Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara[1] GCMG (16 May 1924 – 27 August 2019[2][3]) was a Gambian politician who served as prime minister from 1962 to 1970, and then as the first President of The Gambia from 1970 to 1994, when he was deposed.

Following the coup attempt, Jawara and Senegalese President Abdou Diouf announced the creation of the Senegambia Confederation, but it proved to be short-lived and ultimately collapsed eight years later in 1989.

Their father Almammi, who had several wives, was a well-to-do trader from an aristocratic family who commuted from Barajally Tenda to his trading post in Wally Kunda.

Around 1933, young Jawara's formal education was sponsored by a friend of his father, a trader named Ebrima Youma Jallow, whose trading post was across the street from Alammi's in Wally-Kunda.

[4] After graduation from Mohammedan, Jawara won a scholarship to an all-boys High School, where he enjoyed all his classes, but showed the greatest aptitude in science and mathematics.

The limited career and educational opportunities in colonial Gambia led to a year's stint at Prince of Wales College and School in Achimota, Accra, in the then Gold Coast, where he studied science.

At a meeting in 1959 at Basse, a major commercial town almost at the end of The Gambia River, the leadership of the People's Progressive Society decided to change its name to challenge the urban-based parties and their leaders.

The economic situation has generally been characterized by rampant inflation, periods of excessive monetary instability, and credit squeeze...soaring oil prices and commodity speculation.

[15]The most striking consequence of the aborted coup was the intervention of the Senegalese troops at the request of Jawara, as a result of the defense treaty signed between the two countries in 1965.

At the time of the aborted coup, Jawara was attending the Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer in London and flew immediately to Dakar to consult with President Abdou Diouf.

[citation needed][18][19] Perhaps more importantly, the creation of a new army diverted limited resources that could have otherwise been used to enhance the strong rural development programmes of the PPP government.

In an embezzlement scheme at The Gambia Cooperative Union (GCU), fraud was revealed in Customs,[26] and through the process of privatisation, it was discovered that many dummy loans had been given to well-connected individuals at GCDB.

[26] A group of para-statal heads and big businessmen closely associated with the PPP (nicknamed the Banjul Mafia) were seen as the culprits responsible for corruption in the public sector.

[28] Structural adjustment programmes implemented in response to the economic crisis resulted in government fragmentation, privatisation, less patronage in co-opting various groups and growing corruption.

The credibility of the competitive party system was severely challenged as Jawara's PPP was unable to show that good economic management could lead to benefits for the majority of society.

[29] Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, the first President of The Gambia, played a significant role in shaping the country's early economic policies following its independence from British colonial rule in 1965.

With Jawara's precarious hold on power at Gambian independence, his low caste status constituted a grave handicap and one which threatened to overshadow his strengths (most notably, a university education).

The two pre-independence challenges to Jawara's position demonstrated his vulnerability and illustrated the fact that he could not rely upon the undivided loyalty of the party's founding members.

Given these circumstances, Jawara's task was to overcome his low caste status, assert his authority over the party, and secure control over its political direction.

Within his own party Jawara was fortunate to be surrounded by individuals willing to refrain from violence to achieve their goals, and yet much of the credit for this restraint must go to Jawara—his skillful manipulation of patronage resources, cultivation of affective ties and shrewd balancing of factions within the PPP.

Despite these limits, Jawara skillfully used all the various permutations of patronage distribution (appointment, promotion, termination, demotion, and rehabilitation) to dramatise his power over subordinates’ political futures and entrench himself as a leader.

Many of the party's earliest adherents (even those who showed no outward sign of disloyalty) lost ministerial posts during the early years of PPP rule.

Jawara may not have used force, but neither was he hampered by sentiment; his pragmatism and willingness to demote, or even drop, former supporters in order to strengthen his personal political position was apparent.

Nevertheless, events during the closing years of the People's Progressive Party rule together with post-coup revelations and inquiries suggest that corruption was both a significant phenomenon and one which played an important role in the PPP's survival.

It provided a means of creating and sustaining mutually beneficial and supportive relationships between PPP politicians (headed by Jawara), senior civil servants, and Gambian businessmen.

Initially, then, corruption played a significant part in the survival of the PPP, uniting political, bureaucratic, and business interests in a series of mutually beneficial and supportive relationships.

Perhaps the first indication of this occurred in 1981 when, during the coup attempt of that year, Kukoi Samba Sanyang cited “corruption and the squandering of public funds” as a primary motive of intervention.

Just a month prior to the coup, Reverend Ian Roach had spoken out publicly against corruption, the local press reported numerous instances of low-level bureaucratic theft, and higher up, Jawara's leniency towards the ministers and civil servants towards the end of the 1970s was widely resented.

On the other, Jawara's rejection of coercion as a survival technique meant that overt public challenges could not simply be suppressed; it was vital the latent threat posed by specific societal groups remain dormant.

Jawara had hoped that his work would create an economically prosperous society based on his priorities: democracy, unity, and tolerance for personal differences.