Ademola Araoye
The outcome of the postponed presidential election in Senegal that eventually took place on 24 March 2024 is earth-shattering. The result of the election unimaginably moved Senegal from the enshrined Sedar Senghor-instituted conservative state in the orbit of France in West Africa to the rank of a vanguard state mobilized by radical pan-Africanism. This transformation aligns Senegal with the evolved sensibilities of African youth that were only recently forcefully expressed in the rancorous but non-kinetic militancy of the Ble Guede-led Young Patriots in Cote d’Ivoire in the 2000s. Youth patriotism has acquired the character of a historic code word for the expression of mass mobilization for bold resistance to French machinations in Africa. That character was prominently at play as part of the resistance to the France-inspired deadly conflict in Abidjan. The objective of France in that crisis was to abort the consolidation of a democratically elected radical administration of Laurent Gbagbo. That infamous neo-imperialist intervention brought into office the current French Poulain in Abidjan to ensure the continuity of the toxic era of Houphouet Boigny as a mindless and implacable stooge of France. It did not start with Laurent Gbagbo.
Observers have noted that the events in Côte d’Ivoire in September 2002 were reminiscent of the response of France to threats posed to its hegemony in the subregion. In the 1960s. The emergence of Sylvanus Epiphanio Kwami Olympio as prime minister of Togo at its independence on April 27, 1960, through democratic elections was a challenge to France. Olympio committed many mortal infractions: he sought warm relations with Nigeria. Unlike the Senghors and the Boignys, the handsome Olympio, like Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in later years, was a young charismatic, and confident African who seemed keen to chart an autonomous course for Togo outside the influence of France. He planned to revive an old German connection with Togo, even as rumors suggested that he would float a Togolese currency backed by the Deutsch mark. There were also talks in Bonn about funding for a new port in Lomé, which the French saw as a competitor to its plans to build a port in Cotonou in neighboring Dahomey (Benin). As in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002, France was confronted with a crisis of its continued domination of Togo in 1963. Slyvanus Olympio, as in the case of Sankara, was simply assassinated. In January 1961, Patrice Lumumba had suffered the same fate in the Congo through a conspiracy of a coalition of Western powers. He was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1961. These tragic endings in the previous pursuit of liberty by visionary African leaders present a compass to navigate potential responses to current shifts in the strategic template of West Africa and, indeed of Africa. It however reflects the universal lesson of the risks implicit in the search for autonomy.
In a different context and time, France is faced with a similar debacle in Dakar. The import of Dakar 2024 is that events in Abidjan in the early 2000s have proven to be the gestation period of a legitimate and robust idea that could not be extirpated. Within less than two decades, the maturation of the radical pan-African philosophy across the continent is driving a vigorous new impetus for the placement of the centrality of holistic emancipation of black humanity as the end of policy across Africa and the global black universe. Developments in Dakar and the Sahel therefore resonate not only across Africa but also as far as the Caribbean, where similar sentiments are preeminent today. The pan-African vision and principles of the revolutionary turn of the trajectories in the Sahel and Senegal are validated by the imperatives of holistic black emancipation. Fortunately, the constitutional environment in Dakar is enabling. As a secular republic, Senegal’s Constitution imposes a strong presidency with overwhelming leverage in the face of a weak legislature, weak judiciary, and multiple political parties. Under the 2001 constitution, Senegalese presidents serve for 5 years with the possibility of another second five-year term. Under these conditions, the result of the March 2024 presidential election ushers in a radical dispensation under a presidency with unusually strong leverage to actualize policy. It therefore promises to move Senegal from the reactionary conservative right moorings at the founding of the Senegalese state to the very polar end of the radical left of the African ideological-political spectrum. The result of the election confirmed perceptual and cognitive transformations as well as evolving acutely realigned sensibilities not only within Senegal but also across the sub-region, the continent, and the global black Diaspora. These, deviating from entrenched old impositions of neo-imperialist ethos in African political life, now define the revolutionary ferment of the socio-political African environment at the beginning of the Third Millennium. Although the realignments have somewhat simplified the construction of the political space they have rendered more complex the dynamics of the strategic, political, cultural, and economic planes across the continent. Meanwhile, they provide a setting to contextualize the interactions of forces and dynamics that motorize the evolution of African politics in new directions in the digital age.
