Protests in Senegal
Context:
- Recently, Senegal’s President Maky Sall postponed Presidential elections weeks before the end of his second and final term due on February 25.
- Opposition legislators, who were dragged out of parliament by riot police, were angry that the vote was deferred on grounds of a dispute between the National Assembly (parliament) and the Constitutional Council over the manner of selection of candidates.
- Protests have emerged across the country, with the police cracking down on protestors through indiscriminate detentions and also violence leading to the death of one of them.
- The unprecedented decision in the Country has been decried as a Constitutional coup d’état by the government’s critics.
What is the background to the current crisis?
- According to Amnesty International the current unrest is a repeat of the bloody violence which was witnessed on the streets of Dakar last year, the worst in decades, when more than 20 lives were lost and hundreds were injured.
- The clashes followed a two-year prison sentence slapped on the leading opposition candidate Ousmane Sonko who is a former populist tax inspector who targeted the country’s elites for corruption and resisted the influence of the former colonial power France.
- Sonko the leader of the banned African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity was convicted in a trial for immoral behaviour against a woman.
- In the protests that erupted in 2021, security forces reportedly shot dead about 12 persons.
- In January 2024, the Constitutional Council barred Mr. Sonko from the Presidential race.
- Sall took office in 2012 riding a wave of popular resistance against his predecessor seeking a third term.
- Yet he asserted last March that he was legally permitted to run for a third term in the Country.
- Sall’s reasoning was that since the Presidential tenure was reduced from seven to five years during his first term, the new constitutional clock should be assumed as ticking from the year 2019, when he was re-elected under the new rule, thus entitling him to run for another term this year.
- The decision to delay polls has sparked speculation and debate over Mr. Sall’s machinations to consolidate his position between now and the elections.
