By The Atlantic Digest, Africa Desk | Special Report
Rolling blackouts lasting up to 48 hours at a stretch have tipped years of accumulated frustration with The Gambia’s power sector into open unrest, with protesters storming a state utility office, attacking shops and clashing with police across the Greater Banjul Area this week. President Adama Barrow has responded with televised appeals for calm and new hardware pledges, but the crisis lands on a power sector with a well-documented decade-long record of unmet promises — and three months before an election in which Barrow is seeking a third term he once said he would never pursue.
THE PROTESTS: TIRES, BARRICADES AND AN ATTACK ON NAWEC’S OWN OFFICES
Unrest that began Monday night into Tuesday, September 8, spread well beyond Banjul itself, reaching Westfield, Tabokoto, Brikama, Busumbala, Bakau, Brufut and the town of Farato, according to eyewitness accounts gathered by Gambian outlets. Demonstrators burned tires and threw stones to block traffic on main highways, smashed bottles across roadways, and in some locations seized and burned the makeshift stalls of roadside vendors. Crowds gathered near both President Barrow’s official residence and Vice President Mohammed B.S. Jallow’s home; in Farato, protesters destroyed banners at a local office belonging to the ruling National People’s Party. The most pointed target of the unrest was the state utility itself: protesters stormed the National Water and Electricity Corporation’s (NAWEC) sub-office at Latrikunda, near Cow-Junction, throwing documents and equipment into the street and, according to eyewitnesses, attempting to set the building alight while looting items from inside. Nearby, a Mauritanian-owned shop in Tabokoto had its door broken in, and a shopkeeper was reportedly assaulted, his phone snatched and a bag of detergent stolen in the melee; additional stores in the area were also targeted. Police deployed tear gas to disperse crowds at multiple locations — one resident told reporters that gas “landed in my house,” prompting him to leave and join the protest outside rather than remain indoors. No official figures on injuries, arrests or the value of property damage had been released by authorities as of this report, an information gap this desk was unable to close independently.
THE TECHNICAL CAUSE: A REGIONAL SHORTFALL, OR HOME-GROWN MAINTENANCE FAILURES
NAWEC has offered the government one account of the crisis rooted in regional power-market dynamics: peak national demand of roughly 110 megawatts is now running against available generation of only about 67 megawatts, a 43-megawatt shortfall the utility attributes in large part to the loss of roughly 100 megawatts of capacity at the KarPowership floating power plant that supplies Senegal’s own grid, which in turn forced Senegal’s utility, SENELEC, to cut back the electricity it normally exports to the Gambia. On the strength of that account, NAWEC has asked the Gambian government for approximately 661.8 million dalasi in emergency funding to secure a stopgap arrangement in which SENELEC would supply up to 70 megawatts for six hours nightly, from 6 p.m. to midnight, over a 50-day period — a deal that, even fully funded and delivered, would not close the gap during daytime and early-evening hours. Separately, however, NAWEC officials have also pointed to a more domestic explanation: Chief Operating Officer Pateh Sowe has attributed outages to ongoing maintenance and equipment-rehabilitation problems at the utility’s own Kotu Power Station, where only two of four generating engines are currently functional while the other two undergo rehabilitation, compounded by import delays on replacement parts that Sowe said “take six or seven months to arrive because they have to be manufactured before shipment.” NAWEC’s Deputy Managing Director, Momodou Lamin Sompo Ceesay, has separately rejected suggestions that unpaid debt to Senegal is a factor, characterizing the utility’s obligations there as minimal and saying regional power imports are paid monthly under bank-guaranteed arrangements. Taken together, these are not fully reconciled explanations — a regional supply shock centered on Senegal’s own KarPowership shortfall, and a domestic equipment-maintenance failure at Kotu — and NAWEC has not publicly clarified how much of the current shortfall is attributable to each cause, or why both would be cited by different officials within days of each other. NAWEC officials have said they expect to “normalise the situation” within roughly two weeks, though that timeline has not been independently verified and follows a pattern, documented below, of similar restoration promises in the past.
BARROW’S RESPONSE
President Barrow addressed the nation directly in a televised speech, framing the crisis in personal, everyday terms: “I know that the fans have stopped turning, children work in the dark, mothers throw away stale food,” he said, while separately describing the situation as a “national security issue.” He pledged to install a 24-megawatt generation plant by the end of October, alongside a further 50-megawatt solar facility whose timeline he did not specify. Information Minister Ismaila Ceesay struck a more conciliatory tone, saying the government “recognise[s] the frustration, anger and hardship that many Gambians are experiencing.” Neither official’s remarks addressed the discrepancy between NAWEC’s regional-shortfall and domestic-maintenance explanations for the crisis, nor did they offer a public accounting of how the newly pledged 24-megawatt and 50-megawatt projects would be financed or whether they depend on the same kind of donor and lender support that has funded — and, by most public accounts, underdelivered on — past Gambian power-sector investment.
