The Gambia is bleeding, and no one in power seems to hear the screams.
Young people are dying in their thousands. They are swallowed by the sea, crushed by poverty, betrayed by silence, and erased by indifference. Canoes capsize. Entire villages are plunged into mourning. Mothers bury sons who left home with hope and returned as names on a list, if they returned at all. Some never do.
Our waters, once symbols of life and sustenance, have become graveyards. Bodies drift where fish once swam freely, yet life goes on as if nothing is wrong. People eat from these waters while the truth rots beneath the surface. No alarms. No national reckoning. No collective outrage.
If ten people died this way in the United States or the United Kingdom, policies would shift overnight. Governments would fall over themselves to act. Investigations would be launched. Borders, maritime safety, employment, migration, and youth welfare would dominate headlines and parliamentary debates.
But in The Gambia, mass death has become routine.
What has gone so wrong with us?
We have normalised tragedy. We have institutionalised denial. We have allowed spin doctors in polished suits to downplay a national catastrophe while our youth vanish at an unprecedented and astronomical rate. These are not isolated incidents. These are not accidents. These are systemic deaths born of neglect, hopelessness, and a state that has abandoned its most valuable resource: its people.
What is the government doing?
Workshops. Conferences. Staged dialogues. Carefully worded statements. Endless meetings that produce nothing but per diems and photographs. While officials debate in air-conditioned halls, families are selling land to bury their dead. While reports are being drafted, canoes are capsizing. While excuses are being made, villages are being wiped out.
This is not governance. This is moral failure.
A nation that cannot protect its youth, that cannot acknowledge the scale of its loss, that refuses to confront the truth of why its children are fleeing and dying, is a nation in deep crisis. Development slogans cannot resurrect the dead. Public relations cannot mask grief. Silence cannot absolve guilt.
We are losing a generation, not to war, not to natural disaster, but to abandonment.The sea is not the enemy. Desperation is. Poverty is. Hopelessness is and above all, indifference is.
History will judge this moment harshly. It will ask who spoke and who stayed quiet. Who acted and who pretended. Who mourned genuinely and who hid behind bureaucracy.
The Gambia deserves better than this. Our youth deserved better than this. And until we stop treating mass death as background noise, until leadership rises to meet the gravity of this disaster, the waters will continue to claim what the nation failed to protect.
A sad state of affairs, indeed.
But sadness alone will not save us. Only truth, courage, and accountability will.
I weep for my country,The Gambia.
By Melville R Roberts
