Senegal’s democracy imperiled by unfreedoms, By Omoniyi Ibietan

Senegal has been on fire because President Macky Sall’s regime is taking democracy for granted. Now the Internet is shutdown, largely because Mr. Sall wants to stop the young people’s access to the social media as a measure to stop the current violence led by young people and women.

It is crazy that a government at this age would contemplate muzzling freedoms, including the right to free speech, by restricting the use of social technology. Any country that calls itself a democracy and yet shuts down instrumentalities of freedom is joking because it is a travesty. Such actions imperil democracies.

At the heart of Senegal’s current turmoil is the folly of Sall’s regime to behead the candidature of Ousmane Sonko, a fantastic tax administrator and author of books. Born in 1974 and youngest candidate to Senegal’s presidency in the 2019 election, Sonko is the current face of Senegal desire for a more robust democracy.

Sonko was arrested based on trumped up charges of rape and death threats he allegedly visited on Adji Raby Sarr, who worked at a massage spa that Sonko regularly visited during the COVID-19 lockdown. The allegation turned out to be untrue, even by the reckoning of the courts. Not a single person testified to the genuineness of the allegation except the person who is being used by Mr. Sall (or is it Saul?) to implicate Sonko, and who could not prove the validity of her hypothesis.

Even the claim by Sarr that she’s pregnant was refuted after examination. There is a groundswell of opinion that Sarr has been induced financially by the Sall’s government to achieve its aim of getting Sonko disqualified from running because it is taken for granted that if Sonko runs again for the presidency, he would win.

It is trite that the burden of proof of an allegation is on the person alleging. In the absence of any scintilla of evidence, the court could not legitimately convict Sonko. However, in a strange, odious scenario, reminiscent of judicial recklessness and tyranny, the court in Senegal, evidently under the manipulation of the Executive branch, convicted Sonko ostensibly for corrupting the youth, whatever that means, it is still ridiculous.

As roape.net captured it, “The final verdict acquitted Sonko of the charges of rape and death threats, but sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment for “corruption of youth”, a charge that had not previously been brought, and which came as a surprise to everyone, including Sonko’s lawyers. This conviction comes on top of another recent one for “defamation”, which apparently renders Sonko ineligible to run in the forthcoming elections”.

The Sall’s regime in Dakar, is orchestrating infamies just to stop Sonko, Senegal’s most popular politician, who was elected in January as the Mayor of Ziguinchor (one of the epicenters of the protests), from contesting next year’s election. Yet to the people of Senegal, Sonko represents their own version of Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro. Sonko is listed in the minds of the man on the streets in the 14 regions of Senegal as one capable of upturning Senegal’s neo-colonial perfidious regime of Mr. Sall.

The protests have resulted in terrible, somewhat irredeemable consequences. The archives and some facilities of the Cheikh Anta Diop University have been destroyed by protesters, it sucks and rankles that protesters cannot also use their senses. Destroying treasures as a retaliation smacks of unwisdom and condemnable. Sadly, such destructions have attended protests across Africa.

It happened in South Africa’s Province of North-West during the struggles for the removal of the erstwhile Premier, Supra Mahumapelo, in 2018-2019. Wanton destruction of properties was also the snag and major blight on the popular 2020 EndSars protest in Nigeria.

Ten years ago, the Mayor of the Malian historic city of Timbuktu, Haile Ousmani Cisse, told The Guardian of London, how retreating Islamist insurgents, destroyed some of Timbuktu’s treasures. Cisse described the insurgents’ torching of historical manuscripts as ‘a devastating blow to world heritage’.

Anyone familiar with the history of West Africa, especially the strides of Mansa Kanka Musa centuries ago, will agree that any nihilism directed at the treasures of Timbuktu is an attack on the African civilisation. This is precisely what the unreasonable ones among the protesters in Dakar have done at the University named after one of Africa’s most informed historians.

Yet, President Sall must take responsibility for this infamy. His regime should allow Senegal’s democracy to flourish by allowing defining matrices of fairness, transparency and the Rule of Law to sprout in all nooks and crannies of the Republic of Senegal. This tactics of muzzling the opposition is outdated. Alassane Ouatarra tried it in Cote d’Ivoire but it didn’t work.

In 2015, when the African Public Relations Association (APRA) hosted its 26th annual conference at the new African Union Building in Addis Ababa, at the plenary session of the APRA conference, I told the Kenyan diplomat and then Deputy Chairperson of the AU Commission, HE Erastus Mwencha, that many African leaders are taken democracy for granted and the AU should stop the recurrence of military coups in Africa by telling heads of its supposedly democratic governments to stop taking democracy for granted.

Interestingly, Senegal is one of the few African countries that never experienced military coup or extremities in authoritarianism. Senegal’s founding President, the poet and writer, Leopold Sedar Senghor, became the first African president to resign voluntarily in 1981, paving the way for the ascendancy of the lanky Abdou Diof. Senegal has had fantastic democratic transitions.

However, what Mr. Sall and his cohorts are doing in Senegal is antithetical and I stand with the people of Senegal in solidarity but I call for rational protests. Importantly, President Sall should take the feedback from the streets, stop the persecution of Sonko, and let democracy flourish beyond the frontiers of Dakar.

-Ibietan, PhD is Head of Media and Public Relations, NCC, Abuja