Rédaction Africa Links 24 with pierre Dieme
Published on 2024-03-18 23:51:28
Usually, the Senegalese presidential election is held on the last Sunday of February in the last year of the current term. This year, it will finally take place four weeks late, after many twists and turns related to the outgoing president’s strong desire to delay the election. Does this reflect a panicked fear in the face of the twilight of the neocolonial oppressive system already undermined in neighboring countries?
While this unjustified postponement sparked a huge outcry internationally, it faced massive disapproval in our country, even if it was ultimately seen as the final straw in a series of violations of democratic norms and principles.
However, the National Conference of 2008-2009, in a remarkable exercise of political foresight whose conclusions President Macky Sall had eventually – or pretended to – agree to, had indicated, among other solutions, institutional restructuring, citizen emergence, and the attainment/completion of our political, economic, and monetary sovereignties.
Paradoxically, since the beginning of the second change of power, a heavy veil of silence has fallen over our country, establishing a weighty authoritarianism in the public life in general and the political scene in particular, attempting to turn the wheel of history backwards and bring us back to the era of Senghorian glaciation (even to that of colonial subjugation).
It has reached a point where extreme anti-democratic measures have been accepted. These include the prohibition for opposition political parties to access their headquarters for their regular meetings, the dissuasion of protests through systematic raids of passers-by on the streets, arbitrary arrests of supposed opposition militants in their homes, and the dissolution of the Pastef party, 60 years after that of the PAI….
If this strategy of subjugating citizens has been able to prosper, it is because the Benno-APR regime has manipulated institutions and criminalized political activity, culminating in a conspiracy against the Pastef leader identified as one of the main obstacles to the perpetuation of the neocolonial system. Laws have been perverted in such a way that terrorist-related offenses have been made vague and ambiguous, broadening the scope, notably Article 279-1, equating violent acts or assaults committed against people and destruction or damage during gatherings to terrorist acts. There were also offenses related to information and communication technologies. This liberty-restricting legislation will be strengthened, following the riots related to the Ousmane Sonko – Adji Sarr affair. In light of these reminders, one can better understand the Aperist regime’s obsession with creating and maintaining a tense atmosphere with a systematic ban on protests accompanied by a massive and thoughtless deployment of law enforcement followed by abusive use of force. With these pretexts and provocations, thousands of presumed innocent young people were interned without any proper investigation, without identifying any culprit for all these offenses resembling terrorist acts.
It must be acknowledged that faced with this unprecedented reduction in civic spaces, the capacities for demands, protests, and indignation have also decreased, with a tendency for large sectors of civil society and the press to play a balancing act, standing equidistant between the perpetrator and the victim. It is thus in an almost general indifference that the Benno-APR regime has maintained, as in 2019, the unfair citizen endorsement system as well as the judicial disqualification of political competitors and distorted our electoral process.
With the backing of security and judicial apparatus and brandishing the specter of alleged Salafist terrorism, President Macky Sall and the Benno-APR bigwigs believed they could take shortcuts and avoid their political responsibilities in a country with strong democratic traditions.
This explains the monumental political blunder of wanting to unjustly extend a term that has ended, sanctioned by two resounding rebukes from the supreme electoral judge, the constitutional council. Since then, there has been a disorderly retreat of the Benno-APR coalition, whose leader has become a “champion of national reconciliation,” the initiator of a “generous amnesty” voted on March 6, 2024, with a swiftness that raises questions about the unilateral decision-making mode at the highest levels of the state, which a certain left-wing faction pretends to have only discovered now.
In reality, the current president, excluded against his will from the upcoming electoral contests due to term limits and wary of the Mauritanian and Angolan examples, is securing his future. But he pretends to ignore that by guaranteeing impunity to his zealous collaborators, especially those guilty of serious and multiple violations of human rights, he affronts the families of the victims.
Electoral and sociologically in the minority, Benno-APR, its billionaire candidate, and their liberal, social-democratic, and ex-communist affiliates are no longer able to resist the deep popular aspiration for change and the long-awaited political alternative.
Read the original article(French) on Dakar Matin
