Sénégal on Fire

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Macky Sall — Sénégal’s outgoing president (Inshallah) — has played one Trump card after another over the past year, as he’s tried to retain power. Sall got brazen about his contempt for his country’s democratic process a couple years ago when he started hinting broadly that he would run for a 3rd term, though that’s illegal under Sénégal’s Constitution which only allows a president two terms in office. He prepped for what he assumed would be his permanent ascendancy by defaming and jailing his main political opponent, a young firebrand named Ousmane Sonko who’s been exposing corruption among Sénégal’s political class for more than a decade.[1] When Sonko and his partisans refused to fade out quietly, Sall came out as a petty Big Man trashing the country’s (relatively) free press, unleashing violence against protestors and conflating democratic dissent with Islamist terror.

Sall grasped (slowly) that a third term was not doable, but he’s still scrambling to maintain power. Money is (as ever) in the equation. Senegal seems to be on the verge of a natural gas boom:

Sénégal’s offshore blocks hold some of the largest untapped reserves of natural gas in the world and are set to propel economic growth from early next decade.

But they have caused controversy ever since they were first awarded in January 2012 to a company called Petro-Tim that had no experience in the energy industry and only a few thousand dollars to its name, according to company records seen by Reuters.[2]

That first deal was overseen by Sall’s brother, Aliou, who resigned in 2019 from his government post when word got out that he’d taken a $250,000 bribe from Petro-Tim. The Sall fam, in Trumpish mode, have no shame about emoluments, though Brother Aliou seems to have aimed low like Dr. Evil back in the day. He pitches himself as a master of “resource mobilization” on his linked-in page, which hasn’t been updated to reflect his exit from the national government.[3] (Note the switches from l’etat-c’est-moi third person to first person bluster):

Initiator of many resource mobilization operations with financial institutions such as China Exim Bank, AFD or BOAD, Aliou SALL, has built a proven experience in interactions between states and funders.  As the current Head of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations Group, the largest issuer of public investments in the country, I’m in charge of the administration of several subsidiaries including the airline company Air Sénégal SA, a 25-MW solar plant, a pharmaceutical factory and a real estate company, in addition to his position as a Managing Director, I have excellent communication skills, both written and oral. I’m a natural leader, a hard worker and passionate about large-scale projects.

Why should you care about natural operators eating up resources Over There or quarrels in a faraway country between people of whom you know nothing? My hope is that once you’ve been brought near the brutality that’s gone down under Macky Sall’s aegis (see below) you won’t be able to turn away. New Yorkers, in particular, owe the Senegalese since our city made Trump and attention must be paid to how his foul example defiles the world from D.C. to Dakar. What counts even more, though, is The Democracy that’s risen up in resistance to West Africa’s black Don.

Early in February, Sall, with his punks in the country’s National Assembly — and police who forcefully removed opposition lawmakers from the chamber before the vote — canceled the country’s presidential election that had been scheduled for February 25th. April 2nd was supposed to be Sall’s last day in office, but the new decree would’ve let him stay on until mid-December, organizing (i.e. subverting) the electoral process to ensure one of his minions would win. Protestors hit the streets last month — despite an information blackout since Sall had shut down the internet — insisting on voters’ right to choose their country’s ruler. Three Senegalese were shot and killed during demonstrations sparked by Sall’s decree. Here’s a short clip of one of them being rushed to the hospital (where he died) by his friends who scream curses at Sall’s mother.

The seven judges of Sénégal’s Constitutional Council talked back to Sall in more genteel tones when they ruled on February 15 that Sall’s (et al.’s) edicts were unconstitutional. They “invited the competent authorities to hold [the election] as soon as possible.” Sall has backed down but he’s not giving up. He’s conceded he will leave office on April 2nd and is now averring Sénégal will hold elections before the rainy season in late summer. No doubt he will try on more electoral trickery. His failure to come up with a feasible caretaker-candidate, who will do his bidding, has him nosing around to see if he might find a corruptible political foe who’ll crawl across smashed glass to make a deal. (He probably has his eyes on Karim Wade, the son of the man who was president before Sall. Wade seems like he might be ready to sell out, though he’s been a longtime rival of Sall who exiled him in 2016 after imprisoning him for a stretch.)[4]

As Sall mulls his next move, he’s proposing a national “amnesty.” Said amnesty would not extend to his main opponent Sonko, who remains in jail. It seems meant to set terms of engagement that will enable Sall and his crew to slip accountability for their crimes.

