We’re in the last straight line and the die has been cast. The timing is perfect: Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the candidate of, er, substitution, and his mentor, the former future favourite of this truculent Presidential election, Ousmane Sonko, have finally been released from prison, just as the followers started to become indignant on exasperated social networks in despair.

What do you do with a candidate in prison who you never get to see or hear in action? Do you vote blindly, to avenge an administrative heresy, or do you cautiously ignore him?

The very next day, the two lads face the press. There’s been a change since Cap Manuel: a change of programme and a change of enemy; dare we call it a play of words, the cap?

Of course, the spittoon is in the hands of Ousmane Sonko.

Indeed, the former (putative) President of the Republic Ousmane Sonko, alias Pros, is not the candidate; he’s just there to support his little brother on the campaign trail, the already ‘President’ Diomaye, to whom he advised a few days ago (understand that he ordered him to do so) to trim his beard, which we’re guessing is bushy after so many months in nine square metres of overcrowded jail, and put on an honest face before finding freedom and the electorate.

These are the kind of details that can ruin a presidential campaign… It’s a good thing the Pros thinks of everything!

Read the column – Hatred, a Cardinal Value in Democracy

He, all this while, with his toes in the air, is taking it easy in a prison suite with impeccable room service. The Republic did him a favour by fixing him up after his suicidal hunger strike, the outcome of which would be fatal to the nation. In the midst of the turmoil, his two wives were seen on camera, in front of the microphone of the intrepid Pape Alé Niang, pleading for clemency from the national « Darling Kôr » at a time when our local human rights activists were threatening the Republic with apocalypse on the brink of irreparability.

To reward his two wives for their unfailing solidarity and to lighten their workload, he has just added a third.

When you love, you don’t count…

The incumbent President, Macky Sall, whom Pros was fighting fiercely to prevent from being re-elected in 2019 for a third term (or a second five-year term, as the case may be), is a good man after all, according to the sublime speaker.

The new target is Amadou Ba, an old acquaintance.

They have been colleagues for a long time and Ousmane Sonko, from his position as a simple tax inspector, often ordered him to remain orthodox when the wandering hands of Amadou Ba, at the time Director General of Taxes and Estates, also his teacher at the Ena in his spare time, sought to line his own pockets.

Clearly, he missed the microphone, the cameras and the flashbulbs of the crowd of journalists drinking up his words; he is dressed like a nabob and adds up the bravado. The big, brightly-coloured boubou, the fez, the stentorian voice and the broad gestures give him a superb air. Even when he says something outrageous, his aplomb leaves no one in doubt.

Beside him, Bassirou Diomaye Faye looks a little drab in his little dark suit. With his quavering voice, even when he states the obvious, it’s questionable. He has the look of a survivor who has run out of nutritional supplements and the face of an intruder wondering what he can possibly be doing in this mess.

Dog’s life
Born in 1980, he is a product of the Catholic school system, where discipline, humility and effort are cultivated. He left his native Ndiaganiao with his Bfem, bound for the Demba Diop lycée in Mbour, after which he arrived in Dakar with his Bac in hand in 2000.

Since then, he has paced the corridors of the Taxes and Estates department, where his career has taken modest steps forward.

Read the column – A Quick Guide to Departure and Controlled Skidding…

He is clearly not someone who jumps stages or climbs stairs four by four. Nor is he the exhibitionist who presents his wives or children to the populace, as Ousmane Sonko does, so that public opinion is outraged by the injustices of Antoine Félix Diome’s police force and General Moussa Fall’s Maréchaussée.

We don’t know anything about BDF, really. So far, he’s kept to himself.

That’s why, when events thrust him into the limelight, despite himself, he fell like a hair in the electoral soup of this Presidential election.

First of all, when he insulted judges by comparing them to anthropophagi, everyone was flabbergasted: usually, he never has a word louder than the other. His rare TV appearances, at a time when the Pros is piling up the news, are to defend his mentor. He’s ready to swear on the Quran that Pros is the victim of a sordid plot.

He doesn’t talk anyone down, he tries to convince.

There’s no doubt about it, he’s not the kind of thunderbolt who can turn opinion upside down with shock formulas. When he launches into the campaign and the Pros deigns to let him have the microphone, his performances are more like those of the Mc who announces the star. The microphone and the cameras must not like him.

Diomaye is not Sonko. Even less Senghor…

By Ibou FALL

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE