Powerless

The economy that never was

Ebrima A. Faal

CEO, Development Perspectives UK | Managing Partner, DEVPRAG FZCO, DMCC

Former Senior Executive, African Development Bank Group | Former Senior Economist and Resident Representative, International Monetary Fund

The Gambia’s blackouts are usually blamed on mismanagement. The deeper trouble is that darkness has become an equilibrium, one that taxes the country’s most productive firms and costs it the economy it never built.

Nearly fifty years of the same darkness. The first time I watched the lights fail on Tobaski, I had just finished my O-levels. It was 1978. Somewhere in the festivities the power went, as it had a way of doing, and we thought little of it. Nearly half a century later, this June, it happened again: the same festival, the same darkness, only a different generation sitting in it.

The latest promise expired with the festival. The country had been promised better, and lately. In 2024 the National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC) promised that by June 2026 some ninety per cent of the country’s power problems would be behind it. June duly arrived, and with it some of the worst outages in years, with parts of Gunjur, Brikama and the Kombos enduring up to twenty hours of darkness a day through the heat of Tobaski. The utility conceded a shortfall of more than half of national demand. The promise and the paralysis kept the same appointment.

A protest followed. Then a fifty-day fix. Then nothing. The mid-June deadline that followed came and went as well. On 19 June, Gambians Against Looted Assets led a peaceful protest to NAWEC's headquarters in Banjul, torchlights, candles, empty buckets and electric irons held aloft as symbols of a population exhausted by a crisis its institutions had stopped pretending to understand. An emergency arrangement to import additional power from Senegal followed, described as temporary, conditional and flexible, structured for a maximum of fifty days. The fifty days elapsed in mid-August. The outages returned.

Three names. One problem. Half a century of standing still. Gambians have heard the promise before. After the Occupy Westfield protests of 2017, the government pledged that blackouts would be history by the end of 2018. Tens of billions of dalasi have since flowed into NAWEC, and still the current fails. The striking thing is not the failure but its constancy. The state utility has been renamed three times in half a century, from the Gambia Utilities Corporation in 1972 to the Utilities Holding Corporation in 1992 to NAWEC in 1996, each reinvention treating the problem as one of corporate form rather than of turbines that turn and fuel bills that are paid. Renaming a utility is not the same as keeping it running.

The escape plan rested on three legs. Every one gave way. The latest crisis is instructive because of how it broke. The post-2017 escape plan rested on three legs: a 23-megawatt solar plant at Jambur, a new high-voltage link to the regional OMVG grid and, through it, the West African Power Pool, and a leased Karpowership barge as a stopgap. The logic was sound: import cheaper regional power as the backbone, hold domestic generation in reserve. Then every leg gave way at once. Regional imports fell by up to 60 megawatts on technical faults and fuel shortages upstream; the Karpowership, long past its intended stay, sailed away; and the reserve meant to cover the gap, the Kotu power station, produced almost nothing throughout the crisis, its key generators still under repair. The country had swapped a dependence on imported fuel for a dependence on imported electrons, and found the new dependence the more brittle of the two.

The headline figure invites a shrug. The detail collapses it. Yet to dwell on the blackout is to miss the costlier story, which is not what happens during an outage but what never happens at all. Ask Gambian firms to name their single biggest obstacle and only about six per cent say electricity, a figure that invites a shrug. Disaggregate it and the shrug collapses. Among the country’s largest firms, those with a hundred workers or more, forty-three per cent rank electricity first, ahead of finance and transport combined. The bigger, more formal and more productive the enterprise, the more the power supply governs its fate. The constraint bites hardest precisely where the economy’s future is supposed to be made.

Unreliable power does not slow the economy evenly. It bends its shape. This is the quiet violence of unreliable power. A business that cannot count on electricity does not build the cold store, buy the second production line, or wire up the data it would need to compete. It stays small, stays informal, or stays unborn. The most recent enterprise survey found just nine large firms in a sample of 162; the missing factories are not missing by chance. Electricity is not the only constraint, but it is the one that scales: a firm can work around poor roads or expensive finance at a small size, but it cannot run a production line on a generator indefinitely without pricing itself out of the market. The deepest cost surfaces in the number economists watch for signs of the future: barely four per cent of Gambian firms spend anything at all on research and development, against more than a fifth across comparable African economies. The productivity ladder is not so much unclimbed as never built.