A DECADE OF BROKEN PROMISES
This week’s unrest is not the first time Gambian frustration over blackouts has spilled into the streets, nor is it the first time a Gambian president has promised the darkness would end by a specific date. The country’s #OccupyWestfield protests over power outages in 2016 and 2017 prompted Barrow, shortly after taking office, to promise that blackouts would end by December 2018 — a commitment that went unmet. In 2024, then-NAWEC Managing Director Gallo Saidy said the utility expected roughly 90 percent of the country’s chronic electricity and water problems to be resolved by June 2026; severe, widespread outages were instead underway in the days before that deadline arrived. By conservative estimates cited in Gambian reporting, more than $200 million in grants and loans has flowed into the country’s energy sector over the past decade from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank and ECOWAS. Gambia’s National Audit Office has separately documented “unaccounted funds, weak internal controls, undisclosed accounts, irregular expenditures, and missing millions of dalasi” at NAWEC, while the utility met only about 30 percent of its key performance indicators in 2021 and roughly 20 percent in 2022. No official has been held publicly accountable for that record despite repeated audit findings, according to Gambian press accounts, and NAWEC officials note — by way of comparison rather than reassurance — that outages now average two to six incidents a month, down from nearly 100 monthly incidents before 2017, even as this week’s crisis suggests the underlying generation shortfall remains severe enough to trigger nationwide unrest.
THE POLITICAL STAKES: A THIRD-TERM BID AMID THE DARK
The blackout crisis lands three months ahead of a December 5 presidential election in which Barrow — who came to power in 2016 on an explicit pledge to serve a single term and to enact constitutional term limits ending the legacy of former ruler Yahya Jammeh’s 22-year rule — is now seeking a third consecutive term. Constitutional amendments that would have formally instituted presidential term limits failed to secure the required three-quarters supermajority in the National Assembly in both 2020 and 2025, reportedly for lack of sufficient support from within Barrow’s own party, leaving Gambia without the explicit restriction Barrow once promised to create. Analysts tracking the race have warned that the absence of a codified limit leaves room for what one assessment described as power becoming “entrenched” around the 61-year-old incumbent. Barrow’s most prominent challengers include 77-year-old Ousainou Darboe of the opposition United Democratic Party, who won 28 percent of the vote in the 2021 election, and Talib Ahmed Bensouda of the newly formed Unite Movement for Change; specific public statements from opposition leaders directly addressing this week’s blackout protests were not available in reporting reviewed by this desk. Nomination for December’s election opens October 26 and closes November 6, meaning the crisis is unfolding in the weeks immediately preceding the formal start of the campaign period, with youth turnout and engagement already a prominent theme of the coming race — a dynamic this week’s protests, driven visibly by younger demonstrators, appear likely to sharpen rather than soften. Gambia’s broader democratic transition since Jammeh’s 2017 departure remains incomplete on other fronts as well: a 2020 national security sector reform strategy remains contingent on a new constitution that has not materialized, even as a separate ECOWAS-backed special court, established in December 2024, has begun addressing alleged abuses from the Jammeh era.
RIPPLE EFFECTS: HEALTH, SAFETY AND SMALL-BUSINESS LOSSES
Beyond the protests themselves, residents describe the blackouts reshaping daily life and safety in the Greater Banjul Area. Taxi driver Lamin Jarju said “when the lights go off here, the whole place changes immediately,” with passengers refusing to walk even short distances after dark out of fear of crime; shop owner Fatou Cham and youth leader Alieu Sowe separately described phone thefts and physical attacks on people caught outside during outages. Even law enforcement is not insulated — sources say Serekunda police station itself loses power during outages, hampering night-time policing at the same moments residents say they feel most exposed. At Serekunda Hospital, a healthcare worker said that “when the power goes off in the middle of treatment, we have no choice but to” continue by torchlight, a practice captured in social media footage showing nurses attending patients by hand-held light — a real infection-control and patient-safety concern in an active clinical setting. Small traders describe direct financial losses: food seller Mariama Bojang said she lost an entire week’s stock when a power surge destroyed her freezer’s contents, while electrician Ebrima Manneh said he receives near-weekly repair calls for fridges, televisions and voltage stabilizers damaged by power surges when electricity suddenly returns after an outage. Residents and small-business owners say NAWEC provides minimal advance warning of outages, leaving households and traders unable to plan around them or protect perishable inventory in advance.
WHAT’S NEXT
Neither NAWEC nor the Barrow government has reconciled its competing explanations for the shortfall — a regional KarPowership-driven supply shock versus domestic Kotu Power Station maintenance failures — into a single public accounting, and neither has published a funded, dated timeline for the pledged 24-megawatt and 50-megawatt generation projects beyond Barrow’s stated end-of-October target for the former. It is not yet known whether the government will approve NAWEC’s request for emergency funding to secure the SENELEC stopgap supply deal, nor whether this week’s unrest will recur if outages continue at their current severity in the weeks leading into the formal campaign period for December’s election. This desk will follow the story as NAWEC, the presidency and opposition parties respond further.
Editorial note: This report draws on reporting from Al Jazeera, Africanews, the Daily Maverick, Kerr Fatou, The Africa Report, The Point (Gambia), The Gambia Journal, the Daily Observer (Gambia), The Standard (Gambia), Ghanamma and the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, current as of Thursday, September 10, 2026. Direct quotations are attributed to their original speakers throughout. NAWEC’s own figures on generation capacity, demand and outage frequency have not been independently audited by this desk, and the discrepancy between the utility’s regional-shortfall and domestic-maintenance explanations for the current crisis is flagged above as unresolved rather than adjudicated. Official casualty, arrest and property-damage figures from this week’s protests had not been released as of publication. The Atlantic Digest will follow this story as it develops.
