By Dr Lamin K. Janneh
The electricity crisis that brought Gambians onto the streets on 7 September 2026 requires a more serious national conversation than an explanation of why the lights went out.
The immediate causes matter. NAWEC and the Government should explain precisely what failed, how much generation became unavailable, what happened to regional supply, what reserve capacity was available, and why residents in some affected areas reported outages lasting as long as 48 hours. Reuters reported demonstrations in several locations, barricades and burning tyres, police use of tear gas, and anti-government chants during some of the protests.
But to concentrate only on the immediate failure would be to confuse the trigger with the problem. No electricity system can eliminate technical failure entirely. The relevant measure of resilience is therefore not whether disruption occurs, but whether the system can contain it before a technical fault or supply interruption becomes a national economic and social shock.
That is the harder question before The Gambia.
It also requires intellectual fairness. The present administration did not create the structural weaknesses of the electricity sector. They extend across governments and decades of dependence on imported petroleum, ageing generating assets, weak utility finances and constrained domestic generation. The current Government has also expanded electrification, supported new solar capacity, strengthened transmission infrastructure and deepened regional electricity integration. These are significant developments and should be recognised.
Yet history cannot become an indefinite exemption from accountability. After nearly a decade in office, the relevant policy question is no longer simply what government inherited, nor even how much it has subsequently invested. It is whether the authority, resources and interventions of those years have progressively reduced the country’s vulnerability to electricity failure.
On that measure, September demands a harder national conversation.
From electrification to energy security
The Gambia has made substantial progress in expanding electricity access. The Government’s National Energy Compact places the 2024 national electricity-access rate at 73.7 per cent and sets out a financing requirement of approximately US$552 million for the country’s wider energy ambitions. Large-scale solar generation, battery storage, 80 MW of additional thermal generation and transmission expansion form part of the emerging strategy.
These are consequential ambitions.
But electrification and energy security are not synonymous. A household may be connected to a grid that cannot supply it reliably. A country may increase installed generation while dependable generation remains inadequate. A generating asset may physically exist, yet contribute little to security of supply if maintenance, financing, fuel availability, network constraints or system instability prevent it from operating when demand requires it.
This distinction matters because governments understandably report infrastructure through visible inputs: megawatts commissioned, communities connected, financing mobilised and transmission lines constructed. Citizens encounter a different measure. They experience whether electricity is available when they need it. A generator on an asset register is not, by itself, electricity. The meaningful measure is what the system can reliably dispatch.
This is particularly significant because recent IMF assessments have documented the consequences of inadequate maintenance within NAWEC’s domestic generation fleet, including at least 30 MW of local generation capacity that was out of service because of inadequate maintenance and was being rehabilitated.
The challenge facing The Gambia is therefore evolving. Extending access remains essential, particularly in underserved communities, but the next stage of electricity policy must increasingly be judged by reliability, redundancy and quality of supply. The Government’s own energy strategy recognises energy security and affordability as central objectives. The question is whether implementation can now match that ambition.
Successive solutions, unresolved vulnerability
The history of Gambian electricity policy can partly be read as a succession of rational responses to immediate scarcity, each relieving an urgent constraint without fully removing the structural vulnerability beneath it.
Dependence on imported diesel and heavy fuel oil exposed the country to international energy prices, foreign-exchange pressure and expensive thermal generation. Independent power producers helped address generation shortages but introduced contractual and financial dependencies. Externally supplied and emergency generation provided urgently needed capacity, but temporary responses can themselves become structural dependencies when domestic resilience does not develop sufficiently quickly.
Regional electricity integration subsequently offered a powerful economic alternative. Through OMVG and the wider West African electricity market, The Gambia could obtain lower-cost electricity from generation resources that would be expensive to reproduce domestically. The economic logic is compelling, but lower-cost electricity and secure electricity are not identical policy objectives.
The IMF’s 2026 assessment confirms that the phase-out of Karpower, alongside a switch to cheaper imports through the OMVG network, reduced NAWEC’s average electricity cost. It simultaneously warns that greater dependence on imported electricity has heightened energy-security concerns. The same assessment records approximately US$44 million in NAWEC arrears to SENELEC and Guinea’s EDG.
Regional integration can therefore improve efficiency while simultaneously creating exposure. The appropriate policy response is neither retreat from regional markets nor excessive dependence upon them.
The Gambia requires what I would describe as managed energy interdependence. Managed energy interdependence means using regional electricity markets where they reduce costs and improve efficiency, while maintaining sufficient domestic generation, storage, reserve capacity, contractual diversification and contingency capability to prevent external disruption from becoming national paralysis.
