There’s something definitely pitiful and wearying about watching a novice with an insipid script and actors without panache. What has really been going on behind the scenes in the Republic over the last few months that we’ve come to swallow vomit dating back to 2014?

The regime that, in its early days, under the pretext of tracking down ill-gotten gains, threw Karim Wade in prison on charges of illicit enrichment at the expense of our meagre national resources; ten years later, this same regime is blocking the democratic breathing space of the entire Republic to allow the, er, convicted man to aspire to its noblest office.

The accusations of corruption levelled at the Constitutional Council are far too sordid: it is a skeletal parliamentary minority, in a country where the mechanical majority has dictated the law since independence, which is sounding the alarm.

Look for the error…

And the Head of State, with an eagerness too zealous to be disinterested, confirms the doubts. Moreover, he claims, this is not the only hitch…

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The occupant of the Palace is far too compassionate to be sincere when he listens to the whining of forty or so rejected fantasy candidates who have come to whine under his windows… The computer experts at the Constitutional Council (decidedly them again!) are said to have tampered with their USB sticks and made thousands of sponsors disappear with a snap of their fingers.

You might even call it black magic…

And then, as if on cue, we learn that Dr Rose Wardini is French. An abominable crime for this native of Latmingué, who is regarded as one of the pasionarias in the local fight against breast cancer, whose sister is the last outgoing mayor of Dakar, and whose brother is an officer in the national army. A potential traitor whose case proves just how well-founded the suspicions hanging over the Constitutional Council are.

Racist citizens, calm down!

“Mackyavellic » dilemma: Amadou Ba, the Prime Minister in office, and moreover the presidential coalition’s candidate in the next election, is the alleged corrupter. Clearly, after the electoral process was brought to an abrupt halt, the next step would be for his head, already on the chopping block as soon as he was appointed Prime Minister, to roll around on the floor, his haemoglobin spurting out everywhere.

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Well, no. All is well. President Macky Sall and Prime Minister Amadou Ba are even cuddling in public and posing side by side, wearing identical coloured suits, hand in hand, smiling yellow.

Sniff, it is so touching. Get out your handkerchiefs.

Now, of course, there are the occasional signs of presidential bad temper, which can be blamed on the approach of the poignant farewell to the Palace.

For example, on a few official occasions, Macky Sall does not greet Amadou Ba very warmly in public. And then there are a few meetings of the Council of Ministers that the PM accidentally misses, while some of the ministers make vitriolic statements with impunity, with the apparent blessing of the Palace’s officialdom.

Amadou Ba is not the only one to suffer his wrath, rest assured: Macky Sall is becoming brittle, not to say haughty in public.

We can understand his sullen mood and his heartbreak. It lowers your spirits, just to think of having to travel for the rest of your life on vulgar commercial flights, during which there is a likely risk of rubbing shoulders with airport riffraff, just like the scoundrels in business class. Or even imagining yourself stuck in traffic for thirty minutes because the new occupant of the Palace has lined the main boulevards so he won’t bump into anyone. We’d be happy to pass on to you the forest of bills that we’ve lost the habit of honouring: water, electricity, telephone, fuel…

Worse still, the taxman may come knocking at your door because you’re obviously able to pay more tax than others, and the Treasury has a duty to perform.

Make no mistake, it happened to Senghor. The question was raised in the Council of Ministers and the then Head of State, Abdou Diouf, deferred to his Prime Minister, Habib Thiam, who decreed that former President Senghor was an ordinary citizen and that the taxman should be left to his own devices. It was not until the Minister of Finance, Famara Sagna, objected that the honour of the Republic was saved.

I don’t know how today’s Abdou Diouf would take a raid by the tax authorities to look into his assets and finances…

What can we say about the chilling silence in the august home of the future ex-presidential couple, after the departure of the sycophants whose unfaithful fauna will have left for other horizons, having scraped the bottom of the pot of the last feasts and taken away the last savings?

Some people get depressed for less than that.

And then there’s the string of courtiers who have become paranoid at the thought that a new ruler of the country might start rummaging through their pants for traces of public funds that have no rightful place there. It wouldn’t be the first time: the proof is in the form of… Karim Wade?

If that’s all it was…

Between March 2021 and June 2023, we were spared nothing: right up to the murder of two young girls, children of ordinary people, burnt alive on a bus after a Molotov cocktail attack.

For the record, the recipe for this incendiary alchemy came to us in 1968, at the height of the student protest movement, via the Blondin Diop siblings. The mythical Oumar, who led the revolution from Paris, is said to have passed it on to his brothers to support the indigenous resistance in Dakar.

Piqûre de rappel : Madame Sonko, première du nom, est kinésithérapeute. A moins que, raison d’Etat oblige, elle ne brûle son diplôme.

The paths of technology transfer are unfathomable.

There will be much more damage: people shot dead, people injured, property ransacked. All because the (future) President of the Republic, Ousmane Sonko, Pros to his die-hard supporters, in the middle of a curfew between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, cannot find the moral strength to do without the massages of Madame Adji Sarr.

A reminder: Madame Sonko, first in rank, is a physiotherapist. Unless, for reasons of State, she burns her diploma.

The judiciary, in its immense wisdom, after some turbulent national days, will grant the Pros provisional freedom, despite the desecration of his dignity: the judges in charge of the scurrilous case will be described as « petty », meaning shabby and above all corrupt. Of course, the Defence and Security Forces and their militia accomplices were also accused of the worst crimes.

The explanations of the Minister of the Interior, faced with the gloomy picture presented by the public scene, referring to « occult forces », add to the prevailing obscurantism.

The reason of State makes people sneer when Ousmane Sonko is caught on the road to Koungheul, after having defied the whole Republic and its institutions, and his threats to dislodge the President of the Republic from his Palace with the help of two hundred thousand young people.

If Macky Sall is putting the brakes on the electoral process, convening a national dialogue to reinstate Karim Wade and Ousmane Sonko in the presidential race, it’s because he must believe in national amnesia…

Let’s recap: while the Constitutional Council nominates twenty candidates for the Presidential election, Macky Sall prefers to receive forty candidates who have failed.

From there, everything went to hell…

In reality, the Head of State, who has had to strip off his political panoply since abandoning his candidacy for 2024, is back to his « Mackyavellic » shenanigans.

He can’t help it…

Macky Sall is manoeuvring so well that the electoral process is stalling. The international disapproval has made him lose his usual confidence. He even seems to be panicking. Nevertheless, it is like a headlong rush: from press conferences to national dialogue, the obviously improvised scenario and the surreal casting are hard to watch.

What we remember: the desire to make presidential candidates of Karim Wade, the Qatari resident guilty in the eyes of the Senegalese justice system of the worst economic crimes in our history, and Ousmane Sonko, who faces the most monstrous charges to the detriment of the Republic…

One day, if Karim Wade and Ousmane Sonko become irreproachable presidential candidates, someone will have to explain to us: is Macky Sall the only one guilty of everything that has happened to us over the last twelve interminable years?

To the rescue, to plead his case, some have-beens: former presidents Wade and Diouf have come up with a spiel to give indecent lessons in virtue, while the sycophants rush in at every snap of his fingers… There’s everything here: the small-time politician, the unsuccessful businessman, the tension renter, the hallucination salesman, the little-known artist.
It’s such a distressing spectacle.

By Ibou FALL

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH