Gambians topple Yahya Jammeh

According to the country’s electoral commission, Jammeh lost to Adama Barrow, the main opposition candidate, by 50,000 votes in the presidential election held yesterday.

The commission’s chair, Alieu Njie, said he was followed by out-going President Yahya Jammeh with 212,009 votes while Mama Kandeh, the third candidate in the running, came third with 102,969 votes. News of Mr Barrow’s victory prompted thousands to take to the streets in celebration – some on foot while others rode in cars and trucks and on motorbikes – as confused soldiers looked on.

The incumbent Gambia president, Yahya Jammeh, accepted defeat on Friday.

Jammeh meanwhile had predicted the biggest landslide of his political career.

Barrow, a former businessman and United Democratic Party leader, emerged this year as the candidate for an alliance of eight opposition parties.

Jammeh congratulated Barrow late Friday for his “clear victory” in a jovial conversation that saw him joking about becoming a farmer in his hometown, with the exchange caught on film and broadcast.

Gambians Thursday voted amid a shutdown of all internet and telephone lines, which raised fears of Jammeh planning to hijack the election.

Born in 1965 in a small village near the eastern market town of Basse, Barrow moved to London in the early 2000s, where he reportedly worked as a security guard at an Argos catalog store while studying. “Our foundation will be based on national reconciliation”.

Hopes weren’t high for a peaceful transfer of power, with a crackdown on opposition leaders months before the polls, the banning of global observers or post-election demonstrations, and then the switching off of the internet.

Since coming to power in 1994, Jammeh has won a series of elections that were denounced by critics as rigged.

He said: “We are happy to be free”.

Jammeh’s government shut down access to the internet and worldwide calls on the evening before the election, prompting an outcry that it was a tactic to suppress freedom of expression.

Voting against Jammeh on Thursday was a rare show of defiance against a leader who has effectively ruled by decree and who human rights groups say routinely crushes dissent by imprisoning and torturing opponents.