Sam Sarr vs. Alagie Yorro Jallow: A Tale of Ego, Envy, and the Cost of Clown Politics

By Kebeli Demba Nyima, Atlanta GA

Anyone paying attention knows Sam Sarr’s playbook by now. Whenever he’s broke, bored, or bitter, he fires off an attack against the President or the government. Like clockwork, it works. He insults the system, and the system bends over backwards to appease him. A few months later, you’ll see him smiling at State House, delivering copies of a book no one read, thanking the same government he claimed was “nonsensical” the week before.

Let’s go back. In August 2023, Sam Sarr insulted the Gambia Armed Forces, calling them “polluted” and accusing the Barrow government of staging fake military reforms. The GAF had to issue an official statement, calling his comments fallacious, far-fetched, and out of touch. And yet, less than ten months later, there he was at State House, shaking hands with President Barrow, presenting his so-called memoir, Testimony of a Retired Military Officer and Diplomat.

But here’s the kicker. The book was funded by President Barrow himself. Public money, wasted on glorified blog posts printed between covers. And to add to the insult, the Ministry of Information issued a press release singing his praises like Mandela had just returned from Robben Island.

And now, Sarr is attacking the President again, this time for wearing ceremonial military uniform at a passing-out parade. He calls it “cosplay.” But anyone with a functioning brain understands that a Commander-in-Chief wearing military attire at a national military ceremony is not playing dress-up. It is constitutional symbolism, practiced across democracies.

But politicians do political gimmicks. That’s their business. If Sam wants to insult the President every time his fish money runs dry, that’s between him and his conscience. But what’s disturbing now is his shift from political trolling to personal jealousy, especially his recent attack on Alagie Yorro Jallow.

Alagie Yorro Jallow has done more for The Gambia with his pen than Sarr has done with his entire career with his army uniform. Jallow is a Harvard Fellow, a respected scholar, and a voice of reason. Sarr is an unlettered man with a Facebook account and a uniform from a forgotten era. What he lacks in education, he replaces with noise. But even with no degree, he knows how to run his hustle. Attack, provoke, get invited. Rinse and repeat.

Shamefully, the government still falls for it. Imagine, an entire Ministry responding to a Facebook rant. Not an op-ed in The Economist, not a BBC interview, not even Al Jazeera. Just some poorly written Facebook post, full of grammatical errors, picked up by third-class online pages and forwarded in WhatsApp groups. And suddenly State House feels the need to respond?

If they take Sam Sarr seriously, then maybe they should also start responding to TikTok dancers and conspiracy theorists. Because that’s the level we’re dealing with.

Yes, Sarr was once a military officer. But he was commissioned through O-Levels, without ever attending a proper war college or earning a university degree. Where in today’s world does someone rise to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel without formal academic training or staff college certification? In the US military, even a warrant officer, and mind you, a warrant officer isn’t even a real commissioned officer, needs at least 30 college credits. Sarr wouldn’t even make that cut.

He brags like he’s some Gambian Clausewitz, yet his book is riddled with grammatical mistakes from start to finish. The writing is weak. The logic is shallow. And yet he walks around posing as an accomplished author without even holding an associate’s degree after five decades of public life.

So let’s ask the real question. Who is Alagie Yorro Jallow and who is Sam Sarr?

Alagie Yorro Jallow is not just another journalist. He is a founding editor of The Independent Newspaper, once the most respected and feared publication in The Gambia. He is a survivor of a brutal dictatorship. His newspaper was firebombed by the very soldiers that Sam Sarr once commanded. That alone should make Sarr the last man to ever mention Jallow’s name in criticism. But here we are.

Jallow’s record speaks for itself. He stood tall when the state wanted him silenced. He was arrested, harassed, threatened, and exiled. Still, he never compromised. He could have returned home and begged for crumbs like others. He could have staged a few publicity stunts and ended up a minister. But Jallow is cut from a different cloth. He rejected the political marketplace, choosing dignity over appointment, and principle over position.

A former BBC correspondent, Jallow holds multiple advanced degrees. He could easily be sitting in cabinet meetings or running a major public institution. Instead, he minds his own business and keeps his integrity. Compare that to Sam Sarr.

Sam Sarr is a man who never knows where he stands until someone hands him a seat. His military career is unimpressive, his intellectual output even more so. He was once arrested and jailed. Later, he rebranded himself as a Jammeh loyalist, then as a self-styled diplomat, and finally as a struggling author. He admitted publicly that much of what he wrote in his book wasn’t true. His own words.

When the government changed in 2016, Sarr refused to accept it. He floated the idea of Jammeh’s return and even insulted the legitimacy of the new leadership. But when that didn’t pay off, he switched sides. He praised Barrow, begged for meetings, and tried to reinsert himself into the centre of power. Even without an official post, his proximity to State House raised eyebrows.

And let us not forget the broader risk. When a man like Sarr is allowed to attack the military, insult civilian leadership, and still get invited to State House, the message is clear. There are no standards. No lines. No consequences.

Sam Sarr is not just a nuisance. He is a security risk. A liability. A man who weaponizes his past to gain access, then bites the very hand that feeds him. One minute he’s praising the President. The next, he’s ridiculing him. One week he’s begging for relevance. The next, he’s attacking serious men like Alagie Yorro Jallow.

Enough. The government must stop giving this man airtime, press releases, and public money. He has nothing to offer but recycled bitterness. The comparison between Sam Sarr and Alagie Yorro Jallow isn’t even fair. One stands on history. The other hides behind it. Simply put, one is a former officer who stumbled into power in the Jammeh era, survived on privilege, and now lives off Facebook clout. The other is a scholar who earned his place, who writes with clarity, speaks with dignity, and defends constitutional principles without needing a uniform to prove anything.

The difference is night and day.

And the public is tired of being insulted by this circus.