$220,000 to Become President of The Gambia
In January 2015, US federal prosecutors charged two American citizens with violating the US Neutrality Act. They were accused of plotting to overthrow a foreign government without authorisation from the US government. The two defendants were Cherno Njie, a 57-year-old Texas real estate developer, and Papa Faal, a 46-year-old retired US soldier. The pair assembled a small faction with a wild plan: seize power in another country and install themselves as its leaders. The target of their coup plot was The Gambia, the famously quirky West African nation known across the internet.
The Gambia sits on the Atlantic coast of western Africa. Covering a total area of 11,000 square kilometres, it is mainland Africa’s smallest country. Its capital, Banjul, serves as the nation’s political, transport, economic and cultural hub, with a population of just 31,000 in 2016.
The country’s borders were drawn by Britain and France during colonial partitioning. The whole nation stretches along the Gambia River, tucked entirely inside Senegal’s territory. On paper, Senegal could easily have absorbed The Gambia, yet it never had much incentive. The Gambia is desperately poor, with almost no natural resources. Peanuts are its only major product, once making up half of its GDP. Since Senegal had little demand for peanuts, it saw no reason to invade, and this odd arrangement has persisted to this day.
The Gambia gained independence in 1965. Its first post-independence leader was Dawda Jawara, a figure who struck fear into European circles — and also the country’s first vet. Do not dismiss him for that background. Jawara secured power not only through active political campaigning, but also by earning a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Edinburgh. In a country where high school graduates were rare, a veterinary PhD was seen as a figure of great wisdom. Having spent years in Britain, he understood Western political systems well, so he naturally became The Gambia’s first president.
In 1965, with few qualified candidates available, Jawara held multiple top posts at once: president, minister of defence, foreign affairs, internal affairs, information, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He controlled all critical branches of government single-handedly, running what was effectively a one-man cabinet.
Once in office, Jawara tried economic reforms, with little success. To shore up public support, he travelled around the country using his veterinary skills to treat livestock, which won him some popularity. Beyond these animal clinics, however, he achieved very little else. To follow Western political models, he introduced multi-party politics. In Banjul, a city of only 30,000 residents, there were three official opposition parties, three underground parties, plus a host of grassroots political groups. So many parties in such a tiny population kept Banjul’s political scene lively. Jawara had only intended this as a show of democracy, yet real trouble soon erupted.
In 1981, while Jawara travelled abroad to attend the wedding of Charles and Diana, an uprising broke out. The Gambia had no formal army back then, only 1,200 police officers. The vice president led loyal police forces to fight opposition rebels on the streets of Banjul. Hearing news of the revolt overseas, Jawara urgently called on Senegal for help. Senegalese troops intervened and crushed the rebellion, though heavy fighting damaged Banjul’s central business district.
Jawara learned the hard lesson that military power matters. He decided The Gambia needed a standing army, founding the national military in 1984 with just 800 troops. With this small fighting force, Jawara grew bolder on the international stage and set his sights first on the Soviet Union.
Tensions between The Gambia and the Soviet Union had simmered for years. Jawara criticised Leonid Brezhnev at the UN General Assembly in 1980 over Soviet expansionism. A few years later in 1985, cash-strapped The Gambia requested Soviet aid. The USSR also faced economic strain at the time, and the two sides failed to agree on aid amounts, enraging Jawara. Though his new army gave him more confidence, he proceeded with caution. The Gambia sent troops to Liberia for peacekeeping missions, yet rising military spending pushed the nation deeper into debt. Years of costly overseas deployments left soldiers unpaid — a classic recipe for disaster. Jawara failed to grasp the risk, and catastrophe followed.
On 22 July 1994, soldiers led by Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh staged a coup. Troops marched into Banjul and seized power. Jawara fled and took refuge aboard an American warship. After 30 years in office, he found no military units willing to defend his government. When he left power, The Gambia was in ruins: average life expectancy stood at 45, infant mortality hit 13%, child mortality 29%, literacy only 25%, and 75% of people lived below the poverty line. It ranked among the world’s poorest nations, riddled with corruption.