The day after Sall talked up virtues of forbearance, journalist Pape Alé Niang — who has carefully and courageously monitored his country’s slide from democratic norms toward bully-boy politics — tweeted.

Just the thought of an amnesty law shows that too much harm has been done in this country with total impunity. The problem is not the liberation of the inmates, but you have the feeling that you have had abominable monsters in front of you at some point in history. 

His tweet came with the following cell phone footage of those monsters at work.  (It takes a few seconds before the clips kick in, but the victims deserve your patience.)
 

Niang, who runs the independent news site DARKARMATIN, spent most of 2023 in jail (where he went on a hunger strike) after exposing documents that proved Sall’s officials knew charges against candidate Sonko were based on false testimony. Niang got out of jail in August. Per the Committee to Protect Journalists (last summer):

The release of journalist Pape Alé Niang is a relief, but Senegalese authorities should never have arrested or charged him in the first place. The cases against him should be dropped and journalist Maty Sarr Niang, who was arrested in May, should also be released,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa Program Coordinator, from Durban, South Africa. “Senegal was once a beacon of press freedom in West Africa, but that light is being snuffed by the repeated jailing and harassment of journalists.”

Resistance to Sall has gone international. Juan Branco — Spanish-French Assange-ist and self-styled legal-eagle for dissidents — has been helpful to Sénégal’s democrats. He has represented Sonko in Senegalese courts and used his website/twitter feed to gather evidence of Sall et al.’s abuses. While Branco’s line that current Western democracies are no more than autocratic oligarchies is dangerous nonsense at a time when united fronts must resist the Fascist International, Sénégal is, on the real side (not just in Branco’s self-enrapt fantasies) a place where a reprehensible ruler is at war with representative men and women.

I’ve been struck by the willful cluelessness of certain experts and journos in America and France who have implied that Sall has been a good steward who only recently succumbed to temptations of absolutism. There was a pip of a piece last month in Le Monde  [5]. The hack who composed this ode to Sall’s “Twilight Moment” (Jesu!) credited him with “uncommon political acumen,” before submitting that the “aura” of the man “who, until recently, was negotiating on behalf of Africa with Vladimir Putin[6] and Volodymyr Zelensky, went far beyond the borders of his country, as did his reputation as a great tactician.”

But Sall has never played three-dimensional chess. He’s always been a clunky (Trumpy) autocrat. Check the following video — you won’t need much French to comprehend it — and you’ll get a sense of how Sall’s power-moves have turned previously apolitical Senegalese youth into committed opponents of his regime. A young man tells how he remained in prison for months after security forces arrested him for being near an anti-Sall demonstration that he’d had no intention of attending. Now, however, if there’s a “manifestation,” “je vais m’y mettre 100%!” — “I’m on it 100 percent!”

Rapper Nitdoff has long been giving 100% to the anti-Sall cause. Videos like this one have led to him being thrown in jail. (His callouts make him a brother to rappers in Iran who have dared to speak truth to their country’s vile regime.)

This little YouTube video of Nitdoff’s recent release (from jail)-party is moving because you can almost feel freedom in the night air. Most of the video’s YT comments are in French or Wolof but “C’la Dictature” has come through to at least one English-speaker in the roster: “Those are the real hardcore rappers not those sell outs sitting on the corner talking shit.” The video centers Nitdoff’s celebrants. The rapper looks a little wiped out but he’s also content to be vector for voices of his people, and not simply his age-cohort. The older lady[7] at the end steals the vid…

Sall’s power-mongering has incited protests in the Diaspora as well as at home. Senegalese in New York City have organized protests that embarrassed Sall — and enraged his allies — when he came to the U.N. last fall. These resistants have been teaching themselves how to make history. It hasn’t been easy-peasy as NYC’s anti-Sall task force didn’t know the ropes when it came to lobbying D.C. players. One recent success was no success at all as they got Robert Menendez — venal Senator from New Jersey (and Egypt) — to publicly condemn Sall. Ten days ago, though, they managed to slip a respondent into a U.S. State Department briefing who got the spokesman there to confirm that America’s “extremely concerned” Secretary of State had called Sall, telling him Sénégal needed to hold elections as soon as possible. (You can watch the Department’s Mathew Miller hold forth below.)