Basirou Diomaye Faye, the latest icon of Africa’s revolutionary turnaround, campaigned on a project to restore Senegal’s substantive national sovereignty from the traditional flag independence of post-colonial African states. Further, he affirmed the pursuit of a radical policy of “left-wing pan-Africanism” as the main thrust of foreign policy. The implications of these monumental projects at the domestic level and in interaction with the external environment, are historic. In sum, they represent an unprecedented impulse toward radical restorations of quintessential essences of a humanity that were dislodged by the colonial experience and consolidated in neo-imperialism. The project of radical restoration will manifest critically in the rebalancing of Senegal’s foreign economic relations, in particular with France. The realignment may be expected to, in particular, bring the country more closely aligned to the radical axis of consolidated Africa’s states that are mostly found outside the immediate West African subregion. These states operate on the basis of a fundamental and cardinal precept of a demystification and denunciation of all that Western Europe has historically stood for and continues to advance in Africa. The radical pan-African states are accordingly mobilized by the implacable repudiation of all neo-colonial relations that is expressed in the repudiation of embattled France as the most brutal and vexatious expression of neo-colonial enterprises in Africa. Thus, through the ballot box has emerged another figure with revolutionary credentials in francophone West Africa, in a country with a close sociological affinity to the peoples of the Sahel. Bassirou Diomaye Faye, comfortably beat Amadou Ba, the proxy-candidate of the incumbent conservative Macky Sall and the governing coalition, in the presidential election. Faye’s win was significant with 54.28 percent of votes in the first round over former Prime Minister Amadou Ba, who garnered a mere 35.79 percent. Indeed Faye was considered a contender “who does not come from the system” and his potential win at the poll was anticipated to be a political “earthquake”. Faye’s victory is the first time a Senegalese opposition candidate has won the election in the first round since independence in 1960. The voter turnout of 61.30% in the election and the effusions of popular support bolstered the legitimacy of the radical shift implied by the outcome of the presidential poll.
Meanwhile, the victory of 44-year-old Basirou Faye in the Senegalese presidential poll is novel in all ways. It defied the traditional machinations of incumbent regimes who contrive all sorts of impediments in the way of challengers to remain in office. Democratic consolidation in Africa has for too long taken on a strange contortion as power through “democratic” elections is passed on from father to son or to ensure dynastic, clan, or regime succession. In Senegal, having disqualified Ousman Sonko, the leader of PASTEF, from running, Macky Sall released his associate, Faye, from prison 10 days before the elections. Faye was shooed in as a last-minute stand-in for Ousman Sonko. Sonko, Senior Tax Inspector, is the leader of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity or just Patriots of Senegal (PASTEF). He was PASTEF’s candidate in the 2019 presidential election. The political party, which brings together mainly youth across the country, was founded in 2014 by Ousmane Sonko. In an innovation brought about by desperation, PASTEF was funded largely through crowdfunding. In January 2023, the party raised over 333 million FCFA through online contributions. The manifesto of the PASTEF is premised on winning political power through democratic means and putting at the service of the Senegalese people a social and economic system that would make Senegal a prosperous nation, united and anchored in strong values.
At the symbolic level, Sedar Senghor, considered the founding father of the Senegalese state, must be turning in his grave. He was, notwithstanding the reams of vacuous publications to rationalize his profound loss of bearing, a profoundly disoriented African and politically misguided man. As a poet, he was famous for his ludicrous depth of love of France and prominently associated with that strand of Negritude that many assert devaluated the intrinsic worth of black humanity. Ideologically said to be a socialist, he was a proponent of African culture, black identity, and African empowerment but all these controversially within the framework of French-African ties. Some have considered him to be possessed of a complex that drove his embarrassing unwitting validation of Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad’s evocation of Africa as the heart of darkness. In death, a highly placed mourner inscribed that Senghor had “left us with the difficult task of completely assuming our black identity”. It is also averred that his works provided the intellectual underpinnings to FrancAfrique, a nebulous contraption that has proven almost indestructible even with the changing tides in the affairs of black humanity. In 1969 Senghor was elevated to the French Academy of Moral Sciences. As a politician, he was abashedly dependent on France, appointing a French citizen as his Minister of Interior. By that appointment, France was in control of Senegal’s national security. Senghor gave practical effect to his belief that Africans colonized by France would be better off within a federal French structure than as independent nation-states. He was thus stoutly against the bourgeoning revolutionary ferment for the full liberation of colonial spaces in Africa of the 1960s. Under Senghor, Senegal turned its back on the Front for the Liberation of Guinea Bissau (FLING), the first liberation movement founded by Bissau Guineans, even as many of its fighting cadres issued from the Senegalese region of Casamance. The movement had tried to radicalize its liberation struggle. The FLING, denounced by Senghor, based in Senegal lost its sting. Consistent with many of the early leaders of Africa, he misled his country into the infernal trap of neo-imperialism that a new generation of Africans has a burden to undo. Thus the advent of left-win radical pan-Africanism espoused by Basirou Diamoye Faye, Ousmane Sonko and their blessed cohorts in Dakar. The philosophy of radical pan-Africanism is thus to restore the originality of the essence of black humanity that was badly compromised by Africa’s “wounding” fathers.
