Claim: Madikaja Daily, an online news platform, posted a video of Saihou Mballow, special adviser to the Gambian president, making tribal remarks about the Fula tribe.
Verdict: Misleading! The video shared by Madikaja Daily is from 2025 and does not depict a recent occurrence as portrayed.
Full Text
On Aug. 20, 2026, Madikaja Daily, an online news platform, shared a video claiming that Saihou Mballow, special adviser to the Gambian president on political affairs, was making tribal remarks about the Fula Tribe.
The one-minute, five-second footage (archived here) shows Saihou Mballow, the special adviser, speaking in the Fula language at a community sensitisation gathering.
The post’s caption read, “Don’t Fear, This is Your Government, Mballow Tells Fulas.”
He said, “What I can tell you today is, this government that is here today, if the Fula are not better than the others, then no one is better than the Fula. That is the truth. If you look at the ministers, the President and Vice President are all Fula. The Secretary General of the Civil Service is a Fula. The Director of SIS (State Intelligence Service) is a Fula. Countless people working in law and decision-making bodies are Fula. If I, the adviser to the President, am a Fula, then what are you afraid of? Yesterday, people made you cry in this country, but today, nobody can do that to you with this current government.”
As of Aug. 21, the video had accumulated 122 likes, 122 comments, and 35 shares.
The video has also sparked conversations among Facebook users who did not believe the video.
For instance, Ebrima Colley questioned why the news platform brought the video back.
He said, “Madikaja daily, why do you have to bring back this record again? Remember, if you can’t forget, it means you can’t forgive! For me, it makes no sense to bring back such a record.”
Another user, Lamarana Jallow, wrote, “This is an old video. Besides, people came out and condemned the audio, and it has passed. Why bring it up again? It just adds salt to the wound. Journalism goes with ethics and responsibility.”
Njies Njies said, “This is an old video that was already condemned. Posting it again just to get likes doesn’t help. Let’s keep Gambia united.”
Due to the current political atmosphere in The Gambia and the contradictory comments circulating, DUBAWA conducted this fact-check to set the record straight.
Verification
We broke the video into keyframes and conducted a reverse image search. The result led us to the earlier version of the video posted on Facebook on Aug. 17, 2025, by Binta Basel Jawo. The video was shot during a community sensitisation in Bakoteh on Alien ID cards and the acquisition of identification documents for non-citizens in the country.
The caption attached by Binta Basel reads, “Special Adviser to the President on Political Affairs, Hon. Saihou Mballow’s speech during the community sensitisation organised by Mariama Jallow Taranga FM in partnership with the Gambia Immigration Department.”
DUBAWA also found the footage on the YouTube channel of Kerr Fatou, a prominent online media platform. The video was shared on Aug. 20, 2025, with a similar caption to Binta’s.
In addition, Malagen, a Gambian media outlet, reported the incident after it was flagged as “dangerous speech” in 2025.
On Facebook, bloggers also reshared the video as seen here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion
Our findings show that while the incident truly occurred, the video is not recent. This makes the claim misleading.
This report was produced under the 2026 Kwame Karikari Fact-checking and OSINT Fellowship, co-hosted by DUBAWA and the Digital Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Information Disorder Analysis Centre (DAIDAC), with support from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).