This marked the start of Yahya Jammeh’s rule. To put it simply, even Muammar Gaddafi looked reasonable next to him. On a personal level, Jammeh achieved early success: he became head of state at just 29.
Born in rural The Gambia in 1965, Jammeh passed his high school exams with good grades. He joined the army aged 19 in 1984 and climbed the military ranks. Unlike most soldiers, he was obsessed with politics. In his younger years, he would pretend to hitch rides in Banjul, stop ministerial cars, and yell at officials through car windows for corruption. The 29-year-old seized power and named himself president. Western nations condemned the military takeover, and the United States imposed sanctions. Jammeh resented these sanctions deeply.
To prove his resolve, Jammeh launched a lopsided arms build-up. He expanded the army by 20%, from 800 to 1,000 troops. What had once been a single-service force turned into a multi-branch military with army, navy and air force. In 1996, The Gambia established its navy: 70 personnel and two gunboats, later joined by four speedboats. It also founded an air force with three aircraft. One was a MiG-25 attack jet gifted by Georgia, which never flew after delivery. The other two were crop-spraying planes. Jammeh’s confidence was not entirely baseless: even the powerful US Air Force could not shoot down any of The Gambia’s fighter jets. As for the army, like Britain’s military, it had no tanks. Its hardware included 20 armoured fighting vehicles and a single howitzer. Artillery power was thin, yet Jammeh was a devoted RPG enthusiast. His presidential guard carried rocket-propelled grenades everywhere, and he even kept an RPG in the boot of his official car. The Gambia’s army packed formidable firepower, or so Jammeh believed.
Under Jammeh’s military spending spree, annual defence costs peaked at 3 million US dollars. George W. Bush invited Jammeh to visit Washington in 2007. He visited again in 2011 and held talks with Barack Obama. That same year, The Gambia held joint military drills with US forces.
Jammeh’s domestic policies were equally controversial. In 2007, he suddenly claimed ancestral spirits had given him the power to cure asthma and AIDS. He began treating patients at the national assembly building: AIDS patients on Mondays and Thursdays, asthma sufferers on Fridays and Saturdays. His cure involved placing his hands under patients’ heads, and he claimed they recovered instantly. The World Health Organisation condemned these claims sharply. Reportedly, none of his patients dared say they remained uncured.
Beyond his unorthodox medical claims, Jammeh launched what he called an anti-witchcraft campaign. When his aunt died unexpectedly in a village, he blamed witches for casting a curse. Authorities arrested more than 1,000 people accused of witchcraft across the country, most of them ordinary civilians. Detainees were forced to drink herbal potions and confess to witchcraft. This witch hunt in the 21st century shocked observers. Jammeh also threatened to execute all gay people in The Gambia, and said he would shoot criminals first and ask questions later.
Compared with the vet-turned-president Jawara, Jammeh lacked formal education. When upset by something, he would announce “zero tolerance”. For extreme anger, he promised “double zero tolerance”, seemingly unaware doubling zero still equals zero. His heavy-handed rule bred fear nationwide. Jammeh held power for more than two decades, until a minor shake-up arrived in 2014.
Amad Sanneh fled to the United States in 2013. The then thirty-something man had been a young Gambian military officer, trained in Britain. Back home, Jammeh trusted him and appointed him commander of the national guard in 2012 to protect the presidential palace. Sanneh took his job seriously and guarded Jammeh loyally. But loyalty alone was not enough around Jammeh. He refused an order to shoot his own soldiers one day, and was deemed disloyal. He was removed from the presidential guard, and his home came under surveillance months later. Fearing for his life, Sanneh escaped with his family and settled in Baltimore in 2013.
