On videos as in his autobiography, he had pledged not to run for president in 2024. Foiling the trials of intent, Senegalese President Macky Sall announced Monday that he would not seek a third term, and further polishes its image.
“My long and carefully considered decision is not to be a candidate in the next election of February 2024 (…) I have a clear conscience and memory of what I have said, written and repeated, here and elsewhere, c That is to say, the 2019 term was my second and last term,” Macky Sall said in a speech to the Nation.
“This is what I reaffirm today. I have a code of honor and a sense of historical responsibility which commands me to preserve my dignity and my word”, said Macky Sall, elected in 2012 for seven years. and re-elected for five years.
President builder and advocate of Africa internationally for his supporters, guilty of an “authoritarian drift” for his opponents who accuse him of having restricted freedoms, President Sall is paving the way for a successful exit.
His duel with opponent Ousmane Sonko marked his second term. Sentenced in early June to two years in prison in a sex scandal and ineligible as it stands, Mr. Sonko claims that Macky Sall is “a dictator” who wants to exclude him from the presidential election.
Opposition demonstrations, which are frequently banned, have generated unprecedented violence in a country renowned for its stability. Between March 2021 and July 2023, unrest related to the Sonko affair amounted to between thirty and fifty according to the reports.
In a recent forum, intellectuals, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Felwine Sarr and Boubacar Boris Diop, castigated “the hubris of a power that imprisons or exiles its most threatening opponents, represses freedoms”.
Conversely, Macky Sall presents himself as the guarantor of institutions and security in the face of “destabilization attempts” and boasts of his record in economic matters.
At 61, this geological engineer born in Fatick (center) in a modest family from the north of the country, who defines himself as a social liberal, after an episode of Maoist youth, wants to bring Senegal “further and higher”, towards “emergence” by 2035.
Since his election in 2012 against his former mentor Abdoulaye Wade, he prides himself on having increased agricultural production and pursued an ambitious policy of major works: new airport, new town of Diamniadio, regional express train…
Another success to his credit is the lull in Casamance (south), plagued by an independence rebellion since 1982, and the departure in 2017, under his diplomatic and military pressure, of President Yahya Jammeh, who had governed neighboring Gambia since 22 years old and supported the rebels.
As chair of the African Union between 2022 and 2023, he spoke for the continent in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and campaigned tirelessly for the organization’s membership of the G20.
He was pleased on Saturday “to have already marked out the management of oil and gas resources” and conducted “an economic policy for the benefit of our populations”, during a meeting with elected officials calling on him to run in 2024.
This burly, burly man, nicknamed “Niangal” (stern face, in Wolof), had a rapid rise.
In 2001, he was Managing Director of the Société des Pétroles du Sénégal (Petrosen) when President Wade brought him into the government as Minister of Energy, Mines and Hydraulics.
He will become Minister of the Interior, Prime Minister and campaign manager of Abdoulaye Wade for his re-election in 2007, then President of the National Assembly at the start of his second term, before getting angry with him and resigning. of all his elective mandates in 2008.
“It was at this moment that my life took an essential turn”, says Macky Sall in his autobiography “Senegal at heart” (2019) in which he announces that he is seeking “a second and final term” of five years. He begins a “long march” in the most remote regions of the country, and vigorously fights the candidacy for a third term of his ex-mentor.
“I come from a line of warriors. They would rather die than lose face”, he declared during the presentation of the book, where he claims two translations of his surname: “stubborn” and “who refuses”. .
In fact, under the debonair look of this father of two boys and a girl, pierces a curt statesman, “a real shy but a fake soft”, says of him the former journalist Cheikh Yérim Seck, author of a recent book on Senegal under Macky Sall.
07/03/2023 23:49:50 – Dakar (AFP) – © 2023 AFP