For The Gambia, resilience should not be confused with self-sufficiency. A small economy should exploit regional efficiencies while ensuring that no single external dependency becomes a national point of failure. Successive energy arrangements have often addressed real and immediate constraints. The deeper weakness is that The Gambia has repeatedly changed the form of its energy dependency without sufficiently resolving the resilience problem beneath it.
The hidden price of unreliable electricity
One reason electricity-sector weakness can persist for so long is that its full economic cost does not remain inside NAWEC.
It is redistributed throughout the economy. The World Bank’s 2023 Enterprise Survey provides a revealing indication of the burden. Among the 162 establishments providing valid responses to the relevant question, 37.7 per cent classified electricity as a major obstacle to their operations and another 9.3 per cent classified it as very severe. These figures should not be mistaken for a population estimate of every Gambian business, but they nevertheless illustrate how seriously electricity constraints are experienced within the surveyed private sector.
The implication extends far beyond the electricity bill. A business that cannot depend upon the grid purchases redundancy. It buys a generator, batteries or solar backup. It purchases fuel, maintains equipment and may need additional protection against voltage instability. When these systems cannot compensate, productive time is lost. The published electricity tariff therefore understates the economic price of dependable power.
This additional burden can be understood as a reliability premium. It has at least three components: the direct cost of backup infrastructure and fuel, the productivity lost when electricity fails, and the risk premium investors incorporate into expected returns when infrastructure uncertainty increases operating risk.
The distribution of that premium is unequal.
A major hotel or well-capitalised company can purchase sophisticated redundancy. A tailor, welder, barber, cold-store operator, small restaurant or emerging digital business may not. The same outage therefore produces very different economic consequences depending upon the capital available to escape it. Electricity unreliability consequently becomes more than a productivity problem. It can become a structural disadvantage for smaller enterprises.
The effects then propagate through the economy. A cold store loses stock. A food processor loses operating time. A hotel purchases additional fuel. Public institutions divert expenditure towards backup generation. Firms that can transfer costs forward may increase prices. Those that cannot absorb them through reduced margins, deferred investment or constrained employment.
The original electricity deficit is therefore paid for repeatedly in different parts of the economy. Energy policy is consequently also employment policy, competitiveness policy and an important determinant of production costs and price pressures.
Food systems demonstrate the same transmission. Electricity supports irrigation, pumping, milling, processing, refrigeration, cold storage, fisheries, supermarkets and restaurants. Fish may be successfully landed and still become an economic loss if the cold chain fails. A retailer losing refrigerated inventory suffers a working-capital shock. Households can encounter the same infrastructure failure through higher costs or reduced availability.
Healthcare faces an even more consequential exposure. Laboratories, operating theatres, sterilisation, oxygen systems, blood storage, vaccine cold chains, diagnostic equipment, maternity care, digital systems and water supply all depend upon reliable electricity. Backup generation reduces immediate clinical vulnerability, but every hospital forced to finance extensive energy redundancy is using scarce resources to compensate for weakness elsewhere in the national infrastructure system.
There is insufficient verified evidence at present to attribute particular deaths or clinical outcomes to the September outages. Such claims should not be made without adequate corroboration. The systemic exposure, however, is clear. Electricity continuity for hospitals, water infrastructure, telecommunications and critical food systems should therefore be treated as national resilience policy.
Tourism presents the same problem internationally. Hotels can internalise electricity failure through generators and storage, but the cost ultimately becomes embedded in the competitiveness of the destination. When an economy’s export sectors must privately finance infrastructure resilience, public infrastructure weakness enters the international price of national competitiveness.
The same reasoning applies to foreign investment. Investors do not evaluate tax incentives in isolation. They calculate total operating risk. Electricity redundancy, uncertain infrastructure, contractual exposure and institutional unpredictability can all enter the required return on investment.
A country can therefore spend considerable effort attracting capital while weaknesses elsewhere in its institutional environment simultaneously encourage that capital to leave.
I know another dimension of this problem directly.
The opportunity cost of development that never happened
In 2012 and 2013, Better Future Production, now Better Future Group, partnered with international renewable-energy investors to pursue a 150 MW solar-generation programme in The Gambia. Following negotiations with government, the proposed programme was structured into three phases of 50 MW.
The signed Memorandum of Understanding covered the first phase. It recorded a proposed 50 MW solar photovoltaic development, initially beginning with 20 MW, contemplated NAWEC’s purchase of the electricity generated, and established the parties’ intention to progress towards a Power Purchase Agreement. As owner and Chief Executive Officer of Better Future Production, I was directly involved in those negotiations.
The project had moved beyond aspiration. Technical work examined site conditions, grid connection, topographical requirements, geological characteristics and the local technical competencies that could support implementation. The emerging commercial structure was equally significant. The generating company would construct and operate the solar facility and deliver electricity into NAWEC’s system. Under the draft Power Purchase Agreement, plant-side technical responsibilities rested with the seller, while NAWEC would receive, dispatch, transmit and distribute the electricity.
