Senegal: heart patients, emigrate! The foundations of the Republic have been shaking ever since the current Head of State, Macky Sall, announced the postponement of the election in his most solemn tone and most serious countenance. But now two returnees from the limbo of recent political history have come to remind us of their fate…

In a co-signed letter, the two former presidents of the Republic, Abdou Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade, call on us all to keep our cool, show good manners, restraint, republican spirit and patriotism. They are speaking to us ordinary Senegalese, most of whom are young people described as unhealthy by one, and whom the other has educated to confront the forces of law and order, teaching them how to throw tear gas back at the police when they are not blowing up cars to obtain their release.

This is yet another ‘Senegalese’ act by these duettists, whose sordid companionship goes back a long way and is rooted in occasions that history will no doubt never reveal.

Admittedly, the country is in a very bad shape.

Internationally, our friends in the Western world, who consider Senegal to be the most democratic country in the tropics, are raising their eyebrows.

The US State Department, that eternal virgin, is outraged at the flagrant violations of the principles of good democracy. In a country with the death penalty, where carrying a firearm is institutionalised and where a Negro gets a stray bullet if he reaches into his pockets too suddenly, it is intolerable that a country as poor as ours should have the audacity to violate its Constitution so casually.

As for the European Union, which already fails to understand why a civilised country should take offence at homosexuals strolling down the boulevards arm in arm, exchanging full-mouthed kisses, it is outraged that these savages should also allow themselves to miss an electoral date.

What can we say about ECOWAS’s indignation? Its member countries are already finding it hard to swallow the Senegalese, whom they regard as intruders: a genuine African country has in its pedigree at least two bloody coups d’état and a nice putsch, for the principle, without too much bloodshed. Just jubilant crowds, soldiers on tanks and martial songs that get the midinettes all excited.

Senegal, which is not an African country, just one located in Africa, has been slow to take the plunge. It’s annoying. Come on, now: move on! Couldn’t we have some obtuse sergeant, like Dadis Camara, with his vernacular intonations and sparse vocabulary, who would devote himself to authenticating our negro attitude?

Macky Sall, let’s face it, is heading in the right direction, since he’s opening the way to adventure. But that’s not enough. He should take the plunge and answer the call of the abyss with more courage if he wants to earn his place on the endless list of African heads of state whose deed evoke crushing tears on our jowls.

It’s not Senegalese, but very West African.

A real revolution, with insurgents snarling and screaming, a delirious mob burning everything in its path and, in the end, officers’ quarters taking up residence in the Palace of the Republic after having dislodged the occupier.

The first step these misfits would take, after suspending the Constitution, is to put an end to Republican waste, including astronomical presidential pensions and the maintenance costs that go with them.

Political Détente: Diouf and Wade’s Appeal

This would be enough to revive the spirits of bedridden pensioners who, until now, thought they could live out their days in peace and quiet, while their children and grandchildren would be living high on the hog, in keeping with family standards. Follow my lead…

In another world, we’d be exclaiming, « Holy mackerel!

And so, these fine gentlemen, Diouf and Wade, with their finest pens, who can see the lean times ahead if the Republic tips over into palace revolution, make an appeal to reason, after having reigned their folly for thirty-two years. 

Want to rewind?

At the beginning of the seventies, while Senghor held the helm with an iron fist in a velvet glove, he was surrounded by a flock of ambitious young people whose dreams of glory did not go beyond the glory of taking the place of the white man.

Abdou Diouf, a graduate of the Enfom, where you are taught the art of subduing the Negro by obeying the white man, is top of the class.

Two metres tall, but not a hair shorter than the other. He knows how to bend over backwards, draw in his neck and shave the walls when necessary. When he’s asked to pose next to the rather short-legged President, he takes two steps back so that the contrast in height doesn’t overshadow the President.

Courtesanship is an art.

This reassured the republican autocrat, whose two-headedness with Mamadou Dia was a source of irritation since the « events of 1962 ».

In those years, public finances were too serious to be entrusted to the negro. André Peytavin, a veterinary surgeon and progressive activist who preferred Senegalese nationality to French at the time of independence, was the first Finance Minister.

He died without warning in 1964.

After a short interlude, Daniel Cabou, his successor, became a lawyer and economist, also a pure Enfom product.

All this was before Jean Collin landed there.

Bathroom break.

He stayed on until 1971. Despite the blows of ambitious young people who wanted his head and his place, the main argument being their skin colour.

When it’s time to choose, a few heads emerge.

Babacar Bâ, who graduated from the Enfom and had the misfortune to be Mamadou Dia’s Director of Cabinet, stood out from the crowd. In 1948, he passed his baccalaureate at the age of eighteen, while his contemporaries passed at twenty-two or even thirty.

