Senegal: Continuing Into the Light

[Mackie Sall, BBC Africa]

It has been a few days since the dust cleared in Senegal. The recent presidential election was quite remarkable. After a first ballot could not establish a majority candidate the two finalists, sitting President Abdoulaye Wade (who ran for another term despite constitutional prohibitions against doing so) and former Wade protege Macky Sall, engaged in a runoff. Ten days ago the Senegalese people went to the poll, they supported Sall, and Wade yielded the stage. And it all happened peacefully in a free and fair election.

This latter bit is remarkable. Wade had begun to show some of the characteristics of the Big Man who believed that he was so vital to his country that only he could see the way forward and that the will of the people was only an inconvenience that he could massage and manipulate. In the first round of elections there were rumblings of discontent, hints of violence, worries that Senegal, the most stable state in West Africa and one of the most stable on the continent by most reckonings, might go the way of Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire after recent elections led to politically-driven chaos.

Instead, Wade gave way, acknowledging the triumph his successor, Sall, who ran a smart campaign throughout the election process and who has now emerged from the shadows cast by his one-time mentor, the formidable Wade. And in stepping down, Wade managed to augment his own reputation as a statesman even if he never should have put the country in this position to begin with. Sall, meanwhile, has declared a “New Era” and has taken the oath of office. We don’t know what a Sall administration will do down the road. We cannot declare what it might mean for the region, though we might want to think that Senegal offers a lesson and an example for its neighbors. But the Senegalese can at least rejoice about the state of their democracy right now. And for the time being, that joy, and the promise it could foreshadow, should be enough.