The Senegalese public and our technical and financial partners are now fully aware of this! The governance of the Diomaye-Sonko tandem will be based, as it were, on the Senegal Emerging Plan (Pse). They finally admitted to their electors that they had no government program, contrary to their most glittering election promises. When you reread Ousmane Sonko’s shock statements criticizing the Pse at a time when Macky Sall and his teams were extolling its merits, you come across phrases like: “The Pse is a sham”, “the Pse is everything except a plan of emergence”, “the Pse is a hoax”, “the Pse is the Senegal Debt Plan”, among others; all to the cheers of excited crowds of militants. The Pastef leaders promised to replace the Pse with their “Project”, the sesame that would open wide the doors to economic and social development. This miracle was so precious that it had to be hidden from curious eyes, the better to preserve it, protect it from the evil eye and only take it out of its case on the evening of the electoral victory. 

In the twittosphere and on Facebook, and even on television, radio and newspaper columns, we saw intellectuals’ plebiscite and defend the “Project” tooth and nail, with so many arguments, that we ended up considering them to be the authors of this “Project”. The existence of the “Project” was obvious to everyone; it populated our daily lives. Yet no one had ever seen it. When we were curious enough to ask to see the “Project”, we were rebuffed by certain contemptuous people. Major intellectuals, as well as less qualified citizens, believed in this Arlesienne. 

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Politics in Senegal is a place where fantasies become certainties. Journalists, who relayed the great ideas of the virtual “Project”, have also committed hara-kiri. I invite you to reread some of the posts, and their authors must be in awe when the government announces, without batting an eyelid, in the communiqué of the Council of Ministers of April 24, 2024, that the drafting of the “Projet”, as the new frame of reference for Senegal’s economic and social policy, is about to get underway and that finalization is expected for the last quarter of 2024.

The “Project” was drawn up by experts appointed by a Minister of the Economy, Finance and Planning named Amadou Ba, under Macky Sall, to draw up the Pse. The same people were called in by a Prime Minister named Amadou Ba, to draw up the Priority Action Program (Pap3 of the same Pse). What new thing will they then do?

Diomaye and Sonko do Macky, without Macky and his people!

The ordeal of the “Project lawyers” is made even worse when they learn that the government has decided to continue with the Pse actions and accepts the program signed by Macky Sall’s government with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), covering the period 2023-2026, and that the conditions will be respected (see IMF press release of May 3, 2024). In other words, when Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Ousmane Sonko want to innovate, change things, make a break, it will be at the end of the five-year term. Those who voted for the rupture or for “degagisme” will appreciate! We dare to hope that the new Minister of the Economy, Planning and Cooperation, Abdourahmane Sarr, was not recruited on the basis of his caustic and acerbic contributions against the Pse, and for his wild theories on the introduction of a new currency.

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Finally, the Pse is a good program (Council of Ministers, April 17, 2024). Finally, the policy of family scholarships and a unique National Register (Rnu) of poor and vulnerable households (Council of Ministers, April 24, 2024) is an excellent find.

Finally, the government endorses the Bus Rapid Transit (Brt) project (Council of Ministers, May 2, 2024) and road infrastructure. Finally, it considers the Rosso Bridge, linking Senegal to Mauritania, to be a structural investment (President Faye’s visit to Mauritania on April 19, 2024). Finally, investments in water, health, education, transport, Dakar Dem Dikk and air transport, as well as the 100,000 Housing Program, among others, are recognized as appropriate and relevant. Finally, at the close of the May 3, 2024 inter-ministerial council meeting on the agricultural campaign, the government is to pursue the same policy in the sector. The Army will distribute seeds and fertilizers. We hope that the military will be more virtuous than other Senegalese. The Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Security, Mabouba Diagne, has taken it upon himself to distribute tractors and other agricultural equipment acquired by the deposed regime. Where will the break be?