Accordingly, the latest development in Senegal, if the anticipated trajectory of regime consolidation holds, in tandem with recent developments in the Sahel, would rearrange the strategic template in West Africa. In the medium to long-term, there is a potential to break Senegal and the subregion, in particular, but not limited to the francophone zone, away from its now enfeebled hitherto immovable anchor as an outpost of French interest in West Africa. Associated with the decoupling of Senegal from a historically noxious twinning of its fiscal, foreign and security policy with French interests, the outcome of the presidential elections creates new opportunities for the advancement of radical pan-African objectives in the sub-region and its consolidation in Africa. The latter opportunities paradoxically present challenges to such proxy states as Cote d’Ivoire that cannot escape the imminent doomsday of the overthrow of its French cohorts and, more seriously, of Anglophone West Africa as the fixated pole of continental conservatism in Africa. The imperative of Anglophone West Africa to reappraise the status quo profiles of the respective states to align with the spirit of the strategic rebirth of Africa is an inevitable imperative if ECOWAS is to survive as a truly pan-regional platform into the future. This need for strategic reconstruction has resulted from the repudiation of the continued legitimacy and demystification of the West in Africa: Western ideology, spirituality, political economy, and cultural hegemony as fallacious premises of black oppression. Developments in the Sahel, and now in Senegal, effectively constitute a fundamental crisis of neo-imperialism that has for some time been championed by South Africa.
Yet, despite the turmoil, the moment offers a historic opportunity for the institutional growth of the ECOWAS. It is assumed here that the outcome of the Senegalese presidential election is ordained to enable the new radical forces in Senegal, as it has announced, to persuade their disaffected comrades in the Sahel to return to the ECOWAS fold. In effect, these radical forces in the Sahel and Senegal would coalesce into a major aisle of activist radical pan-Africanism in the subregional body. This development, as threatening to internal cohesion as it may, has the extra benefit of also dissipating the more problematic permanent divide of the Anglo versus Franco phones in the community. The potential eradication of the France-inspired cleavage in the ECOWAS is a very welcome possibility. In the absence of this divide, whatever policy differences emerge in the community would not be driven by deliberate sabotage by actors beholden to external interests. But to overcome the emerging challenge of moderating, but more importantly, distilling into coherent policy frameworks, the divergent philosophical underpinnings to various perspectives on preferred trajectories that would predictably clash in the future within the sub-regional body, ECOWAS has to move from the often knee-jerk impositions of the personal preferences of heads of state as policy. The alternative to the current outmoded policy formulation paradigm is a transition to more formalized rational policy-developing processes that entail respect for professional and analytical rigor to craft consensus that advances the interests of the people. That would deviate from the pursuit of the interests of the often compromised incumbents of the obscure capitals in the West African region as regional policy. These paradigmatic and structural transformations must be instituted now even as a belated reaction to the exigencies of structural reconstruction of the subregion, and by implication the Commission, that have already emerged.
In this connection, keen observations of the ingresses of powerful elite delegations to various capitals of the subregion since the events of the Sahel, suggest determined efforts by various states of the West to consolidate their holds on a few capitals that in more recent times have come across as sympathetic to continued Western domination of the continent. In the context of influence peddling in the international system, these are legitimate initiatives to shore up their residual controls of the various regimes in West Africa. However, the same principle allows for newcomers, such as Russia, to consolidate their budding relations with their new friends in the neighborhood. At the same time is the legitimation of the consolidation of Russia’s foothold in a few states with a view to expanding its presence in the subregion. The impact of the elite power influence is expected to be felt at all levels of engagements in the subregion, and even across the continent. That is a reality of the African continent today as it seeks to integrate itself into the maelstrom of mainstream global politics. A more profound clash of visions is therefore logically on the cards, both in ECOWAS and in the African Union. This is not necessarily an unwanted development as there is not one single fully autonomous state actor on the global scene, no matter how powerful, that is completely insulated from other influences in the global system. Each state actor must therefore reckon with competing external interests seeking a form of collaboration or the other. The deciding factor is often the terms of that proposed collaboration. Policy, in such intrinsically fluid and evolving circumstances, is often calibrated, and logically the outcome of a nuanced calculus of projected ultimate dividends in the face of competing opportunity costs. In terms of cost-benefit analysis for Africa in the longue duree, the advent of left-wing radical pan-Africanism is a legitimate enterprise for the good of black humanity globally.
* Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).