Defending and Exposing Corruption: The Case of Ousman Jobarteh

By Madi Jobarteh

For years, it has been an open secret that the Gambia Ports Authority (GPA) operates as a fortress of patronage, opacity, and systemic corruption. Long before the controversial concession to the Turkish firm Albayrak in July 2024, the port was infamous for inefficiency, revenue leakages, smuggling, and governance failures. Empirical studies consistently showed its declining competitiveness, particularly when compared with the Port of Dakar. Reports of illicit commodities, including illegal timber exports to Asia passed through Banjul with little accountability.

Meanwhile, audit reports have repeatedly flagged multimillion-dalasi procurement violations, administrative malpractice, and suspicious financial outflows. A D300 million scandal tied to the ratings office has lingered unresolved since 2019. The same year, GPA funded the construction of a police station in Mankamang Kunda, raising troubling questions about the misuse of public funds for political patronage. The ferry services, a subsidiary of GPA, a lifeline for commuters, have remained chronically dysfunctional. And despite generating revenues, dividends remitted to government have been erratic and unexplained.

Through it all, the government turned a blind eye. Not because it lacked information but because the ecosystem of sycophancy, patronage and rent-seeking at the ports served the interests of the political elite in State House, the Ministry of Finance, and beyond. Silence was not accidental. It was strategic.

Now, Suddenly, a ‘D20 Million Case’ Appears! Today, the same authorities that shielded systemic corruption at GPA now claim to have discovered a D20 million allegation against its Managing Director, Ousman Jobarteh. The timing is impossible to ignore. This announcement comes immediately after Jobarteh publicly rejected Albayrak’s reported attempt to use the Port of Banjul itself as loan collateral, an action that would amount to mortgaging a national asset without sovereign consent.

The obvious question must therefore be asked: Is this a genuine anti-corruption intervention or a retaliation for defiance?

If the government were serious about accountability, why the prolonged silence on the far larger and well-documented scandals at the ports? Why has the Disinformation Ministry issued no public statement on what should be one of the biggest corruption investigations in the country? Why is transparency suddenly fashionable only when it helps remove one official whose resistance obstructs a commercial interest?

What is unfolding exposes two fundamental truths. First, corruption in this government is not aberrational, it is structural. Second, loyalty to power is never a shield. If Jobarteh believed that bankrolling a police station in the president’s hometown and concealing the port concession agreement from the public would protect him, his predicament is now evidence that he was operating in a political market where allegiance has no resale value. In such systems, the promise of protection lasts only until the next dispute over spoils.

This moment is not about a single official. It is a case study in selective justice where corruption is condemned only when it threatens competing corruption.

But, if Jobarteh is guilty, the circle is larger! If prosecution is to follow, then the dock cannot have a single seat. The decision to hand the Port of Banjul, one of the Gambia’s most strategic national assets to a foreign private company, without parliamentary approval or an amendment of the Ports Act, is not a clerical oversight. It is a constitutional infraction at best and an economic crime at worst. The subsequent refusal to publish the concession agreement adds a second layer of illegality, i.e., the willful concealment of information of immense public interest.

Such decisions were not taken by Mr. Jobarteh alone. They implicate the Presidency, the Office of the Chief of Staff, the Ministry of Finance, and every authority that sanctioned, executed, or legitimized the agreement. If accountability is the destination, then the road must carry all of them.

Gambians must also be warned: this may not even end in prosecution. The script could easily follow familiar patterns – an arrest, a photo-op, one or two court appearances, then procedural coma. We have seen it before in the case of former CRR Governor Abba Sanyang, whose matter has been in judicial limbo for years. This may not be about justice at all. It may simply be about replacing one gatekeeper with another by replacing Ousman with someone more compliant with using the port as collateral for foreign debt.

What will be the final choice for Ousman Jobarteh? At this moment, Mr. Jobarteh has two paths before him. He can walk the well-trodden road of silence and solitary disgrace, shielding a system that has already sacrificed him. Or, for the first time he can take a different turn and stand with the public by releasing the full Albayrak concession agreement and disclosing everything he knows about how the port has been administered, negotiated, and compromised.

History will not remember him for the statements issued in his defense. It will remember him for the choice he makes next: whether he exits the stage as a fallen protector of corruption, or the man who broke ranks and exposed it. One thing is certain; the Gambia does not win if this becomes a story about one man. The country only wins if this becomes a reckoning with a system. A corrupt system that must be dismantled.

For The Gambia, Our Homeland