Senegalese opponent Ousmane Sonko, detained since the end of July on various charges including calling for insurrection, announced on Tuesday October 17 that he was resuming his hunger strike, which he had stopped at the beginning of September.
Mr. Sonko, 49, third in the 2019 presidential election and candidate for that of February 2024, accuses President Macky Sall, who denies it, of wanting to exclude him from the ballot through legal procedures. Mr. Sall, elected in 2012 for seven years and re-elected in 2019 for five years, announced in early July that he would not run again. “We can only resort to the means of resistance that our current situation allows. This is why I decided to resume my hunger strike,” declared the opponent on his Facebook page and on X (formerly Twitter).
He wants, through this decision, to mark his “solidarity” with the other activists “unjustly arrested for expressing their political opinions”, detained and today deprived, for some, “of all contact with their loved ones” for having led a strike hunger. He wishes to “protest against [his] arbitrary and electoral detention and that of hundreds of patriots, and demand an end to it,” he wrote in his message. His resumption of hunger strike was confirmed by Ciré Clédor Ly, one of his lawyers.
Admitted to intensive care in September
On Friday, a magistrate at a district court in Ziguinchor, the main city of Casamance, in the south of the country – Mr. Sonko had won the municipal elections there in January 2022 – ordered that the opponent be reinstated on the electoral lists from which he was removed, opening a new page in the legal saga which pits him against the State and has kept Senegal in suspense for two and a half years.
This recovery would a priori allow Mr. Sonko, imprisoned since the end of July after months of showdown with the government and the justice system, to hope to compete in the presidential election. But his candidacy is still far from guaranteed.
After a conviction for defamation against a minister, Mr. Sonko was found guilty on June 1 of debauchery of a minor and sentenced to two years in prison. Having refused to appear at trial, he was convicted in absentia and then removed from the lists. He was imprisoned at the end of July on other charges, including calling for insurrection, criminal conspiracy in connection with a terrorist enterprise and endangering state security.
He had started a hunger strike which, according to his relatives, he had ended on September 2 to respond to calls emanating in particular from very influential religious leaders in Senegal, after being admitted to the intensive care unit in a hospital. The Senegalese authorities had cast doubt on this hunger strike.