The firms that can cope have quietly stopped demanding change. Why, then, does so little change? Because firms answer darkness not by demanding light but by buying their own. Those that can afford it run diesel generators at a cost far above that of grid or solar power, and pass the rest of the burden into higher prices, thinner wages and forgone investment. Eighty-seven per cent of firms endure outages, more than the regional norm, and the ablest simply opt out of the public supply altogether. Each exit is rational for the firm and ruinous for the system. It strips away the large, visible, politically consequential voices that might otherwise force reform, and it relieves the government of pressure, because the productive economy has quietly insured itself. Darkness, in other words, has found an equilibrium: a stable arrangement in which the people best able to demand change have the least reason to, and the state pays no price for standing still. That, and not incompetence alone, is why fifty years of new names have changed so little.

Demand has nearly tripled. Supply has not kept up. The equilibrium is under additional pressure that the original diagnosis did not fully capture. Electricity demand in The Gambia has nearly tripled over the last decade, rising from about 300,000 megawatt hours in 2016 to an expected 970,000 megawatt hours in 2026, with annual growth running at around 12 per cent. A system that cannot meet current demand while demand grows at that rate is not standing still. It is falling further behind each year the equilibrium holds. The stable arrangement is, on closer inspection, a slow collapse.

The cost of the blackout is visible for an evening. The cost of the equilibrium is permanent. What has the equilibrium cost? The honest answer is a range rather than a figure, but every plausible range is large. Cross-country studies find that a one per cent rise in the frequency of outages cuts firm output by roughly three per cent in the short run and long-run income per head by nearly as much; the average growth drag from unreliable power across Sub-Saharan Africa is put at about two per cent of GDP a year. These are regional coefficients, not Gambian ones, and should be applied with care; the compounding that follows is illustrative rather than an accounting exercise. But the direction is not in doubt. Compounded over a half-century, a drag of even a point or two is no statistical footnote. It is a second Gambia that never came into being: the industries not founded, the wages not earned, the generation of firms that never reached scale. The cost of a blackout is visible for an evening. The cost of the equilibrium is invisible and permanent.

The explanation changed in August. The darkness did not. When the outages returned in August, NAWEC offered a different explanation from the one it had given in June. In June the cause was supply failure: three interlocking dependencies collapsing at once. In August it was demand surge: peak loads reaching 140 megawatts during the heat of the season. The explanation changed. The darkness did not. By late August the frustration had moved past formal advocacy into something less organised and less deferential. Spontaneous protests broke out in Banjul and spread: youths carrying candles through Brikama, women attempting to enter a local NAWEC sub-branch in Wellingara, chants against the government in Busumbala. Gambians Against Looted Assets has since demanded public disclosure of hospital backup power arrangements after a reported death at a health facility during an outage. As this piece goes to press, residents in parts of Brikama are back in the streets.

The fix is unglamorous. It is also the highest-return investment The Gambia is declining to make. Seen this way, fixing the power supply is not an engineering chore but the highest-return investment the country is declining to make. The remedy is unglamorous. It means a domestic floor of firm capacity, solar paired with serious storage and thermal plants actually maintained, sized to carry hospitals and water through a regional outage rather than merely to shave a daytime peak. It means treating the regional link as a way to buy power cheaply, not as the spine of national supply. And it means putting the discipline of the maintenance schedule where the politics of the deadline now sits. And it means repairing the economics of the utility itself: collecting what is owed, paying suppliers before arrears become outages, reducing technical and commercial losses, and maintaining assets before failure turns maintenance into emergency. None of this yields a ribbon to cut. All of it would do what no press conference has managed: turn the country’s most capable firms from reluctant exiles back into stakeholders with a reason to stay, and to invest.

The pattern holds. Another generation sits in the dark. Until then the pattern holds: a new name, a new financier, a new inauguration, and, sooner or later, another festival spent in the dark. I watched those lights fail as a school-leaver. A child born into this year’s darkness could, on present form, watch them fail again with children of their own. The blackout is an evening’s inconvenience. The half-century is the tragedy.