« Only one hand can undo what another has done » is more or less a close translation of the Wolof saying. But the idea remains from my point of view without any nuance: democracy has brought to power an anti-democratic and anti-republican party. It is up to democracy to remove the Pastef abscess from the body of Senegal. In six months, Pastef has shown that it is not a party of government. It had put forward an insurrectional infrastructure supposed to lead it to power and intends to govern by threats and excess.

Those who are surprised by this chaotic governance surprise me. Either they did not observe this party enough in the opposition, or they were not very demanding on democratic and republican values, or finally they are not in good faith. These people cannot govern in serenity because they are populists whose ideas are anchored in an insurrectional perspective and in a desire to destroy the foundations of the secular and republican State. My friend Yoro Dia inspirationally pointed out one day that the Pastef party’s project was a « negation of Senegal » through its desire to destroy the social model of social and religious harmony and to open the country to all the fertile winds of the world.

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Six months after these amateurs came to power, the Senegalese are discovering a head of government who is more likely to go to the theatre than to the Assembly; in addition to coming out with verbal enormities in a more than summary language. Worse, our fellow citizens remember that between two IMF missions, the burden of managing a State requires seriousness and competence and not verbiage and muddy slogans. The IMF, which stressed, in a report from May 2024, that the signals were green with a deficit of 3.9% and growth of 7.1%, is now sounding the alarm and informing that in three months, all the indicators have turned red. The deficit rose to 7.5% and growth fell to 6%, with an economy whose outlook is negative. The economic slowdown reflects, according to the Fund, « weaker activity in the mining, construction and agro-industrial sectors ». 

Instead of striving to maintain the virtuous trajectory outlined by the previous regime, the government has resorted to flashy actions to systematically block economic activity. The shutdown of construction sites on the coast, tax relentlessness, inflammatory speeches towards our international partners, procrastination on the CFA franc, winks at the adventurers of the AES, the purges announced by the Executive, the incompetence at the top of the State are all factors that confuse investors, threaten the business climate and slow down economic activity.

They inherited a Senegal on an upward slope with a credible signature, green signals and a real dynamic of emergence, and want to transform it into a small tropical state from the early 60s preoccupied by settling scores and grocer’s economies, and the suspicious speeches specific to the dictatorships of the time.

 

They glossed over thousands of competent and honest executives, but had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find ministers and directors general whose incompetence and irresponsibility ooze from the first speech. The same people who called for a « Mortal Kombat » to save the « Project » admitted on April 24 that they did not have one. They are the same people who used trickery to exempt their guru from the constitutional requirement of the General Policy Statement. These people have broken with the tradition of consultation established since 1991 for the organization of each electoral rendez-vous.

Violations of the law are increasing, as are the attempts to settle scores; not to mention the filthy speeches and insults and outrageous remarks against religious leaders, customary authorities, journalists and intellectuals who have the audacity not to submit to the wishes of the guru and his faithful cupbearer.

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Those who called for national preference see their Minister of Health assume that the preference went to the party and its activists. Cheikh Tidiane Dièye, this opportunist who also has the good taste to be a notorious incompetent, thinks to dodge forever the Onas file, while Cheikh Oumar Diagne is kept in office despite his incompetence, his dubious diplomas and his astonishing remarks threatening national unity and security.

For the early legislative elections, Democrats and Republicans must mobilize to defeat this regime whose will is to keep us in petty quarrels over dishes and microwaves, for lack of a solid vision and concrete solutions to the real economic and social issues. The remote-controlled dissolution, the chaotic organization of the upcoming election and the serious threats of the Pastef party on national unity commit and oblige us. In the name of republican secularism, public freedoms, purchasing power and the credibility of Senegal abroad, we must all demonstrate responsibility before the irreparable happens.

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In a democracy, between republicans, we are adversaries opposed by different visions on society and on the way to conduct our development strategies. But on the essential, which consecrates the preservation of the Republic, secularism and the Senegalese social model, we are sitting on the same base erected by our founding fathers. This is not the case of Pastef, which is a fascist party, therefore outside the republican arc, and whose political practice is based exclusively on violence and gross manipulation.

All this obliges us to fight with rigor, anger and boldness in order to make a democratic U-turn in the legislative elections and transform the test in 2029. The Pastef party must be a parenthesis in the Republic, as Nazism was in Germany.

In view of the above, I am convinced that a broad gathering of political forces around the imperative of a Republican Front is an emergency. The ideological limits of this Republican Front are adherence to the values ​​of the Republic. The historical political families, socialists, liberals and social-liberals, because they founded Senegal and governed until then, have an obligation to save the Republic from the Pastef disaster, from creeping Islamism, from threats to freedoms, from economic collapse and from the isolation of Senegal on the international scene.

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This grouping requires ingenuity thanks to the electoral experience of each party, generosity, the courage to sometimes decide against one’s own and the sense of sacrifice for the only valid emergency: the Republic. The Republic of Senegal is threatened. Let us all try to live up to history and the requirement to save the outraged, threatened and desacralized republican homeland. If the fascist party has all the levers of power in its hands, it will be the end of the Senegal that we have inherited and that it is our responsibility to pass on as a precious legacy to the next generations of Senegalese women and men.

I wrote in these same columns, on March 26: « As soon as the final proclamation of the results, we must offer half of the Senegalese, who refused to entrust the country to adventurers, a horizon, a project, a discourse and a framework of expression for an opposition that is demanding on principles, intelligent on strategy and innovative on methods. In this path of hope that must emerge to make the defeat of March 24 a fertile ground for a surge towards future victories, I am ready to assume my full share of responsibility. »

For this election, we must not shirk our responsibilities in order to confront the fascists, in the name of the Republic and living together.

A Republican Front !

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn 

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH