Thousands of people gathered in Dakar on Saturday, February 17 for a silent march to demand that the government uphold the election calendar. On Friday, Senegalese president Macky Sall had announced that he would abide by the Constitutional Council’s decision to organize elections in the country “as soon as possible.”
The declaration comes in the wake of days of protests against the postponement of the much-awaited polls, which saw deadly violence from state forces leading to the killing of three young people.
On February 15, the Constitutional Council, the country’s chief election authority, overturned a presidential decree that had postponed the presidential elections scheduled for February 25.
On February 3, President Macky Sall had revoked a November 26 decree that had set the date for the elections. On February 5, the National Assembly voted to adopt a law that would delay the polls till December 15, and have Macky Sall remain in office as president until his successor was chosen.
The seven judges of the Constitutional Council ruled on Thursday that both actions were unconstitutional. While noting the “impossibility” of holding the election on the initially announced date, barely 10 days away, the authority “invited the competent authorities to hold it as soon as possible.”
“The president of the Republic took note of this decision which falls within the framework of the normal jurisdictional mechanisms of democracy and the rule of law as enshrined in the Senegalese constitution. The president of the Republic intends to fully implement the decision of the Constitutional Council,” read an official statement issued on Friday.
Protests had broken out in different parts of the country by February 4. State forces responded with heavy violence including tear gas, as opposition parties and civil society groups decried a “constitutional coup” orchestrated by the president to extend his term in office. Over a dozen presidential candidates approached the Constitutional Council to challenge the delay.
Meanwhile, at least three people, including a 22-year-old university student and a 16-year-old child were killed during protests in Saint-Louis and Ziguinchor between February 9 and 10, the student’s killing prompting a strike across eight public universities. The funeral of the 16-year-old boy, identified as Landing Camara or Landing Diédhiou, was held this week, with huge crowds joining the procession and raising the country’s flag.
A 23-year-old street vendor was also killed in Guinaw-Rails in Dakar after he was shot in the stomach while trying to collect his wares, according to Amnesty International. At least 25 journalists were attacked and detained, including being targeted by the police using tear gas canisters. Dozens of people were arrested.
“The president is completely isolated in Senegal, even his allies abroad, in the west, including the former colonial power France was forced to issue a statement saying that the elections had to proceed,” Demba Moussa Dembélé, the director of the Forum for African Alternatives in Dakar, had told Peoples Dispatch ahead of the February 15 ruling.
The Constitutional Council further reaffirmed the “intangibility” of the five-year presidential term. Under the original political calendar, Sall’s mandate is set to expire on April 2, 12 years after he first assumed office in the 2012 election.
In its decision, the Council had noted that “the duration of the mandate of the President of the Republic cannot be reduced or extended according to political circumstances” and that the date of the election “cannot be postponed beyond the duration of the mandate.”
Under the provisions of the Senegalese Constitution — which state that an election must be held 45 days at most, and 30 days at least, before the expiration of the incumbent’s mandate — the election must be held on March 3, or latest by March 10, according to election experts.
After years of refusing to confirm that he would not contest in the 2024 polls, in line with the two-term limit set on the presidency in Senegal, it was only in July 2023 that Sall announced that he would not seek a third term. This was after several people had been killed in protests that had broken out in June against the imprisonment of opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko.
Sonko’s initial arrest in March 2021 had sparked five days of protests in the country, in which at least 14 people had been killed. Since then, an estimated 60 people have been killed in the protests against the political conditions in the country — without anyone being held accountable.
The unraveling of a manufactured crisis?
Meanwhile, on February 15, the government began releasing members of the opposition and civil society who had been in detention. According to the Collective of Families of Political Detainees, 156 people were released on Thursday, with a total of 500 people expected to be freed soon.
In a press conference held earlier this week, the collective had rejected the language of “amnesty” when it came to those imprisoned, stating that while the government had previously refused to even talk of political detainees, it was now using the very same language.
The families denounced Sall’s attempts to extend his mandate, even stating that their imprisoned children had been tortured after they protested the postponement of the elections within the jails. They have demanded an unconditional release of the reportedly 1,500 people who are in detention.
Among those released are members of Ousmane Sonko’s now dissolved African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics, and Fraternity (PASTEF) party, Pape Abdoulaye Touré, a member of FRAPP and F24 who had been arrested and subsequently tortured in custody in June 2023, as well as Aliou Sané, the coordinator of the Y’en a marre movement.
The movement had first emerged in 2011 to oppose the attempts by Sall’s predecessor, Abdoulaye Wade, to seek a third term. At the time, Macky Sall had been among the fiercest opponents of Wade’s actions, and went on to win the election to replace him.
While Wade ceded to public pressure and left office, “what Sall has done is worse — he used the democratic process to come to power but he is a dictator,” Dembélé said.
The Constitutional Council’s decision, and the President’s response to it, are particularly noteworthy given that it was on the basis of allegations of corruption raised against the Council that Sall had postponed the election.
The allegations themselves had been raised by the opposition Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), after its candidate, Karim Wade, the son of former president Wade, was excluded from the candidate list due to his dual French-Senegalese citizenship at the time of submitting his application.
The PDS then approached the National Assembly to vote to open a Commission of Inquiry into the Council, accusing two of its judges of corruption. While the opening of the investigation served as a basis to postpone the election, the Commission of Inquiry was itself “buried” after the public prosecutor opened a judicial investigation into the matter.
