Bah Diakhaté, the Mirror that Ousmane Sonko Does Not Want to Look Into
by 549 
by 549 The arrest of activist Bah Diakhaté and Imam Sheikh Tidiane Ndao for abject speeches is quite regrettable. We cannot prejudge the verdict that will be given by the Flagrant Crimes Tribunal. However, we must express our embarrassment at the obscene remarks made about the man Ousmane Sonko, a family man, father whose dignity and that of his relatives must be respected. The person of the Prime Minister must also be respected and given due regard. I have expressed my sympathy to my friend Bah Diakhaté for the tribulations he is suffering. However, I also told him that he unfortunately gave his opponents the stick to beat him, to settle some small old scores. Yet, this episode of Senegalese public life is full of lessons.
The first lesson is that we have discovered that Ousmane Sonko is sensitive to personal attacks and those under the belt. Frankly, I couldn’t believe that a person who came to the public stage to insult, defame, slander other people would suffer if his own weapons were returned to him. Ousmane Sonko encouraged his supporters to pour out all sorts of folly on people whose lives, paths and morals they knew nothing about.
Pastef’s bet was to whom the best insults, the filthiest
It was necessary to try to hurt, and the bet for Pastef was on the one to whom would be pronounced the most rudeness, the filthiest. There was no regard or respect for the head of state, members of the government, administrative, judicial, military or religious authorities. They didn’t respect anything, nor anyone. No scruples, everything was desacralized, including, above all, the privacy of those who were not on their political margins. The culmination was, on February 7, 2023, when the Kaliph General of the Niassens, Sheikh Mahi Niass, said with a barely confined emotion: “I know that after this I will suffer a bunch of insults but for the sake of Senegal, I would say what I have to say.”
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Ousmane Sonko gave the tone by insulting at each of his outings the highest authority in the country, the President of the Republic. It is understandable why he is working daily to remove some of his statements and posts from social networks. It can be assumed that the next five years will not be enough for his teams to finish cleaning and polluting their pages and other public walls of their now too heavy spicy balls. Indeed, since he entered the public scene, there has been no outing of Ousmane Sonko, as trade unionist or as politician, in which there is no material for defamation, insults, false accusations or counter-truths prophesied against persons and/or public authorities. His critics have a wise pleasure in circulating his videos that are a few weeks, months or years old!
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It’s funny to observe today that if his person is treated in the same way, Ousmane Sonko suffers so much, to the point of harassing and ordering the arrest of the dirty and big mouths. Bah Diakhaté’s arrest has perfectly revealed this. Perhaps the new Prime Minister thought that everything he said about others slipped on their skin and returned to the potholes. And, if from now on he thinks that his position of power does not permit attacks on his person, that is the best confession! « When things go wrong, look in the mirror » (Chinese Proverb). The history of peoples teaches that autocrats do not retreat from any cowardice in order to spare their own person from cruel spells to which they would subject others. Who has not noticed that those who seek to condemn Bah Diakhaté are indignant that he has received the generosity of personalities close to the fallen political regime? Who organized the « kaac kaac » mafia to raise tens of millions of francs to bribe witnesses to lie about Adji Sarr who accused Ousmane Sonko of rape and sexual abuse? Who rewarded a gendarmerie officer who publicly confessed to sabotaging a judicial investigation he was leading? The initiators of the operation do not seem to realize it, but, in Wollof, « Kaac » means to lie in an inveterate way. The subconscious sometimes plays some small laughing rounds!
Protecting the Prime Minister, they say! What about a President of the Republic?
By the way, Ousmane Sonko now admits that he was all false and that it was totally wrong to talk about others as he did. Furthermore, the criminal proceedings against Bah Diakhaté and Sheikh Tidiane Ndao would aim to protect the “Prime Minister”, in the spirit of protecting from offense “any person holding all or part of the powers of the Head of State”.
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One can applaud the genius of the excellent prosecutors who ingenuously peeled out of the Senegalese Penal Code this “new” weapon of mass imprisonment! This, this affirms that it was then wise to prosecute all those who promised to reserve to President Macky Sall the fate of former Liberian President Samuel Doe, who was chopped into pieces on 9 September 1990, by warlord Prince Johnson’s hordes. It should be admitted that on the scale of the ignominy, this sadism does not go beyond what Bah Diakhaté said. It therefore appears that it was legitimate and appropriate to prosecute all those who publicly called for insurrection and military coup, or who copiously insulted the President of the Republic, the judiciary, the army, the gendarmerie, the police or the men and women members of the government or other republican institutions. All personalities and functions protected by the law, as they are always!
