by ARAME TALL and NIMI HOFFMANN
President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal PHOTO/Wikipedia
Dakar, Senegal – On February 1, mass protests swept Senegal in opposition to the perceived attempts of President Wade to engineer a constitutional coup that would allow him a third term in office. The Wade administration has responded by cracking down against protesters across the country. Police have allegedly fired on Senegalese citizens with live ammunition. The number of dead is unknown. In Dakar, a university student and a police officer were killed, and at least ten protesters were seriously injured. In Podor, a violent protest on Saturday left two dead – a high-schooler and a 60-year-old grandmother.
The violent crackdown has left Senegalese society reeling, calling into question their history as a fundamentally democratic and peaceful polity.
Mamadou Diop, the father of the student who was killed, has called on the country’s leaders to step down. “In the name of peace, I am begging Abdoulaye Wade to relinquish power,” he said. “I am not wishing any other parent, any other human being, to go through what I am going through right now.”
The protests are reportedly being led by the Y’en A Marre [French slang for “fed up”] group and M23. Composed of civil society, ordinary citizens and opposition parties, M23 is a social movement that arose from the Green Thursday uprising of June 23, 2011, which protested against a constitutional makeover that would have instituted a vice-presidency (thought to have been created for Wade’s son, Karim) and secured an easy victory for Wade at the 2012 presidential election. The protesters have since taken to the streets on the 23rd of every month, in order to sustain their pressure against a potential constitutional coup.
The calls for President Wade’s departure were in part fuelled by his age, and by doubts about his ability to assume the country’s leadership. Officially 85 years old, Wade is popularly thought to be at least 90. After a third term, he would thus be around 97 years old. Many also fear that Wade’s secret ploy is to seize power in 2012, but not finish his term, and appoint his son Karim in his place, thus imposing a monarchic devolution of power that the Senegalese electorate rejected during the 2009 legislative elections and again on June 23, 2011.
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