The February 5 vote to postpone the election to December 15 was passed with the support of the PDS and Sall’s ruling coalition, after 60 protesting MPs were forcibly removed from Parliament by the gendarmerie. Sall himself was a member of the PDS, even serving as prime minister under Wade, before running for the presidency in 2012.
“For the Senegalese people, this was a plot to postpone the election. The PDS wanted Karim Wade to be on the ballot, and Macky Sall wanted to postpone the polls and stay in office,” Dembélé said.
Meanwhile, amid reports of people being killed, the country’s former presidents and political opponents, Abdou Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade issued a joint statement calling on young people “to stop the violence and destruction of property,” “take a step back so as not to be manipulated by outside forces with obscure designs,” and calling on civil society and the opposition to participate in the dialogue.
However, despite having expressed support for the December 15 election date, Diouf issued a clarification the next day, stating that the Constitutional Council “remains the ultimate guarantor of our institutions and our democracy”.
“This letter was the initiative of the Presidential Palace, at a time when Sall was completely isolated, and unfortunately for them it backfired,” Dembélé said.
Civil society remains vigilant
While the president has now pledged to hold consultations to hold the elections “as soon as possible,” opposition leaders and activists remain vigilant. MP Guy Marius Sagna, who is one of the leaders of FRAPP and has been previously jailed under the Sall administration, stated that “The fight continues for a presidential election before April 2, the last day of the mandate of the putschist Macky Sall.”
He added that the presidential election needed to be secured, alleging that the electoral map had been inflated in places, comparing the departments of Matam and Dakar — “How can the Matam department have 18,515 new voters, when Dakar has only 21,775? How can the Matam department have 12% of new registrants when Dakar has only 3%?” He added that the electoral register must be made public.
Not only has the Sall administration faced accusations of instrumentalizing Senegal’s justice system to exclude political competitors, there have also been long-standing concerns over the exclusion of people from the electoral process altogether, what Senegalese economist and author, Ndongo Samba Sylla, and French journalist Fanny Pigeaud have called “electoral eugenics.”
Ahead of the parliamentary elections in 2022, “In April and May, it was announced that the electoral list would be revised, so people had about three weeks to register. But this period was not sufficient because the offices in charge of voter registration could only process about 300 requests per day, at best,” Sylla had told Peoples Dispatch in 2023.
“So by the end the voting status, including new registrations, of only about 300,000 people had changed, out of a potential 2.5 million voters.” he concluded, based on his calculations.
Read more | A deadly fight: Senegal’s political crisis escalates after repression of protesters
In fact, Sylla told AfriqueXXI, the number of voters in Dakar declined by 19,000 between 2012 and 2019, with the area representing 30% of the electorate. Meanwhile, in the Fouta region, which includes Matam and is reportedly favorable to Sall, voter growth increased by 153,000, while the area represented only 6% of the electorate.
Meanwhile, there is no certainty yet on the release of Ousmane Sonko, who has been in jail since July, or his party’s secretary general, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, whom the PASTEF leader had picked to replace him on the ballot after his candidacy was rejected by the Constitutional Council.
“The reason why Sall wants to postpone the election is because the candidate for his coalition, incumbent prime minister Amadou Ba, was headed for defeat. Bassirou Diomaye Faye was slated to win the election,” Dembélé said.
While PASTEF was declared dissolved by the government last year, coinciding with Sonko’s arrest and imprisonment, the former tax inspector has continued to draw support from the youth in a country where 75% of the population is under the age of 35.
“The youth support Sonko because he has presented a new kind of leadership, a course different from what we have had since the 1960, of the same neocolonial system. All presidents, from Léopold Sédar Senghor to Macky Sall, have been within this system,” Dembélé said.
For his part, Sonko positioned himself outside “the system,” speaking up against corruption and the misuse of public funds. The PASTEF party has espoused a Pan-Africanist rhetoric, with Sonko also calling for a “responsible exit” from the CFA Franc, the common currency used by 14 African countries and one of the most enduring pillars of French neocolonialism on the continent.
While Sonko’s arrests since 2021, coupled with Sall’s refusal to confirm that he would step down at the end of his term, had sparked public protests, the anger of the people was also directed at French-owned businesses, with protestors targeting gas stations operated by Total Energies, Auchan supermarkets, and the Orange telecommunications company.
Sonko called for further scrutiny of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) signed between Senegal and the European Union, and the alleged preferential treatment by the Sall administration in the allocation of petroleum and gas exploration contracts following the discovery of massive reserves in recent years.
At the same time, “Among the biggest failures of the administration has been the inability to resolve the crisis of youth unemployment. One of the reasons was that there was no long-term strategy to deal with unemployment. On the other hand, even if a government wants to implement changes, macroeconomic policies are ultimately dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank,” Dembélé said.
“There has existed a transnational class alliance between the interests of the private sector and the political leaders — to the detriment of the ordinary citizens,” said Dr. Rama Salla Dieng, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Dembélé said further, “The people are fed up with the neocolonial system, of its economic, social and political failure. We are fed up with the IMF and World Bank dictating economic and social policies that have failed and have brought misery on our people.”
With the coming weeks now crucial to watch, “The issue of recovering our sovereignty is at the top of our agenda— our sovereignty over our resources, instead of leaving them to the multinational corporations to plunder, sovereignty over our policies to be able to determine our own path to development, and importantly, sovereignty over our political system.”