Even in exile, Sanneh remained determined to change The Gambia, convinced he had the ability and duty to save his homeland. He contacted a Gambian dissident living in the US, a long-time opponent of Jammeh. That dissident put him in touch with Cherno Njie. Njie, a Gambian-American real estate developer in Texas, had built a successful business. He had lived in the US for over 20 years, yet retained deep ties to his home country. After hearing Sanneh’s plan, Njie agreed at once: “You run the operation, I fund it.” The money came with a price tag: if Jammeh fell, Njie wanted to become president of the transitional government. It seemed Texas real estate brokers could harbour presidential dreams.
They got to work. Sanneh recruited a team including Gambian exiles and retired US service members to form the “Gambia Freedom League” and plot Jammeh’s overthrow. Sanneh drafted an action plan presentation and shared it with the group via Google Drive. Their strategy had two prongs: first, ambush Jammeh’s motorcade during travel, capture or kill him, then seize control of the country. Second, storm the presidential palace.
The obvious flaw? Their whole team only had around a dozen people. Even small, The Gambia still had more than a thousand soldiers and police officers. What would happen if state forces resisted? Sanneh believed there was no need to worry. Having served for years in the Gambian military, he claimed he could convince Jammeh’s guards to surrender and national troops to defect the moment fighting started. His whole plan rested on the assumption that government soldiers would lay down arms or scatter immediately, with little need for heavy combat. Sanneh also believed he could rally 160 former cadets he had taught at the military academy to join the uprising. The plan was full of holes, yet it counted as thorough in their eyes — they had both Plan A and Plan B.
Papa Faal, another Gambian-American and former US soldier who served in Afghanistan, joined the plot soon after. He was also the great-nephew of ex-president Jawara and harboured a personal grudge against Jammeh. With his combat background and family lineage, Faal quickly became a core member. Sanneh managed recruitment and operations, Faal handled field action and brought symbolic family legitimacy, and Cherno Njie supplied funding while waiting to take office.
The team was assembled and funded, ready to launch. Group members held conference calls twice weekly to refine their tactics. They printed Google satellite images of the presidential palace, sealed them in folders marked “Top Secret”. It was strange that people sharing battle plans on cloud storage treated publicly available satellite photos as classified. They drafted a Word document listing required gear: 28 rifles, 8 handguns, 4 machine guns, 15 scopes, plus two .50-cal sniper rifles, noted as “not essential, but could be very useful”. These weapons were relatively easy to source in America. Members bought the firearms separately, enough to equip an infantry platoon. Once purchased, Faal packed the guns in plastic barrels covered with blankets and shipped them to Banjul on a commercial airline without trouble.
By late October 2014, plotters flew to The Gambia one by one. Once the core team arrived, they discovered most of their promised mercenaries and local allies had backed out for trivial excuses: sickness, custody schedule conflicts, passports seized by mothers-in-law. When the dust settled, only 11 people reached The Gambia, and merely six or seven were fit for combat. Still, they pushed ahead. They rented houses in Banjul and prepared for action. Sanneh had hoped to bring in 160 allies, but only one local recruit joined him, plus a presidential guard who promised to leak Jammeh’s travel schedule. Intelligence said Jammeh planned to leave the country early the day after Christmas, so the team scheduled an ambush on his motorcade for the early hours of 26 December. But Jammeh changed his travel time, moving his flight from early morning to 10 a.m. Sanneh scrapped Plan A and let Jammeh leave safely.
With Plan A dead, only Plan B remained: assault the presidential palace. Many members argued this was suicidal; attacking the palace with so few men was pure fantasy. Sanneh insisted they had come all this way and had to try. They set the assault for the night of 30 December.
At 1 a.m., eight members gathered in a graveyard one mile from the palace. They chose this spot because almost nobody wandered there after dark, lowering the risk of detection. Sanneh split the eight men into two teams in two vehicles. Team A, led by Sanneh with four men, would attack the main gate. Team B under Faal, two men strong, targeted the rear gate. A planned backup Team C never materialised due to manpower shortages. The two cars left the graveyard and headed for the palace.
