DESPITE being widely thought to have consulted fortune tellers, President Yahya Jammeh surely foresaw little chance of an upset in the elections in Gambia on December 1st. Ahead of the polls, the man who once vowed to rule for “a billion years” had already boasted that he was Allah’s preferred candidate. Just to make sure, he had jailed the main opposition candidate in April for the crime of holding an unauthorised protest. His new rival was an estate agent called Adama Barrow (pictured, centre), whose less-than-glamorous biography included a stint as a security guard at Argos, a discount store, on London’s Holloway Road. On polling day Mr Jammeh cut off the internet.
Yet despite government ministers poking fun at his modest past, Mr Barrow staged a big political upset in results announced on December 2nd, winning by 45.5% to Mr Jammeh’s 36.7%. Even more surprisingly—and to his great credit—Mr Jammeh quickly conceded defeat. By the evening, streets that many had feared could be a battleground were full of partying crowds tearing down posters of their outgoing president.
The vote ends the rule of one of the last of Africa’s old-school strongmen. Mr Jammeh had clung to power since a military coup in 1994 and often seemed to combine some of African leaders’ worst traits. From his dire human rights record to his equally long personal title of “Excellency Sheikh Professor Doctor President”, Mr Jammeh was every inch the eccentric African Big Man, even adding a few new quirks of his own to the genre. There was his huge six-wheeler Hummer, for example, that sped him along Gambia’s dusty bush roads, and his practices of witchcraft, most notably his claim to have invented a herbal cure for HIV.
Against all this, Mr Barrow’s victory is all the more remarkable. A quiet, diffident figure, he lacks his predecessor’s showmanship, and indeed would not have been running at all had his United Democratic Party’s main candidate, Ousainou Darboe, not been jailed. But what Mr Jammeh intended as a pre-emptive strike against the opposition backfired spectacularly. For while Mr Darboe was in his late 60s and considered a little past it, his replacement, Mr Barrow, was only 51 and more of a consensus candidate. Though hardly a compelling orator, he speaks most of Gambia’s ethnic languages, which may help him heal the tensions that have simmered between Mr Jammeh’s minority Jola tribe and the bigger Mandinka people.
Mr Barrow was very much the underdog. For a start, Mr Jammeh hogged most of the media airtime—many Gambian newspapers were wary of even covering opposition rallies. And as with most strongmen, he enjoyed a bedrock of support, thanks to the ease with which he could get things done. Under his stern stewardship, Gambia’s roads, electricity, schools and hospitals improved. The country also avoided the wars, plagues, famine and terrorism that have hit the rest of West Africa during his 22-year rule.
But Mr Jammeh’s isolated progressive acts—like last year’s banning of female circumcision—were overshadowed by his feverish anti-Western posturing. In the past three years Mr Jammeh has withdrawn Gambia from the “colonialist” Commonwealth, scrapped English as an official language, and, in October, quit the International Criminal Court, which he denounced as the “International Caucasian Court”. With the West threatening sanctions over his human rights record, many feared the country was becoming a pariah state. Emigration was increasingly attractive. According to the Migration Policy Institute, Gambia’s net migration rate in 2013 was 2.3 departures per 1,000 people, the tenth highest in Africa. UN figures show that Gambian is the sixth-most-common nationality of migrants crossing the Mediterranean by boat this year—a remarkable number given that the country’s population is just 1.9m.
As such, Mr Barrow faces some simple decisions. He has already said that among his first acts will be rejoin both the Commonwealth and the ICC. The longer term, though, will be harder. Not the least of his difficulties is what to do with Mr Jammeh himself. Many in the opposition want him prosecuted over hundreds of cases of “disappeared” comrades. But that might see Mr Jammeh withdraw his offer to retire quietly or even risk a coup. At a time when African democracy has often seemed to be in reverse, Gambia’s swift transfer of power is a sign of hope. However, Mr Barrow, who once watched out for miscreants at Argos, will need to keep his eyes peeled once again.
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