By Pascal Fletcher
DAKAR (Reuters) – Asked what might happen if Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade is declared winner of the West African country’s elections, student Nando da Silva mouths the sound of an explosion: “Boom!”
Casting his first round ballot last month in Grand Yoff, a dusty Dakar suburb which is a labyrinth of sandy streets and crowded homes, da Silva is one of many young Senegalese who want to see an end to the octogenarian president’s 12-year rule.
“African leaders like politics … khaliss,” the 19-year-old adds with an impish grin, using the local Wolof language term for money and rubbing his thumb and finger together to emphasis how high political office brings enrichment for a few.
The clamour for change and renewal in one of Africa’s most stable states is colliding headlong with Wade’s disputed bid for a third term, setting up a ballot-box battle many see as a test for electoral democracy in the world’s poorest continent.
A surprisingly peaceful Feb 26 first round vote followed violent anti-Wade protests in the election run-up that killed at least six people. The contest is headed for a deciding second round run-off on March 25 between frontrunner Wade, 85, and his former prime minister Macky Sall, 50.
Inside and outside Africa, Senegal’s election is being closely scrutinized to see whether it upholds and advances a positive spread of multi-party political pluralism since the end of the Cold War more than two decades ago, or whether it will exacerbate what many are calling a “democratic recession”.
“Across Africa as a whole, it sends a signal,” said Abdul Tejan-Cole, Dakar-based regional director for Africa of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy network founded by the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros.
Supporters of democracy have hailed the flowering of frequent elections that have accompanied Africa’s general shift away from dictators and one-party states since the late 1980s. But in recent years, they have started to sound the alarm about what they see as a deterioration of these democratic gains.
“There was a time in the 60s, 70s, when we were talking about coups d’etat, then in the 80s and 90s we were talking about presidents for life. Now we’ve got to a stage where we are having elections … Now it’s really about the quality of the elections,” Tejan-Cole told Reuters.
He and other observers point to “manipulation” of democracy by some elected or long-serving African rulers, who speak the language of pluralism to appease donors but then use all powers at their disposal to rig or fix elections. Many have also sought, often successfully, to extend their terms through constitutional reforms forced through compliant parliaments.
‘Democracy without democrats’
“I think several African countries have seen attempts to create democracy without democrats,” said Professor Babacar Gueye, who heads a civil society collective in Senegal that provided volunteers to observe the country’s election.
In the last decade, a number of African rulers from Algeria to Uganda have succeeded in fixing their constitutions to remove term limits and gain more time in power.
At the same time, states across the continent have stumbled through elections whose processes and outcomes have sometimes been criticized by observers as deficient or outright flawed, such as the polls in Democratic Republic of Congo in November that re-elected President Joseph Kabila.
Other closely-fought votes have exploded into violence such as in Kenya in 2007 and Ivory Coast in 2010, and expected elections this year in Angola and Zimbabwe, where long-serving rulers preside, are already generating attention, and concerns.
Nevertheless, regional power South Africa has held regular credible elections since the end of apartheid in 1994 and others, such as Ghana, Mali, Zambia, Benin and Cape Verde, can boast of having gained international praise for ‘good’ elections involving genuine political alternation.
One widespread problem is the “patronage and spoils” system of politics in Africa. Here, as elsewhere in the developing world, power almost always signifies opportunities for rapid personal enrichment for individuals and political elites, which they are often reluctant to give up once ensconced in office.
“I don’t see democracy in Africa. People just want to be in power to get rich,” said Awa Faye Ndoye, a Dakar housewife.
Many Senegalese voters now view Wade, who was enthusiastically elected in 2000 when he unseated the long-serving Socialists, as just one more example of this kind of self-serving lapsed democrat seeking to hang on to power.
Opponents, many of whom re-elected Wade in 2007, accuse him of attempts to engineer a succession scenario for his 43-year-old banker son Karim and point to an equally abortive plan to limit the Senegalese election to a single round. Both the president and his son have denied any succesion plans.
Underpinning this is bubbling frustration over prices for staple foods, basic goods and fuel which have spiraled upwards, squeezing most citizens in the small, largely Muslim, mainly agricultural country that depends heavily on foreign aid.
Tirades against Wade are invariably prefaced by the exasperated complaint “Life is too expensive!”
But despite this palpable groundswell against the president, especially in Dakar, the incumbent led in the first round with 34.8 per cent of the votes compared with Sall’s 26.6 per cent in a total field of 14 contenders, according to official results.
The president has his supporters. “Yes, he is old, but in a household you need wisdom. If the old man goes, whoever comes will have a lot of problems,” said Ousmane Cisse, 72, a street trader, as he fingered his string of black prayer beads under a leather awning on a sandy curbside.
‘Man to man marking’ for election
The biggest outpouring of fury against Wade greeted his contested candidacy for a third term – endorsed by a Constitutional Council whose head he appointed. Opponents said this flouted a two-term limit enshrined by a 2001 constitutional reform, but Wade’s supporters argued this was not retroactive and the council ruled he could stand for a third time.
In the run-up to the Feb 26 first round, the controversy saw rock-throwing protesters fighting pitched battles with riot police, turning normally tranquil streets around Dakar’s Independence Square into a tear gas-clouded battleground.
“Maybe he is a democrat … in the end. But before that he is trying to exploit democracy by using all the powers at his disposal,” said Mamadou Diane, 35, an unemployed teacher in Dakar’s gritty Parcelles Assainies working class neighbourhood.
“Senegal has woken up since 2000,” said trader Khady Diop.