By HAMADOU TIDIANE SY, NATION Correspondent
Last updated: 52 minutes ago
DAKAR, Tuesday

If he had wished to remain a hero in Senegal, as Nelson Mandela is across the continent, Mr Abdoulaye Wade, the octogenarian Senegalese president, could have followed the path of the old South African leader and put an end to his active political career in 2007, after the completion of his first term.

Though nothing legally opposed his candidacy, Mr Wade 82, was starting to lose a bit of its original popularity.

Instead, he decided to seek a second term and won a disputed victory in the February 2007 election. This left many questioning his democratic credentials, and the country’s democratic model as well.

Mr Ismaila Madior Fall, a law professor at the Dakar Cheikh Anta Diop University, says: ‘‘The idea of a Senegalese democratic model is a tiny bit of reality and a great deal of myth. After reflection on the past and current state of the country, the opposition and government are still at loggerheads over past and future electoral processes.’’

De facto president

Although accepting Mr Wade as the de facto president, the main opposition parties rejected his February 2007 victory and the legitimacy of his regime. The same opposition boycotted parliamentary elections in June of the same year.

Their argument then was: Taking part would mean endorsing the victory of the president and allowing the government to rig the votes again and proclaim its own victory at the assembly as it did with the presidency.

The presidential camp has been busy ever since rejecting these accusations, saying the vote was transparent and opposition members were bad losers, who could not accept defeat.

This traditional

Added to this traditional and somehow normal rift between power and opposition is the ongoing debate on who will succeed the octogenarian Wade. This debate is currently polluting the Senegalese political climate, and mostly Abdoulaye Wade’s own Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) which he founded in 1974 and which took him to power in 2000, at the head of a strong coalition.

Partly due to the age of the president, tough internal fights are taking place within the ruling party, where too many candidates, including Mr Karim Wade, the son of the president, are queuing for top posts.

Recently the chairman of the national assembly, Mr Makcy Sall, a member of the ruling party, viewed as a serious contender and a serious rival of the president’s son in the battle for succession, nearly lost his seat in parliament after some of his fellow party members tried to unseat him.
Mr Sall resisted and has momentarily succeeded in keeping his position in parliament, but for how long?

Prior to this attempt to evict him from the chairmanship of the national assembly, the same fellow party members have managed, successfully this time, to seriously weaken him by lowering his rank in the party’s hierarchy where Mr Sall used to be, until last October, the deputy Secretary General behind the president. He is not on the post anymore.

This fight for the succession has been made even more ferocious now that Mr Wade is constitutionally serving his last term at the president.

All these developments have put the spotlight on the Senegalese leader himself and his style of governance, urging some analysts to start questioning the credentials of a man who used to say: “I don’t want to access the presidency walking on corpses.”

This was long before he came to power. Now many of his critics and some of his former allies say they hardly recognise the man depicted all over Africa as a symbol of the fight for peaceful and democratic change.

When he came to power in 2000 after 26 years in civilian opposition, Mr Wade was then hailed as a great leader.

He was carrying with him hopes for change after 40 years of rule by the Socialists Party, the PS, which led the country to independence. Currently, the most visible sign of disillusionment with Mr Wade is the opposition demand for a more transparent electoral process before this year’s municipal and local polls, an issue the Senegalese thought they had resolved way back in 2000 when the incumbent Abdou Diouf accepted a fair electoral process and conceded defeat. He handed over power peacefully to Mr Wade.

In 2007, the “easy” 58 per cent win by Mr Wade in the first round instilled doubts and complicated things to quickly turn his triumph into a sour victory, as none of the major parties have until now congratulated him for his re-election nor accepted his legitimacy.

Though the opposition did not call for any violent protests and the citizens did not take to the streets, all major parties started a campaign against the elderly Senegalese ruler.

However, despite the split between the opposition and the elected government, the most serious tensions are within the heart of the regime itself where the battle for succession and the open defiance expressed by the chairman of the national assembly to the president have led to an open rivalry, prompting civil society organisations to ring the alarm bell.

“We have reached worrying levels in the escalation and this is a serious matter of concern,” said Mr Alioune Tine, speaking on behalf of a coalition on 13 civil society organisations. The civil society activist was speaking to the media after a meeting with the chairman of the national assembly.

These organisations decided early in January to meet both parties (the president and the chairman of the national assembly) to prevent “civil unrest”. Mr Sall accepted to meet them and told them he is a victim, while the presidency cancelled at the last minute a meeting scheduled with the same organisations.

“The current political crisis could easily lead to civil unrest if no preventive measures are taken,” said Mr Tine.
He warned his countrymen that what happened in Kenya or in other West African countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Côte d‘Ivoire could as well happen in Senegal. He was referring to the Kenya’s current violent political crisis and to the long civil wars which crippled the three West African countries he mentioned.

In Senegal, by deciding not to “congratulate” the winner or to concede defeat, the major opposition parties have shown that in Africa democratic achievements are still very frail.

Their decision to boycott the parliamentary poll has also weakened the country’s institutions and paved the way to a comfortable majority for Mr Wade and his allies at the assembly.

The easy win turned into a sour victory, as suddenly, Mr Wade, a formerly a popular opposition leader and democracy fighter was accused of rigging the votes and stealing or buying votes, seriously tarnishing the country’s image.

Important to note, however, is that neither the political deadlock over the succession battle nor the lack of dialogue between the government and the opposition have caused any violence so far.

On the contrary, impoverished citizens in search of survival, weary workers, angry and unemployed youth, who have started getting impatient, are the major threat the regime has to face, as they grow more and more vocal by the day in their criticism of Mr Wade and his style of government.

To meet both parties

On November 21 and 22, Dakar woke up to witness very violent street protests led by vendors opposing a government decision to remove them from the streets.

Most of the protesters are youngsters who cannot find jobs and who survive from selling petty items or people from the rural areas where decent life has become impossible.

It is generally believed they are the same ones who voted for Mr Wade in 2000.

The local media depicted the November riots as “among the worst ever” in the country’s recent history, and the “most violent incidents” in the past two decades, prompting the government to rescind its decision.

This was among the most serious setbacks for the president since he came to power, and the situation created allowed his opponents to unleash all sorts of criticism against his liberal policies, his unmet promises and his desire to install a Wade dynasty in the country, formerly viewed and hailed as a beacon of democracy in an unstable West African region