NAWEC would therefore not have carried the solar plant’s fuel costs, because there were none, nor its ordinary generation-side operation and maintenance burden. It would, of course, remain responsible for transmission, distribution and wider system-management functions. The project had not stalled for lack of investor appetite or technical preparation. During those negotiations, my partners and I were confronted with financial demands from individuals in influential positions. We refused them.
We consequently cancelled the Gambian project, and the international investors redirected their interests towards Kenya and Ghana. I recount this neither to reopen an old grievance nor to claim that 150 MW of solar proposed in 2013 would, by itself, have prevented the present crisis. Such a conclusion would be technically unserious. Solar generation is intermittent. Demand has grown. Storage, balancing, transmission capacity, maintenance and firm generation all matter. No responsible national electricity system should depend upon one project or one technology.
The experience raises a more important development question. Governments record money they spend. Economists measure investment that enters an economy. Development reports catalogue infrastructure eventually constructed. We rarely account for the opportunity cost of unrealised development, productive investment that was technically and commercially possible but never entered the economy because institutional conduct caused capital to leave.
That cost is largely invisible.
Electricity never generated appears in no national account. Jobs never created never enter employment statistics. Technology never transferred cannot be recorded as lost productivity. Taxes never collected appear in no revenue statement. Domestic companies that might have entered new supply chains never know what business they lost. And capital that leaves does not disappear. It builds productive capacity somewhere else.
This is why improper demands and discretionary interference in strategic investment should never be evaluated only by the monetary value of the transaction sought. The larger economic question is what that conduct causes a country to lose.
Development is also cumulative. Infrastructure built earlier can enable firms, skills, investment and secondary economic activity that themselves generate further development. A strategic investment delayed for ten years is therefore not simply the same asset delivered ten years later. Between those dates lie productive opportunities that may never be recovered.
The Government’s current National Energy Compact envisages 150 MW of additional solar generation. The current programme and the project in which BFP participated in 2012 and 2013 belong to different institutional, technological and financing contexts. They should not be conflated. The relevant comparison is not institutional continuity, but developmental time.
Developmental time has an economic cost, even when public accounting never records it. Because development is cumulative, the cost of delay is not merely the electricity a project might have generated during those years. It includes some proportion of the secondary investment, enterprise formation, institutional learning, technical capability and economic activity that earlier infrastructure might have enabled.
That counterfactual cannot be quantified with certainty. Its economic significance should not therefore be ignored.
The deeper deficit is state capability
The record does not support the argument that The Gambia has simply failed to formulate energy policy. Policies exist. Projects have been financed. Regional agreements have been concluded. Solar generation has entered the system. Transmission has expanded. Utility reforms are under way.
The harder problem lies in converting intention into durable operational performance. This requires us to distinguish failures that public debate frequently collapses into one category.
A policy can be poorly designed. A sound policy can be inadequately implemented. An institution can lack the technical or organisational capacity required for implementation. Governance incentives, weak accountability or discretionary interference can undermine delivery even where policy and technical competence exist.
The available evidence suggests that the Gambian electricity problem contains elements across these categories. Infrastructure governance does not end when financing is secured or a project is commissioned.
Maintenance is part of investment. Contract management is part of energy policy. Financial discipline is part of energy security. Supplier arrears are not merely accounting problems when they can threaten continuity of supply.
Investment governance is not peripheral when capital can leave before a project reaches construction. Contingency planning is not optional where external supply represents a material component of the electricity system.
This is fundamentally a question of state capability: whether institutions can anticipate demand, preserve assets, manage contracts, coordinate agencies, regulate effectively, develop technical competence, retain credible investors, manage regional relationships and translate strategy into dependable public value.
The September crisis should therefore be examined not simply as a failure of NAWEC, but as a test of the wider institutional architecture through which The Gambia governs energy.
December and the meaning of accountability
The presidential election scheduled for 5 December gives the present crisis an unavoidable political dimension. The electricity crisis has already entered political contention. That tells us nothing certain about how Gambians will vote.
The more serious issue is democratic accountability. Political responsibility cannot be determined only by asking who originally created a problem. Responsibility also attaches to those who possess the authority, resources and sufficient time to correct vulnerabilities that are known. The current administration inherited deep structural weaknesses in electricity. That history should inform judgement.
But after nearly a decade in office, inheritance explains the starting point more persuasively than it explains the present outcome.
Government can legitimately point to expanded electrification, solar investment, transmission development, regional integration and institutional reform. Citizens can equally ask why those interventions have not yet produced an electricity system sufficiently resilient to prevent prolonged disruption.
