The 1997 Constitution of The Gambia lays out tidy legal routes to citizenship, by birth, descent, marriage, and naturalization. On paper, it is orderly and precise. In real life, however, it has produced a quiet but enduring injustice: generations of people born on Gambian soil, raised in Gambian communities, educated in Gambian schools, yet treated as strangers in the only country they have ever known.
This paradox flows from the Constitutionโs stubborn attachment to citizenship by blood. Under its logic, birthplace counts for little. A child may draw his first breath in Banjul, Brikama, or Bakau, but unless a parent is Gambian, that child is legally invisible to the nation. Law triumphs over lived reality.
Nowhere is this contradiction more glaring than in Ghana Town, in the West Coast Region. Ghanaian families settled there long before independence, some more than sixty years ago. Their children speak our languages, share our customs, and know no other homeland. Yet many of them cannot obtain national identity cards, cannot travel with proper documents, and cannot secure government employment, even after completing their education. They grow up Gambian in every sense except the one that matters most, recognition by the state.
This is not merely unfair but irrational. Citizenship is supposed to express belonging, loyalty, and contribution. Instead, our law turns it into an inherited privilege, detached from social reality. The result is a class of people suspended between belonging and exclusion, at home everywhere in The Gambia, yet fully accepted nowhere.
The irony deepens when one looks beyond our borders. In the United States, anyone born on American soil is automatically a citizen. That is why many Gambians deliberately send their wives for delivery to ensure their children are born there. We celebrate the logic of that system when it benefits us, yet defend a harsher rule at home that punishes children for the nationality of their parents.
Even more troubling is the colonial echo embedded in our citizenship laws. Both the 1970 and 1997 Constitutions were shaped under British tutelage, and their rigidity reflects colonial anxieties rather than post-independence confidence. Yet these same rules were selectively applied. British nationals like Sir Philip Bridges, one of the key drafters of our first Constitution, held the highest judicial and administrative offices well into independence. Today, African families who settled peacefully, worked honestly, and raised generations here are denied the most basic civic recognition.
Existing constitutional pathways offer little comfort. Naturalization demands fifteen years of residence and the renunciation of oneโs original citizenship, an unappealing bargain, especially for Ghanaians whose country historically frowned on dual nationality. Citizenship by marriage is no solution either; national belonging should not depend on romantic choice or ethnic mixing.
This problem is not confined to Ghanaians alone. Senegalese, Guinean, and other long-settled West African communities face the same quiet exclusion. Left unresolved, it risks creating a permanent underclass, of people who belong socially but not legally, whose loyalty is tested by denial rather than affirmed by inclusion.
If constitutional reform is to have meaning beyond rhetoric, this is the place to begin. At the very least, children born in The Gambia to parents who have lawfully and permanently lived here for many years should be entitled to citizenship, either at birth or upon reaching adulthood. Such a reform would not weaken the nation but would rather strengthen it by aligning law with life.
A country confident in its identity does not fear inclusion. It recognizes its own in those who were born, raised, and rooted within its soil.
The Author Lt Colonel Samsudeen Sarr (Rtd.) is former commander of the Gambia National Army
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