In February 2025, Gambian press described the country’s only statutory music collecting society as fully operational. The claim rested on two quotes from an inspector at the National Centre for Arts and Culture (NCAC), the body that sits on the society’s board but does not run it: “This is a major step forward for Gambian creatives,” and “artists deserve to be compensated when their work is used commercially.” Neither quote actually says the society is now collecting and paying out money. That characterisation came from the reporter.
Sixteen months later, on 15 June 2026, the Permanent Secretary of the ministry that oversees the same society stood at a government event and said something that reads, on its face, like a contradiction: “We will operationalize the Collecting Society of The Gambia to strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights.” Future tense. No timeline. No reference to the “major step forward” announced the year before.
This record does not resolve which statement was right. It sets both out, with everything that came before and after them, because the gap between the two is itself the story of how a statutory body with no annual report and no public collection figure gets described differently depending on who is talking about it and when.
What the law actually assigns to whom#
The Gambia’s Copyright Act, 2004 splits two jobs between two different institutions, and conflating them is the easiest way to misread this record. Section 56 makes the NCAC, referred to in the Act as “the Centre,” responsible for “the administration of this Act” in general: public education on copyright, monitoring The Gambia’s position on international conventions, and maintaining a data bank of copyright owners. Section 66 is a separate clause establishing a separate body, the Collecting Society of The Gambia (CSG), “for authors and other owners of copyright,” a non-profit corporation whose job, except as otherwise provided, is “collecting and distributing the royalties and other remuneration accruing to its members.” Section 47 is the underlying right CSG is meant to collect against: authors, performers and producers are entitled to royalties when a sound recording is used in public performance, in a public place, or in broadcasting.
Section 67 gives CSG its own governance, a nine-member board drawn from the Musicians Union of The Gambia, the Gambia Association of Music Producers, writers’, publishers’, performing-artistes’ and film-producers’ representatives, plus one NCAC seat. NCAC sits on the board. It does not chair it, and the Copyright Inspector quoted in February 2025 is an NCAC role, created under Section 58 of the Act for enforcement, not a CSG board officer under Section 67. That distinction matters here: the person making the most recent “operational” claim about CSG does not speak for CSG’s own executive.
A decade of the same institution, described differently each time#
The pattern of mismatched status reports goes back further than 2025. In February 2012, NCAC’s then Director of Copyright, Hassoum Ceesay, described a society still being assembled: 17 registered works on the books, and NCAC still recruiting the artists’ associations the Act required to seat its board. The constituent congress followed in May 2013. By September 2015, writing for the Music In Africa Foundation, the same Ceesay reported the board “fully constituted and has since started work,” with the office operating “with volunteers” and a three-year plan awaiting finance, before concluding the society “should be operational sooner than later,” a line that reads as hope, not a status update.
Four years after that, in September 2019, NCAC’s then Creative Industry Director, Sheikeh Omar Jallow, gave Foroyaa a number: exactly one Gambian artist, the musician Hakim, had licensed his work with CSG. Jallow blamed artists’ own lack of awareness, not any failure inside CSG, and said NCAC’s priority was building up the artist associations that feed the society’s board. No membership or licensing figure for any later year, 2020 through 2026, turned up in anything this desk could find.
In October 2020, an editorial in The Point called CSG “operational alongside the Copyright Office” and reported that the tourism minister wanted royalty payments to begin in 2021. Again, no figure accompanied the claim. Then, in November 2024, an opinion piece in The Standard went the other way entirely: CSG, it said, “has failed to fulfil its mandate since inception.” It cited a secretariat that had never been funded, an NCAC budget proposal for that secretariat that was never approved, a cabinet paper on CSG from the Ministry of Tourism and Culture that never advanced, an unsuccessful direct appeal by CSG to the President of the Republic, and a Copyright Amendment Bill, stalled in the National Assembly, that the piece said would let private collective-management organisations operate alongside CSG and shift CMO supervision from the Ministry of Tourism to the Ministry of Justice.
None of those specific problems, the funding gap, the unapproved secretariat proposal, the stalled cabinet paper, the stalled bill, were reported as resolved anywhere between that November 2024 piece and the February 2025 one that followed it just under three months later, the one that produced the “major step forward” framing.
What changed in the time between the two 2025-2026 claims: not much, on paper#
If CSG genuinely crossed from non-functional to fully operational between November 2024 and February 2025, it would be a remarkable turnaround, in three months, for an institution whose funding and legal problems had taken more than a decade to accumulate. This desk looked for the event that would explain it and did not find one. No secretariat appointment, no funding announcement, no amended ordinance, no CSG board statement, appears anywhere in the reporting examined between those two dates.
What does appear, in June 2026, is the Permanent Secretary’s future-tense commitment to operationalize the society, which is difficult to square with an institution already described as fully operational the year before. And in October 2026, the most recent reporting checked, the National Assembly approved a motion by Attorney General and Minister of Justice Dawda A. Jallow to ratify the 1996 WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. The Attorney General’s own stated reason was that ratification would let “Gambian collecting societies,” plural, start collecting royalties from digital uses and join international distribution systems, implying they cannot yet. Planned amendments to the Copyright Act 2004, to bring it in line with digital use, were described as still to be drafted jointly by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, and NCAC. CSG was not named individually in that report, but the structural point stands: as recently as three weeks before this piece was researched, a cabinet minister was describing basic digital-era collection capacity for Gambian collecting societies as a thing still to be built, not a thing CSG already has.
There is also an open question this record could not close. The Standard’s November 2024 piece describes a stalled “Copyright Amendment Bill” aimed specifically at CSG and CMO supervision. Separate, extensive 2024-2026 coverage of an “Intellectual Property Bill,” tabled in 2023, withdrawn, and re-tabled as the 2025 Bill, now sitting with the National Assembly’s Business Committee, covers industrial property, geographical indications, plant breeders’ rights and a new IP tribunal, and none of the reports on that bill name CSG, private CMOs, or a change in which ministry supervises copyright collection. It is possible these are the same piece of legislation under different names at different stages. It is also possible they are two separate bills moving on parallel tracks. Nothing in the sources checked settles which.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Gambian songwriter or performer, the Copyright Act gives you a real, specific entitlement under Section 47, and CSG is the only body the Act names to collect and pay it out under Section 66. Nothing in this record suggests you should avoid registering your works with NCAC or seeking CSG membership; the legal entitlement is genuine, and the structure for collecting it, on paper, has existed since 2004.
What this record does say is that no outsider, and on the evidence found here, perhaps no artist either, currently has a reliable public figure for what CSG has actually collected or paid out, in any year. The strongest number anyone has put on record is six years old and describes one artist, not a system. Treat any claim that CSG is “now operational,” including the one examined in this piece, as a claim about messaging, not as evidence that a specific royalty is on its way to a specific songwriter’s account, until CSG itself, through its own board officers rather than through the ministries that sit beside it, publishes a membership count or a distribution figure.
Gambia is not alone in this pattern among West African collecting societies working with thin budgets and thinner reporting. Niger’s BNDA told artists in February 2026 that a payout was coming “soon,” then spent its next public appearance, three months later, on a workshop instead of a distribution, and Burundi’s OBDA has told reporters it will inform artists “as soon as it is ready,” with no distribution total ever published. What is distinct about Gambia’s record is that the contradiction here is not between a promise and a non-event months apart. It is between two named government officials calling the same institution, within the same sixteen-month window, both already working and still to be built.