Public Policy: Faye on Sall’s Tracks

The men and women who were in charge of implementing the Pse will change and give way to other eggheads, those who have not thought through the policy, or written the Pse they will have to implement! Those who had done the work and achieved some successes are nincompoops, corrupt, losers and thieves. It’s the human resources that will have to be changed, “cleared out”, to use their violent or muscular rhetoric. However, as if to thumb its nose at them, the IMF, at the end of its Mission last week, lavished praise on the outgoing team. The press release states that the Senegalese government (needless to say, it was headed by the unsuccessful candidate Amadou Ba, who wanted to be a kind of continuity candidate) “has shown itself to be resilient” in 2023. The IMF adds that the installation of the new government team was facilitated by the timely establishment of “cash reserves of over 320 billion francs”. We then learned that the coffers were not as empty as the Minister of Finance and Budget, Cheikh Diba, had wanted people to believe. The paradox was that Bassirou Diomaye Faye, elected on the promise of a break with continuity as advocated by candidate Amadou Ba, ended up being the President of the continuity that voters had rejected. They are so converted to the Pse that one comment, deriding the situation, renamed the Pse “Emerging Sonko Plan”.

Since you will deny later, why not deny now?”

They came to power unprepared. They took the reins of Senegal with their hands in their pockets. What can we do? Continue what was already being done, and then renege on all their commitments and promises. The great promise to reduce the cost of living will be postponed to the calendars of Kayor. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye seems to have found an excuse for the difficulties of lowering the cost of living. At the Daaka in Médina Gounass, a Muslim religious event, he pointed out that the upheavals and tensions on the international scene are handicaps for a country like Senegal, as they increase the cost of imports. In addition, the IMF demanded and obtained that the government continue to reduce, if not eliminate, subsidies on basic foodstuffs and energy. In particular, the international financial institution noted “high expenditure on energy subsidies (620 billion CFA francs, or 3.3% of GDP)”. The only concession left to Ousmane Sonko and his team is perhaps to play on the electricity billing bands. In less esoteric terms, the government will be able to work on Senelec’s tariff grids to lower the price per kilowatt hour for the bands concerning the most disadvantaged social strata (around 1,150,000 households paying monthly bills of less than 15,000 francs), but that this reduction will be passed on to the bills of relatively better-off consumers.

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The IMF will return in June to assess Senegal’s compliance with its commitments, before disbursing the second tranche of loans totalling 1,150 billion francs in July 2024. Here too, government authorities will have to renege on their promises to renounce debt.  In opposition, they criticized the sinister IMF, blamed for all Senegal’s wrongs. “The new authorities have reaffirmed their commitment to pursuing the current IMF-supported program. They recognize that the main pillars of the program are aligned with their own strategic objectives.” To think that they had also criticized the policy of indebtedness to finance projects! Diomaye and Sonko, once in power, find themselves seeking and obtaining the IMF’s backing to go to the international markets to raise large amounts of financing to profile the already existing debt, through efforts to “reduce its vulnerability”, in order to remain in the situation of a “country with moderate-risk debt”. The principle is well known: they will increase the amount of debt outstanding by lowering debt servicing costs. The result? They will continue to drive the country deeper into debt. They were told that Senegal’s economy does not have the capacity to generate domestic revenues of 15 trillion CFA francs, as the leader of Pastef proclaimed in his populist flights of fancy.

The right touch for Pse reforms

With a view to continuous improvement up to the 2035 timeframe of the Pse, the government will be able to introduce greater transparency and good governance into project management. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s contribution to the implementation of the Pse will undoubtedly be to lead the series of reforms planned for public governance. At the December 2018 Consultative Group meeting in Paris, President Macky Sall pledged to carry out reforms expected by partners, but which he will put under the bushel in the wake of the 2019 Presidential election. Reforms in the areas of justice, central administration, such as the digitization of procedures, the energy sector, agriculture and taxation. The General Tax Code, already ten years old, is in need of revision. Reforms in the energy sector were also included in the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), while transparency and rationalization of spending in the agricultural sector were included in agreements with the World Bank, when Louise Cord was the institution’s representative in Senegal.

 

In any case, the promise of systemic change will have to wait! Indeed, it was noted that the commitment to call for applications to fill strategic national jobs was not realistic either. However, the government still has a way of partially fulfilling this promise. This is to proceed in the same way for important positions in the central administration. Positions usually reserved exclusively for senior civil servants can be advertised. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, posts such as Director Generals of the Treasury, Customs and Tax departments are advertised. Those selected sign performance contracts and are evaluated on this basis. The practice of performance contracts has already started in Senegal. Already, the rectors and directors of some institutes in our universities, as well as the positions of general managers in certain public agencies, are filled by calls for candidates. But beyond all that, the question is why was a government with such a good program beaten to a pulp? This could be a good subject for a dissertation by a political science student.

By Madiambal DIAGNE / mdiagne@lequotidien.sn

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