Forty-four year-old President Bassirou Diomaye Faye of Senegal PHOTO/Senego.com
By MORRIS ODHIAMBO
The people of Senegal are in a celebratory mood. It is for good reason. They have just had a smooth “democratic transition” with the election of 44-year-old Bassirou Diomaye Faye.
Part of the reason for the celebration is what transpired when the former immediate head of state, Macky Sall, attempted to prolong his term in office, leading to civil strife, suffering and death.
Among those who died during protests against Macky Sall’s attempts to unconstitutionally extend his stay in power was Gaston Berger University student Alpha Yoro Tounkara. He was killed in Saint-Louis when protesting students were blocked by police from entering the city centre.
The second recorded victim was Modou Gueye, a hawker and resident of Guinaw-Rails, a poor neighbourhood on the outscats of Dakar. Most accounts I have read indicate that Gueye was shot when going about his hawking business.
The third of the few recorded cases is that of Landing Camara, who was shot in Grand Dakar, Ziguinchor. Camara’s case is especially sad because he was at home when a teargas canister thrown into their compound forced him to run outside, where he met his death.
The reason I have detailed these three cases is partly to draw parallels with the situation in my country, Kenya. The phenomenon of state-sponsored electoral violence became entrenched in Kenya’s politics from the time of agitation for multipartism in the early 1990s.
Before that, political violence was mainly targeted at individual “dissidents” and detentions without trial were the order of the day from the Jomo Kenyatta presidency to the Daniel Moi presidency.
“Collective community punishment” as a form of political repression became widespread from the early 1990s when the single party regime’s hold on power became threatened. A pogrom was then organised mainly against the members of the Kikuyu community in the then Rift Valley province, leading to thousands of deaths and displacement.
The violence was aimed at displacing voters from the region to forestall the possibility of opposition candidates winning parliamentary and civic seats as well as undermining support for opposition presidential candidates.
From 2007/8, when Kenya experienced its worst political rupture, the elite preferred the use of bullets to silence protesters after opaque elections. Usually, the violence is “ethnicised” since it targets the strongholds of the opponents of those in power at that time.
In Kenya, ethnicity is a key element in political mobilisation. It is one of the outcomes of the narrow, ethnicised vision and rationale that was entrenched at independence by the elite in terms of distributing the benefits of incumbency such as state jobs.
My reflection today is about the contradictions inherent in “democratic” practices on the African continent. It stems partly from the Senegalese experience and the reactions I recently got from my reflections on democracy and human rights in Africa.
From those recent conversations, I discerned that there are certain segments of the online community that see democracy as an imposition of the West in pursuit of their own interests.
This is a legit way of looking at the problem, but only when one restricts their assessment to post-colonial Africa. Indeed, I presented discussions and arguments from key scholars who have discussed democratic decision-making processes in traditional Africa.
Retired President Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta at the Status conference on 8 October 2014 at The Hague, during the Trial Chamber V(b) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over post-election violence during Kenya’s 2007 General Election. PHOTO/ICC-CPI
I also discerned a tendency to confuse “democracy” as a concept and the narrow, minimalist, Western tradition of liberal democracy or what Karl Marx referred to as “buourgoisie” democracy.
I quoted liberally from Professor Abdalla Bujra (“Democratic Transition in Kenya: The Struggle from Liberal to Social Democracy”) and other scholars who have attempted to distinguish different forms of democracy.
My reflections on the Senegalese situation (not very different from the Kenyan situation though term extension is yet to become a major factor in Kenya) show the following progression:
(a) The incumbent gets into power aided by “democratic principles” like the rule of law
(b) The incumbent is unable to deliver on their promises to the electorate
(c) The incumbent becomes increasingly unpopular as corruption becomes widespread
(d) The incumbent seeks to subvert the rule of law to extend their stay in power
(e) The people revolt and are exposed to mass violence and killings
(f) An election is held, and the incumbent (or their annoited successor) loses
(g) There is zero accountability for the suffering and death caused to the people, and the cycle repeats itself!
The above assessment leads me to pose the following questions to the people of Senegal and Africans at large:
(a) What is Faye’s plan to transform this system that has subjected the masses to unnecessary suffering?
(b) How will Faye deal with entrenched economic interests that control the politics of Senegal with the outcomes described in this article?
(c) What is his blueprint for transforming Senegal’s economy so that it becomes beneficial to the majority of citizens?
(d) What are you, as citizens, putting in place to ensure Faye is accountable to you and not to narrow economic and elite interests?
(e) Come the next electoral cycle, will you be celebrating or getting killed?
There is need, urgent need, I think, to move away from celebrating Faye’s youth and the fact that he is married to two beautiful women!