My guess is that Blinken might’ve preferred to let the French go first on this front (as Sénégal is seen to be in a francophone “sphere of influence”), but Sens from New York helped force this issue on to the Biden Administration’s public plate. Macron has tried to avoid condemning Sall who’s remained an ally as the French have lost face in one West African country after another over the past year. I’m not sure what’s behind Macron’s political calculations, but he made a bad bet when he chose to cozy up to Sall last fall, naming him “Special Envoy and President of the Monitoring Committee of the Paris Pact for the Planet and the People.” It will be hard for Macron to ignore Sall’s most recent gambits which have drawn mockery[8] from French cartoonists…

 

I’ve been a witness (on the side of the margins) as Sens have acted up in NYC. My wife has been mobilized over the past year. Democracy in action is uplifting and when it’s familial…

I’ve been thrilled to watch my wife and her sisterly comrades think their way forward, their confidence growing as they act on their own imperatives.[9] Their progress reminds me of scenes in God’s Bits of Wood (1960) — Ousmane Sembene’s novel about a railroad strike in colonial Sénégal in the 1940s. Sembene depicts how the strike prompts changes in the consciousness of the strikers themselves and their wives whose contributions to the struggle become crucial. These indispensable women (per one summary of the novel) “go from merely standing behind the men to walking alongside them and eventually marching ahead of them.”[10]

A cross-section of Senegalese immigrants have united to fight the would-be dictator but certain class sectors seem to have stayed out of the fight. The most marginal Senegalese immigrants — unmarried women without English language skills who tend to work in hair-braiding salons and undocumented young men stuck in the illegal economy — have tended to recuse themselves along with the most bourgeois Sens. (Sad to say, but the proprietor of one of New York City’s most stylish Senegalese restaurants has been a no-show.) It’s people of middling means who have been at the heart of this movement of Jah People.

They’re steady fighters not bloody-minded floaters. You can learn plenty from them if you mean to heal the world rather than paraglide into a future of apocalyptic violence. Free Sénégal!

Notes

1…

2 Senegal President’s brother resigns after allegations of energy fraud | Reuters

3 When Salls aren’t coming on from above, they whine. Aliou complained that journalists who exposed his corruption were out to “dehumanise” him.

4 Karim Wade has been living in Qatar since 2016 and has been something less than a profile in courage as his country has gone to hell.

5 President Macky Sall’s twilight moment (lemonde.fr)

6 When it comes to Putin, by the way, game recognizes game. Sall may be chiefly concerned with making sure he maintains luke-warm relations with France, the E.U. and America, but he also sucks up to Putin (who has recently trumpeted Russia’s good relations with Sénégal). Sénégal abstained from the UN vote in 2022 demanding that Russia “unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine” just as it did back in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.

7 Sénégal’s older generation of musicians have tended to pass on this struggle. Youssou N’Dour, for example, hasn’t simply been M.I.A., he’s been aligned with Sall for years.

8 Sens have been mocking Macky Sall for years. They are a polite people, though, so they would not call attention to how the figure of Sall’s son seems to embody his family’s appetites. Maybe I’m a wicked messenger but I’ve been in-country a few times and I’ve gone many miles and days without seeing a Senegalese guy with more than a suggestion of girth. (They really do tend to run long and lean.) It’s true I didn’t attend wrestling matches with bulked up laamb fighters but, even still, Sall’s son takes the beignet…

 

9

Sister-Sens feeling their power.

10 My own favorite scene in God’s Bits of Wood comes when the soul of the union convinces his comrades not to beat up a strikebreaker. Instead, he proposes they put the scab on trial and publicly shame him rather than physically abuse him.  The Union man sets out to educate himself about how his side might hold a trial. His wife tells her friends she’s worried about her husband: “He stayed up all night with a book.”

I’ve been staying up, scrolling around the internet in search of decent reporting in English on Sénégal’s crisis. (While my wife is a good steerer on this score, she tends to be locked on reporting in Wolof or French.) The following web-dispatch is pretty good, though the notion Sénégal might be returning to “civility” soonish seems iffy. And when you’re in an argument with a thug, there are things more important than civility.