Nothing to do with the slow careers of the other contenders, including a certain Abdoulaye Wade.

Babacar Bâ has that little something, the panache, perhaps, that nobility imposes on you in spite of yourself. His mission: to create a national bourgeoisie that will take back our economy from the hands of the coloniser. On Fridays, when Babacar Bâ leaves the Soumbédioune cemetery at dawn, he is obliged to attend the audiences that the Senegalese people urgently demand of him. His legend animated the business world and he became a myth in the groundnut basin.

It was no doubt at this point that Abdou Diouf, a Prime Minister of no great stature, and Abdoulaye Wade, a jurist, economist and lawyer, entered the picture as Finance Minister after having worked so hard to ensure that the economy and finance were entrusted to a good-natured Negro.

Senghor preferred Babacar Bâ.

Abdou Diouf and Wade will never tell us the extent of their complicity. The creation of a Labour « contribution party », the Pds, to support the progressives of the Ups, especially on the economic front, came at exactly the right time. When Wade met Senghor in Mogadishu to obtain authorisation to create his party, he had the Prime Minister’s blessing.

Just as well, the whole world was waiting for the creation of a civilised opposition party in Africa…

As chance would have it, it was in Babacar Bâ’s fiefdom, the groundnut basin, with Ahmed Khalifa Niasse at the helm, that the first congress of the Pds was held.

In those days, ballot box stuffing was the norm. When Senghor wanted it, the ballot boxes showed 100% of the votes. When Wade and his Pds arrived, oh miracle, they were able to form a parliamentary group in the Assembly, with eighteen members.

Fara Ndiaye, the number two in the Pds, was an old friend of Diouf’s since the late fifties. At the time, they stayed in the same university residence in France. The icing on the cake is that Fara Ndiaye’s brother-in-law is a fellow student of Diouf. Doesn’t that help?

They talk to each other at night, like good Africans, as a dry French editorialist would say. Diouf himself says so in his autobiography.

To finance the Pds, a consultancy firm was set up, co-directed by Fara Ndiaye and Habib Diagne, said to be close to Abdou Diouf. Letters of recommendation from the Senegalese government opened up contracts with a number of African countries.

Postponement of the Presidential Election: Abdou Diouf Backtracks

Politics is not just about making money, it’s also about damaging your adversaries…

While Abdoulaye Wade was denouncing the economic scandal that was Oncad, the engine of the economy in the groundnut basin, Babacar Bâ’s stronghold, Abdou Diouf was demolishing the financing mechanism of the local bourgeoisie by closing the famous « K2 Account » at the Bnds, which gave Babacar Bâ more power than he was entitled to.

Moustapha Niasse and Djibo Kâ, who surrounded Senghor under the thumb of Jean Collin, devoted themselves to causing a short-circuit between the President and his Finance Minister. Even his cousin, Serigne Ndiaye Bouna, got involved by creating the famous « Japanese car scandal », claiming that Babacar Bâ, Finance Minister, was protecting French multinationals by banning the import of Japanese cars.

A « scandal » revealed by the only private newspaper at the time, Le Politicien…

All these brave citizens did so much that Senghor’s darling fell from grace. He was first moved to Foreign Affairs before an incident removed him from the list of government members. Compliments of Jean Collin and Abdou Diouf.

The coast is clear.

When Diouf replaced Senghor, Collin was certainly in the front row, but Wade had no doubt that he had his share of the spoils waiting for him. Diouf was no political animal and he thought he could make mincemeat of him in the first elections to come.

In 1983, surprise, surprise, it was Diouf who won…

It was at this point that the friendly opposition party that emerged from the « contribution party » began to change. The style changed. The extremism of Wade, who was obsessed with winning power since Diouf had occupied the Palace, frightened his lieutenants, who left him one after the other.

In 1988, when the Pds attacked, it was an army of no-pants supplemented by a trio of bombers.

The State is Jean Collin.

We had to get rid of him in 1990, so that Diouf and Wade could finally meet face to face. So that there could be the « Consensual Electoral Code » piloted by Kéba Mbaye, then the « Enlarged Majority Government » where our two thieves would think they were having a fair go of it…

In addition to the failure of education and citizenship, a « blank » school year, the assassination of a constitutional judge, several curfews, humanity’s biggest shipwreck, a culture of denial and compromise, political vandalism and a conception of the public good that is content to hold on to power or win it just to enjoy its privileges.

In the meantime, that is thirty-two years in power if we add up the years of glory of our duettists, the ‘unhealthy youth’ has produced offspring who have become looters and murderers.  With the compliments of Misters Diouf and Wade…

By Ibou FALL