The question is not whether government has acted. It clearly has. The question is whether the outcomes are commensurate with the authority, resources and time available. The opposition should face an equally demanding standard. It is easier to campaign against darkness than to govern electricity.
Political parties seeking national authority should therefore explain not merely what the incumbent has done inadequately, but how they would finance dependable generation, restructure NAWEC’s finances, address supplier arrears, preserve the economic advantages of regional power trade, create adequate reserve capacity, accelerate solar and storage, protect maintenance expenditure and establish an investment environment in which credible energy capital can reach financial close without improper interference.
The December election therefore provides an opportunity to move the debate beyond attribution of blame towards competing models of energy governance.
Anything less risks reducing a structural development problem to campaign rhetoric.
From energy policy to energy statecraft
The policy response should go beyond another emergency contract or another generation announcement. The first requirement is physical resilience.
The Gambia should measure and publish installed, available and dependable capacity separately. Peak demand and reserve margins should be transparent. The system should be routinely stress-tested against foreseeable failures, including loss of a major generating unit, substantial reductions in regional imports, fuel interruption and sharp demand increases.
Maintenance must become lifecycle asset management rather than expenditure deferred until equipment fails. Critical spare parts, scheduled overhauls and replacement plans are forms of capital preservation. A generating asset that cannot operate because maintenance was postponed represents public capital whose productive value has already been impaired.
Renewable expansion must likewise move from capacity to reliability. Solar should become a much larger part of The Gambia’s energy future, but renewable generation must increasingly be integrated with storage, grid reinforcement and balancing capability. Solar megawatts and dependable 24-hour electricity are not interchangeable measures.
The second requirement is institutional and financial reconstruction.
NAWEC cannot remain an institution whose unresolved weaknesses periodically migrate onto suppliers, consumers or the national budget. Collections, technical and commercial losses, arrears, procurement, financial reporting and operational efficiency require sustained discipline.
Tariff reform may be necessary. But the principle should be clear: cost-reflective tariffs require a cost-efficient utility. Consumers should not be required to finance avoidable inefficiency merely through higher prices.
Private-investment governance requires the same seriousness. Investor promotion is not investor protection. The Gambia requires transparent procurement, predictable approval processes, bankable Power Purchase Agreements, credible guarantees, enforceable timelines and institutions capable of protecting legitimate investment from arbitrary or improper demands.
The third requirement is conceptual. Electricity should no longer be treated as one sector competing with agriculture, tourism, health, digital transformation, industrialisation and employment for strategic attention. It is enabling infrastructure upon which the productivity of these sectors partly depends.
A hospital without dependable electricity is a constrained hospital. A digital economy built on unstable power carries structural weakness from its foundation. Agro-processing without reliable pumping, refrigeration and machinery cannot scale. Tourism that privately finances electricity resilience carries an avoidable competitiveness penalty. Industrialisation without predictable energy is more aspiration than strategy.
The Gambia therefore needs to move from conventional energy policy towards energy statecraft, the capacity of the state to align electricity infrastructure, investment, finance, technology, technical capability, regional relationships and institutional governance with a long-term national economic strategy.
That requires managed interdependence rather than isolation, domestic resilience rather than an unrealistic pursuit of complete self-sufficiency, and implementation capability rather than another layer of policy ambition.
Beyond September
The immediate responsibilities are straightforward. Electricity supply must be stabilised. The causes of the present disruption must be explained transparently. Critical public services must be protected. But restoration of electricity should not be confused with resolution of the crisis.
The Gambia cannot industrialise on emergency electricity. It cannot build a competitive digital economy on an unstable grid. It cannot deepen agro-processing without dependable power or maximise tourism by transferring public infrastructure failure onto private generators. Nor can it sustainably attract productive capital if electricity uncertainty and institutional unpredictability remain embedded in the investor’s calculation.
The standard for the next phase of Gambian energy policy should therefore not be how many projects are announced, nor even how many megawatts are installed. It should be whether the country becomes progressively more difficult to place in darkness. That requires dependable domestic capacity, strategically managed regional integration, storage, disciplined maintenance, financially credible utilities, investment governance and institutions capable of carrying strategy through political cycles.
The protests of September should be understood in that larger context. They are not only expressions of anger over an outage, nor merely an electoral warning to an incumbent government. They are evidence that the cost of unresolved infrastructure weakness has travelled beyond the technical boundaries of the electricity sector and entered economic performance, public confidence and democratic accountability.
The lights will return. The more consequential question is whether we use this crisis merely to restore supply or to confront the institutional choices and capability deficits that have allowed electricity vulnerability to remain recurrent.
Restoring power resolves the immediate emergency. Building the institutional and technical capability to prevent recurrence is part of building the economy The Gambia says it wants to become.