Memo from Dakar

June 18, 2008
Memo From Dakar
Shadows Grow Across One of Africa’s Bright Lights
By LYDIA POLGREEN

DAKAR, Senegal — From the air, this sprawling city looks like a metropolis on the move, a buzzing quadrilateral jutting into the Atlantic. Cars speed along a supple, newly reconstructed four-lane highway that hugs the rugged coastline. Cranes dot the seaside, building luxury hotels and conference centers, as investors from Dubai revamp the city’s port, hoping to transform it into a high-tech regional hub.

But on the ground the picture shifts. Jobless young men line the new highways, trying to scratch out a living by selling phone cards, cashews and Chinese-made calculators to passers-by. The port is full of imported food that is increasingly out of reach for most Senegalese.

Dakar will soon have a glut of five-star hotel rooms, but rising rents have pushed the city’s poor and even middle-class residents into filthy, flood-prone slums. Shortages of fuel mean daily blackouts.

It is hard to escape a sense of malaise that has settled over Senegal, one of Africa’s most stable and admired countries, a miasma of political, economic and social problems as unmistakable as the fine dust that blows in from the Sahara every winter, blotting out the sun with an ashy haze.

This month the sense of crisis reached a head, when a coalition of political and civic groups began a national conference to reassess the country’s direction. The government, seeing it as a provocation, refused to participate.

All of which raises the question: If hardship and tension are vexing Senegal — a former French colony that has never known a coup d’état or military rule, and for 48 years has been one of the most stable, peaceful and enduring democracies in a region so long beset by tyranny and strife — what could that mean for its more troubled neighbors?

This question has become all the more pressing with the implosion of Kenya, once East Africa’s oasis, into ethnically driven electoral violence earlier this year, and South Africa’s recent descent into anti-immigrant rage.

Senegal’s chattering class is increasingly worried that the country’s long run of relatively good luck could also run out.

“After years of sunshine, we have so many clouds gathering over us in Senegal,” said Abdoulaye Bathily, secretary general of Senegal’s Movement for the Labor Party, one of the parties that joined with President Abdoulaye Wade’s coalition in 2000 but have since broken with him. “We are lost, adrift. And if we can’t make it, what country can?”

The political class is in seemingly permanent crisis. The grand coalition of opposition parties that brought Mr. Wade to office in 2000 after 40 years of Socialist rule has collapsed.

Most of the major parties sat out the 2007 legislative elections, so the National Assembly is made up almost exclusively of Mr. Wade’s allies.

A series of squabbles within the governing party, along with the widespread speculation that Mr. Wade is grooming his son, Karim, as his successor, have also soured Senegal’s longstanding reputation as a beacon of democracy in a region once plagued by authoritarianism.

Mr. Wade, an indefatigable octogenarian who was re-elected last year for a five-year term, has in many ways staked his legacy on the rebirth of Dakar from a quaint colonial city to a major regional center, a kind of mini-Dubai for West Africa. It is the bequest of an aging leader to a new generation of Senegalese, the men and women he calls the Generation of Concrete.

Mr. Wade put his son, a former banking executive in London, in charge of organizing the Islamic Summit, a meeting of heads of state of Muslim countries held here in March. The vast makeover of the city was supposed to be complete beforehand, but while most of the roads were finished, the hotels were not. The government rented private homes and cruise ships to house delegates and members of the news media.

Much of the work was paid for by Islamic donors, not the public, but little accounting has been given for the reconstruction projects.

When the speaker of the National Assembly tried to question the president’s son about spending for the summit meeting, the speaker’s party leadership position was abolished and the assembly introduced a bill to cut his term to a single year.

He later reconciled with the president, but such scandals have exacted a toll on the country’s reputation. Once a darling of international donors, who have spent millions to help Senegal build schools and clinics, pay off its debts and plan infrastructure projects, the country has found itself criticized by representatives of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over public spending and policies that have worsened the effects of rising food prices.

A study commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development last year concluded that “a lack of transparency in public affairs and financial transactions, as well as chronic corruption, plague Senegal today.”

Africa as a whole has been enjoying high economic growth rates, but in 2006 Senegal’s economy grew by just over 2 percent. It has rebounded and is expected to reach 5.4 percent this year, but persistent unemployment and high food and fuel prices have blunted the benefits of growth for most people.

Above all, Senegal’s people seem to have lost their seemingly endless optimism. A Gallup survey completed here last year found that only 29 percent of respondents said they had a job, down from 35 percent the previous year

Most telling, 56 percent of those surveyed said they would leave Senegal permanently if they could. In recent years, tens of thousands of Senegalese have boarded rickety wooden fishing boats to try to sneak into Europe. Many thousands are believed to have died in these perilous crossings.

This frustration has largely been turned against Mr. Wade, a longtime opposition figure who endured imprisonment and political isolation for decades before bringing his quirky blend of neo-liberal and Afro-optimist ideas to the presidential palace.

To his many fans, Mr. Wade is an updated version of the founding fathers who governed Africa in the years immediately after independence. His age is a closely guarded secret, but he is believed to be 82, which would make him almost old enough to have been a contemporary of Africa’s early political giants, like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

El Hadji Amadou Sall, Mr. Wade’s spokesman and a senior adviser, says that the government is already spending most of its budget on sectors that directly affect the poor, like health and schools, but that these are less visible than five-star hotels. Mr. Wade has also announced ambitious plans to boost food production.

Some Senegalese are pleased. Paco Demba Dia, a 39-year-old traditional wrestler, said seeing new roads and buildings gives him a sense of pride.

“In all those years, the Socialists never did anything like this for us,” he said.

But to his critics, Mr. Wade has sullied Senegal’s reputation and has consolidated power within his own family.

The discontent is keenest among young people, and their chosen mouthpieces: rap artists who have become the griots, or musical storytellers, of their generation, providing a soundtrack to their frustrations.

“We’ve been waiting 40 years for real change in this country,” said Didier Awadi, a rapper whose rhymes in the Wolof language demanding change helped steer young people to vote the Socialist Party out of office in 2000. “But we are still waiting.”

On one of the many billboards across the city welcoming the attendees of the Islamic Summit meeting, someone scrawled paint over Mr. Wade’s face, writing: “We are hungry.”

Indeed, many Senegalese wonder whether the money to rebuild the capital was well spent. Amadou Ndiaye, a hawker who sells cheap Chinese-made shoes on the sidewalk, said that little of the new construction will benefit him. He has no car, and the new roads don’t go anywhere near his slum home.

“We can’t eat roads,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “We can’t afford to sleep in five-star hotels. So for whom is all this? Not for the ordinary Senegalese man.”



Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company