against the president. Police used tear gas. That is what happened. Independent journalists, including those at this newspaper, The Alkamba Times, documented it. They did not invent the darkness, the rotting food, the stalled businesses or the heat. They reported what citizens were living through. To describe that work as incitement is to invert cause and effect. The incitement, if any, came from years of underinvestment, broken promises, and a utility that cannot keep the lights on. The press merely held up a mirror.
Ceesay has a record of this rhetoric. He has accused some journalists of bias and of painting only a negative picture because of political affiliation. He has warned that media boycotts would be met with government countermeasures. He has promoted regulatory frameworks that many in the profession see as a slide toward permission-based journalism, even after the most controversial registration proposal was walked back. He has claimed no journalist has been jailed for reporting under this administration — a claim fact-checkers have shown to be false. The pattern is consistent: when scrutiny is uncomfortable, the minister recasts scrutiny as a threat.
This does not defend the government. It exposes it.
A government that treats independent reporting of public hardship as incitement is a government that has lost confidence in its own performance. It signals that the problem is not the outages, but the people who refuse to pretend they are minor, inherited, or someone else’s fault. It tells citizens that their lived experience is less important than the official narrative. And it tells the international community that The Gambia’s hard-won gains in press freedom after 2017 remain fragile — that the same ministry tasked with communicating policy is willing to smear the press when policy fails.
Independent media is not an accessory to The Gambia’s democratic dispensation. It is one of its load-bearing walls. After two decades of fear, disappearance and shuttered newsrooms, the country rebuilt a space in which journalists could ask questions, document suffering and hold power to account without automatic arrest. That space lets citizens know whether NAWEC is meeting demand, whether new-generation capacity is real or rhetorical, and whether “we inherited a bad system” is an explanation or an excuse. Without that space, democracy becomes a slogan recited at awards ceremonies while the public is left in the dark — literally and figuratively.
Ceesay’s words and actions harm the very institutions he is paid to represent. They erode public trust at the moment the government needs it most. They invite comparison with the past rather than contrast with it. They give ammunition to those who argue that reform has been cosmetic. They make it harder, not easier, for competent officials to explain genuine technical constraints or regional supply problems. And they teach a new generation of journalists that the price of doing their job during a crisis may be an official accusation of incitement.
The minister likes to say that freedom must be paired with responsibility. We agree. Responsibility, however, begins with those who hold public office. It means telling the truth about service failures instead of attacking the people who report them. It means distinguishing between covering protests and organizing protests. It means recognizing that a free press is not the enemy of stability; it is one of the few remaining checks that prevent instability from becoming something worse.
Gambians do not need lectures about patience from a minister whose lights stay on. They need electricity. Until they have it, they will keep talking about it. Independent journalists will keep reporting it. That is not incitement. That is democracy doing what it is supposed to do. Dr. Ceesay should stop lying about it. The government he serves would be stronger if he did.