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Could one hope for a gesture of greatness when one notes that in the first high-ranking public appointments, the government sought to reward the ones who insulted the most? To a point where, considering himself forgotten in the nominations, Ousmane Tounkara, a bragger based in the United States of America, multiplies videos demanding his reward from the new regime. He exhibits his own acts of insulting, breaking houses and financing the armed insurrection. He himself confesses to it, as if to taunt the victims of these serious crimes! I almost forgot, won by a great magnanimity, Macky Sall amnestied all these sordid acts! Tounkara can afford the revendication because we have seen, for example, the Diomaye-Sonko tandem appoint to the post of CEO of a public company, a person who showed on television how to make Molotov cocktails and how to swing them against the security forces?
You can always delete your posts, Mr. Sonko, people will not forget. And, as long as you do not have the honesty to acknowledge your shamelessness and apologize for it! It can also be hoped that you will learn a lesson from this, and, urge your supporters to stop insulting their opponents. It would need pleading with them endlessly, having insulted them whilst you were in the opposition and to continue even better, since you came to power. It is indeed more than a double punishment that you impose on them if, you use the judiciary to punish them when they turn your words back to you. Even worse, it is a four-fold punishment, some self-proclaimed sentinels of the “Pastef” regime, now promise to physically settle scores with any impertinent who lacks respect towards Ousmane Sonko! An easy shortcut to seduce and remain in the memory of the signatories of appointment decrees? “Beautiful souls are not without stains and the best of us are those who regret in the second half of our lives that they have not used the first better.” (Franz Liszt).
Bah Diakhaté, eligible for political prisoner status, according to the Tine-Gassama criteria
All things being equal, anyone who insults a prime minister must be treated as a political prisoner in Senegal. Have we not seen the principal leaders of civil society organizations, notably Alioune Tine and Seydi Gassama, dressing the great dignity of political prisoners, persons prosecuted and arrested for insulting a President of the republic, calling for insurrection, military coup d’états, associating high public authorities with homosexuality or freemasonry? At a press conference on June 3, 2022, Ousmane Sonko attacked the President of the Republic with a bullet in the head on the issue of homosexuality: “We are in the era of the tragedy of homosexuality. God has punished entire societies for these practices. I want it to be clear in Senegalese minds: Macky Sall carries the LGBT agenda (…) After that, we’ll have gay parades like Gay Pride. That’s Macky Sall’s program. » It is my guess that President Sall believed that “the mania of justification is common to those who do not have a calm conscience”. Besides, have we not seen people arrested for throwing Molotov cocktails into a bus full of passengers and slaying children, sabotaging power plants, burning power stations, looting and setting fire to shops and private homes, who ended up being considered political prisoners? Have we not seen people publicly accusing the head of state, Macky Sall, of murders and assassinations, finding themselves with the respectable status of political prisoners? It is strange to see false devotees wonder whether the chronicler or “liver” of “Baatu Dëg” was not in provocation mood to try to go to prison and thus defile the image of the new regime! Cynicism or the desire to absolve at all costs those who are never wrong?
In addition, there have been situations where people have deliberately blocked sewer pipes to cause floods, in order to reveal the deficiencies of Macky Sall’s regime. They were also counted in the lot of political prisoners!
That is why we could not keep smiling when we heard Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko warn people about difficulties in containing the flooding feared during the coming rainy season, because, he says, “the Senegalese are in-disciplined!” A truck driver was arrested on 20 May 2024 for degrading the BRT track. What about the savages who plundered the TER and BRT facilities so that Macky Sall’s regime could not show a positive outcome? The people of Pastef applauded them! “The amnesiacs do not experience anything unforgettable!”
Bah Diakhaté was not so rude, we can agree and once again, “who can the most can the least!” So, for Mr. Tine and Mr. Gassama, not to regard him as a political prisoner and therefore to treat him as such would, in accordance with their criteria, violate his inalienable rights; it would also be to regard the person of his target, Ousmane Sonko, above the State and more sacred than all republican institutions and, above all, that Ousman Sonko would be entitled to more dignity than any other Senegalese. The President of Pastef would have the divine right to authorize himself, for example, to call for the “gatsa-gatsa” (the law of The Talion), and thus insult without limits, threaten, call for sedition or to ransack private homes and squabble bodies (more than 40 dead) to get to power! Let’s assume that we didn’t know how to say it, on June 13, 2022, when I wrote that: “in power, the leaders of Pastef would not like to be reserved the treatment they apply to Macky Sall and his regime”. It seems that I was right, before the hour, writing on January 14, 2019: “Mr Sonko, someone who wants to become President of Senegal should not do this…”. Could I risk, with these words, being punished for the crime of “lese-Majesty” or “lese Prime Minister”, I didn’t mean “lese Ousmane Sonko”? I know, if necessary, that I can count on the support of Alioune Tine!
By Madiambal DIAGNE / mdiagne@lequotidien.sn
- Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH
