Faye victory in Senegal is the death knell to French Commonwealth

Senegal has had a ‘democratic Revolution’. On March 24, 2024, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a 44-year old former tax inspector, won a first-round victory, ten days after being released from prison, to become the fifth president in the strongest bastion of French influence in Africa.

The election was a proxy fight between the incumbent President Macky Sall and charismatic opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.

Faye, a ‘substitute candidate’ for disqualified popular candidate Sonko, garnered 54.34% of the popular vote, defeating Macky’s horse, Prime Minister Amado Ba of the ruling Alliance for the Republic’s 35.8%.

Faye’s win carries familiar echoes of the recent wave of “democratic coup d’etats” in the Sahel.

Senegal has always been a model of stability and peaceful transfer of power. In this sense, Faye’s victory was also a triumph of the principle of peaceful transfer of power as a cornerstone of a stable democracy. Ba called Faye to concede defeat.

It all started with Senegal’s founding father and first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1960-1980), who resigned in January 1980 in favour of Abdou Diouf, Senegal’s second President (1981-2000).

Diouf left power willingly and peacefully after losing the 2000 election to Abdoulaye Wade (2000 to 2012).

Diouf “should receive a Nobel Peace Prize for leaving without violence”, declared a bewildered Wade who later handed power peacefully to Macky Sall in 2012.

Faye’s victory is a triumph over the instability that resulted from maneuvers by Sall, a triumph of Senegal’s democratic institutions and collapse of a pro-French “hybrid regime”.

In 2022, the Economist Intelligence Unit rated Sall’s Senegal as a perfect “Hybrid Regime” blamed for persecuting the opposition, manipulating the judiciary, harassing the media and corruption.

Faye’s victory reinforces Senegal’s pro-intellectual values leadership going back to the pristine days of Senghor. As a budding scholar in the dark days of authoritarianism in the early 1990s, I visited Dakar, Senegal’s capital and the Mecca of African intellectuals. In Dakar, “those with knowledge have power, and those with power have knowledge”.

Until Faye stormed into the political space, Senegal was a former colony at peace with its ‘French identity’, la Francophonie, and which France must be very proud of. The democratic revolution Faye has set off, like the popular coups in Mali, Niger and Boukina Faso has sounded the death knell to ‘La Francophonie’ or ‘French Commonwealth’.

Ironically, Senghor was one of the intellectual architects of la Francophonie as an ideology of French-African ties, now unravelling. In an 1957 speech, Senghor argued that “In Africa, when children have grown up, they leave their parents' hut, and build their own by its side. Believe me, we don't want to leave the French compound. We have grown up in it, and it is good to be alive in it. We simply want to build our own huts.”

Senghor even pushed for the extension of French citizenship to all French territories in a federal model where pro-French elite governs the internal affairs of each former colonial territory in a larger French confederation that ran foreign affairs, defence, monetary and development policies.

Faye’s victory carries the promise of ending French neo-colonialism in Senegal, the last and sturdiest bastion of ‘la Francophonie’. Like the populations of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, the voters in Senegal wanted to end the military, financial and political influence France continues to wield in Senegal. As in other countries, France continues to extensively interfere in the internal affairs of Senegal in what experts term “the most glaring example of ongoing neocolonialism in Africa today”.

In this day and age, Senegal is required to deposit a minimum of 50 per cent of their international reserves into an Operations Account in Paris under the control of the French Treasury. Senegal is one of 14 former African colonies where France continues to manipulate monetary policies through the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA), making it poorer than the average sub-Saharan African country.

In Senegal as elsewhere, France has supported unpopular elites as a post-colonial strategy to protect its interests and maintain access to natural resources such as uranium, manganese, chromium, phosphates, and crude oil vital to its economy.

Faye is a self-declared left-wing pan-Africanist along the lines of Sekou Toure , Mamdou Keita (Mali) and Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso) who rejected the ‘la Francophonie’ strategy. His reform agenda revolves around three key areas. First, he wants to reclaim Senegal’s sovereignty, distancing the country from Western powers and pushing for ‘balanced and respectful relations,’ especially with France.

He promised to renegotiate contracts between the government and corporations in energy, mining and fishing sectors, as well as equally distribute profits out of a gasfield expected to start production in 2024.

Second, he wants to fight ‘French economic stranglehold’ over Senegal. ‘There is no sovereignty if there is no monetary sovereignty,’ he declared. “We will carry out a monetary reform that will allow our country to have its own currency,’ he added, by reforming the CFA or reforming or creating a national currency.

Third, Faye won on an anti-corruption platform. “No country can develop when corruption and embezzlement of public funds are endemic”, he declared.

Faye’s reforms will unfold within the larger canvas of a changing global geopolitical landscape. The emergence of China, alongside the influence of the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — has pan-Africanists with alternative avenues for economic and political support

China is Senegal’s second largest trading partner, second only to the EU. Faye has been described by opponents as a Salafist Muslim, which he denies. However, he has not ruled out new security cooperation with Russia, which has offered security support to Francophone states asserting their independence from French military influence. Senegal’s democratic revolution is a wake-up call to France.

- Prof Peter Kagwanja is the CEO at Africa Policy Institute, Adjunct Professor University of Nairobi & Visiting Scholar at the National Defence University-Kenya.