By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
Mustapha K. Darboe, Awa Macalo and Talibeh Hydara, in The Republic’s investigation ‘Soil for the elites‘ (30 October), went through more than 900 state land allocations the Ministry of Lands made between 2017 and 2025. Against a rule of one plot per person, they found office-holders and their relatives, alongside connected businesses, holding several plots each. Lawmakers across party lines received plots too. A state task force cleared car dealers off a roadside strip in Fajara, and artisans near Kotu received eviction notices from a developer handed their land.
The arguments since then have followed a familiar path. Critics call it greed. Defenders cite procedure. Reformers look to the new National Land Policy 2026–2035 and its promise of fairer access. They share a premise nobody has tested.
Listen to the words almost everyone in this debate uses. The investigation describes the Ministry turning ‘public land reserves’ into private assets. The policy promises equitable access to land.
Bakary K. Badjie, the National Assembly member for Foni Bintang, declined his plot on principle. Yet even he objected to handing ‘state reserved lands’ to those in authority. From the allottee to the angriest critic, everyone assumes the land belongs to the State, and the only argument is who the State should give it to. ‘State reserved’ is the phrase that lets the State give it away.
That agreement is my subject. Before we ask who received the land, we have to ask an older question: who gave the State the right to give?
The premise nobody has tested
Every society carries ideas so settled that nobody thinks of them as ideas; they feel like the way things are. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called such beliefs doxa. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu urged African thinkers to examine what he called the ‘unexamined assimilation’ of ideas brought in under colonialism.
In The Gambia, the State’s claimed ownership of Kombo land has become that kind of belief. It feels as old as the country. In fact the State first wrote the claim into law in 1994.
Britain treated the Colony, Banjul and Kombo Saint Mary, as its own. Mainland Kombo sat in the Protectorate, where the land stayed with the kabilolu. The Lands (Provinces) Act 1945 had it held ‘for the use and common benefit, direct or indirect, of the communities concerned’. Kombo kept that land at independence in 1965. I traced the line between Colony and Protectorate in Before the State, Part One.
Read Kombo through Bourdieu and Wiredu together, then, and you find a postcolonial state applying to its own communities a claim of ownership the colonial state itself never applied to them.
What 1994 did
I read the State’s law here on its own terms, because the State relies on it. SFLRAC rejects the vesting itself, trust and all; I set out the full reading in Before the State, Part Two.
On 1 March 1994, under Jawara, Legal Notice 2 of 1994 designated Kombo North, Kombo South and Kombo Central as State land under the State Lands Act 1991. The Act gives the State Banjul and Kanifing ‘absolutely’. The designated districts it holds ‘for the use and common benefit, direct or indirect’ of the communities: the colonial Act’s words, copied exactly. On its own wording, the Act made the State a trustee.
Section 7 then treated the trustee as an owner. It deemed every holder in the designated districts a lessee of the State. The notice records no purchase and no consent: the kabilolu of Kombo sold nothing and signed nothing.
The law offered the State a proper way to own land. The Land Acquisition and Compensation Act 1991 lets the Minister take land for a public purpose, with notice, and requires the State to pay compensation. For Kombo North, South and Central as a whole, the State chose designation instead. Where it used the lawful route for a particular layout, the Ministry will hold the notices and compensation records.
Within one generation of self-rule, an African government took what the colonial state had spared.
What the paperwork does
Section 7 made every holder a tenant on paper. The paperwork makes the tenancy real, until the belief no longer needs anyone to hold it. A family in Kombo applies to the Ministry for a lease on land its ancestors cleared, farmed and owned. Nobody in that family would say the State owns their land. The application form says it for them.
The State Lands Act writes the belief into law. Section 27 says that in any action by or against the Government where title to land is in issue, ‘the averment that any land is State land, shall be sufficient without proof of such fact, unless the defendant proves the contrary’. The State does not have to prove it owns the land. Whoever challenges must disprove it. Section 27 turns the doxa into a legal presumption.
This is why the critics share the premise of the people they criticise. The form, the grant and the statute have taught everyone the same belief. Even the angriest reader of The Republic’s investigation is asking for a fairer share-out.
The elder and the list
Yet many of the plots in the records behind that investigation sit in Bijilo, Brufut, Sukuta, Yundum, Jambur and across Kombo Central, North and South. These places, many of them once farms, rice fields and orchards, have names. The names belong to kabilolu who held the land long before this State existed.
A Brufut elder told SFLRAC he had gone through the allocations of plots in ‘Brufut Heights’ a few years ago. Not one Brufut indigene appeared on the list. In April 2026 SFLRAC was shown a copy of that list. It runs to hundreds of names. I read every one, and found what the elder found.
To him the State was disinheriting Brufut, and the same, he said, would hold for every other kabilo across Kombo. ‘Brufut Heights’ is the Tourism Board’s layout, on coastal land the State holds by the 1970 Kombo Coastal Belt leases. The paper differs from the 1994 designation. The premise is the same: the State treats the land as its own to give.
A fairer share-out of taken land is still a share-out of taken land
Some will say this question comes too late. The Ministry has parcelled out the land, and families have built homes on it in good faith. SFLRAC does not argue for evicting anyone. Before a State can share land fairly, it has to show that the land was its to share.
Even on its own law, a State that relies on designation alone holds the land for the communities, and owes them an account of what it has done with it. An account is the first step. Where the State gave away land it never acquired, it owes restitution to the kabilolu who held it.
Restitution does not require eviction. What restitution requires is a process the State has never convened.
This is a question about every government since the designation. Jawara’s government passed the State Lands Act and issued Legal Notice 2 of 1994. Jammeh’s government continued it. Barrow’s government allocates under it still. December’s election will change the government. It will not change the premise.
On 2 November 2026, SFLRAC put the question to the Minister, Hon Hamat N.K. Bah, in an open letter. For each layout the Ministry has allocated in Kombo North, Kombo South and Kombo Central since 2017, it asks him to name the document by which the State acquired the land, or to state that the Ministry relies on designation alone. The same day, SFLRAC asked the Ministry, under the Access to Information Act 2021, for the records behind fifteen Brufut allocations. The Ministry has until 23 November to answer.
SFLRAC will publish the answer, or report the silence. Until the Ministry answers, critics, defenders and reformers are arguing over who got the land before anyone has answered the older question: who gave the State the right to give?
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: State Lands Act 1991 (Cap 57:02); Lands (Provinces) Act 1945, now the Lands (Regions) Act (Cap 57:03); Land Acquisition and Compensation Act 1991. A Brufut elder spoke to SFLRAC in The Gambia in March and April 2026. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977); Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars (1996).
About the Author: Dave Manneh is Founder and Research Lead of Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC). He is a Brufut indigene and a member of the Brufut Manneh Kabilo. The full research archive is available at https://securing-futures.org/research