Team A drove straight into the palace compound. A sentry spotted them. Sanneh and another man tried to talk the guard into surrendering before a single shot was fired. They never finished their pitch. The sentry opened fire, killing Sanneh on the spot. The rest of Team A fled in panic. As Team A collapsed, Faal’s Team B was still circling to find a parking spot. Gunfire erupted from the palace guards before they could settle in. One of Faal’s men was killed. Faal realised the coup had failed instantly and escaped with the other surviving team member. The attackers wounded none of the palace defenders. Some plotters were captured, some killed.
Faal hid in a brothel, convinced a local resident to swap clothes with him, then took a taxi to Dakar. Along the way, he even shared the ride with a Gambian soldier and pretended to sleep to avoid suspicion. He reached Dakar at midnight the next day and turned himself in at the US Embassy, confessing every detail of the plot. An embassy official asked whether he knew he had committed a crime. Faal replied that he did, yet surrendering was better than capture by Jammeh’s soldiers.
The surviving American plotters faced trial. Charged under the Neutrality Act and for illegal weapons possession, they risked prison terms from five to twenty years. This reckless bid to seize a nation became a farcical failure. Jammeh exploited the failed coup to launch a sweeping crackdown and suppress opposition parties, which actually strengthened his grip on power. Diplomats stationed in Banjul dismissed Jammeh’s victory, commenting that someone would succeed sooner or later. No one expected regime change to arrive peacefully just one year later.
The Gambia held its 2016 presidential election, the fourth vote in Jammeh’s rule. Elections under Jammeh were usually foregone conclusions. He had won the prior three votes, famously claiming he intended to rule The Gambia for a billion years. Elite Red Beret troops oversaw polling. On election day, Jammeh cut domestic and international communications and barred foreign observers. Outside observers expected another predictable win.
Jammeh’s rival was Adama Barrow, a political newcomer aged 51. Barrow was born the same year as Jammeh but came from a wealthier family. After high school, he worked as a shop assistant before deciding to study in the UK in 1998. While studying management, he worked gruelling shifts as a shopping centre security guard, logging 15-hour days and once catching a thief. He graduated in 2002 and returned home, later working in real estate. He founded his own property firm in The Gambia in 2006 and built a profitable business. Soon he realised property development alone could not fix his country. Youth unemployment hit 38%, and 85% of the population lived in poverty. He decided to enter politics to help Gambians. He secured backing from eight opposition parties and became their unified presidential candidate.
Jammeh never took Barrow seriously, mocking his former job as a mall security guard and dismissing his chances. Yet Jammeh underestimated public anger at his rule. Barrow’s supporters campaigned on the streets, shouting their message to voters, quietly building massive grassroots support.
Polling day arrived. Low literacy meant voters could not mark paper ballots. Instead, each voter received a glass marble. Portraits of candidates sat above separate drums. Voters tossed marbles toward their chosen candidate’s drum, and election officials counted votes by listening to the sound the marbles made. All vehicles were banned near polling sites to avoid disrupting counting.
In December 2016, election results were announced. Barrow won 45.5% of votes, beating Jammeh’s 37.7% and becoming the new president. Jammeh immediately called for a new election. The international community refused to accept his demand. West African nations assembled a joint military force, and Senegal hosted Barrow’s inauguration in Dakar. Faced with overwhelming international pressure, Jammeh accepted defeat, stepped down and left The Gambia.
The Texas real estate investor never achieved his presidential dream, but a Gambian real estate businessman won the office peacefully. Jammeh fled to Equatorial Guinea, announcing he planned to take up farming with funds he had embezzled during his rule. He remained an eccentric figure, yet no longer commanded global attention. His bizarre era had ended.
The Gambia stayed poor, yet tourism emerged as a growing industry alongside farming. Oddly, its biggest tourist draw was not scenery, but young local men. The Gambia for older European women resembled Southeast Asia for Western male tourists. British and continental European women travelled long distances to the beaches of The Gambia to form relationships with young local men.
New president Barrow faced fragile political footing, yet he was a pragmatic leader willing to rebuild the nation.
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