If we lose peace, we lose everything. Look around us at our brothers and sisters in nations once full of promise, now broken by the scourge of war, political strife, and lawlessness. Look at the shattered streets of Liberia, the blood-soaked soils of Sierra Leone, Congo, Sudan and Somalia, the instability creeping into Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Guinea. Look at the children who never knew school, the mothers who bury their sons too soon, the fathers who scavenge for scraps in a land that once fed them. This is the fate of nations that trade peace for chaos, order for anarchy, patience for reckless haste.
Now look at The Gambia, small but steadfast, weathering the storms of transition with determination. We are building, slowly but surely, a nation where roads stretch into once-forgotten villages, where health centers rise from dust, where light now flickers in homes that knew only darkness. Our progress is real, but it is fragile and it demands our protection.
The ruins of states within our continent stand as grim monuments to what happens when order collapses. War does not just kill soldiers, it starves children. Political strife does not just topple governments, it shatters economies for generations. In places where the rule of law was abandoned, where protests turned violent, where institutions were undermined instead of strengthened, the result was not freedom but suffering.
Do we want to gamble with such a fate? Do we truly believe that tearing down what we have, however imperfect, will lead to something better? Or will it lead us down the same path of ruin we have seen elsewhere? The Gambia has chosen a different way; the hard but honourable path of reform, of rebuilding, of refusing to let impatience destroy what peace has afforded us.
Yes, change is slow, but look at what has already been achieved. From Barra to Basse, new highways and rehabilitated streets are stitching our nation together, boosting trade, saving lives, and ending the isolation of rural Gambia. New health centers, expanded clinics, and modernized schools are sprouting where neglect once reigned. Our children now have a fighting chance.
Rural electrification is no longer a dream. It is now a reality. Villages once cut off from the modern world now hum with energy, powering businesses, education, and hope. The judiciary, the civil service, the security sector all are undergoing reforms that take time, because rebuilding trust and competence cannot happen overnight.
Yet some say it is, "too slow!" Ask yourself: which is easier to lay asphalt or to transform an entire governance system poisoned by decades of dictatorship? Which is faster: to build a road or to reform a police force once used to terrorize citizens? Can we honestly expect a civil service trained in corruption to become efficient in just a few years? The experience of all post-authoritarian states have all proven that resolving structural issues such as reforms in the civil service, laws, security sector and institutions do take time and cannot be rushed.
Post-authoritarian transitions are not like flipping a switch. They are like healing a body long abused. It is painful, slow, but necessary. The very fact that we are having debates, that protests occur without massacres, that courts rule independently, proves progress is happening. Yet, democracy is not built in days but over decades.
Our nation is moving forward, even if some cannot yet feel it. The alternative, which is disorder, impatience, destruction, leads only to the graveyard of failed states we see around us. We must not let frustration blind us to the stakes.
We have suffered enough. We have known tyranny, and we are now tasting freedom, but freedom without responsibility is chaos. Protest is a right, but must be undertaken according to law and not against the law. Demand change but do so through laws, through votes, through dialogue, not through fire and fury.
The Gambia is rising. Let us not tear her down in our haste to see her fly. Let us stand together, patient but persistent, in defense of peace, progress, and the rule of law. Let us all strive to keep the peace and obey the law because that is where our collective prosperity and security lie.
