Under pressure from the World Bank, Senegal has also been involved in the protracted process of privatising its water services, with an early electricity privatisation that initially involved Hydro-Quebec and later Vivendi, among others. Vivendi is the company so loathed in South Africa for its pre-paid meter system. These privatisation processes lead to rising household bills for working people whose wages have been stagnant.
Thus Senegal has seen a growing division of society between those who can afford pay-per-use services, and those who cannot. Toll roads and new first-class trains sweep the wealthy out to the suburbs, while the rest make their way home in apartheid-style hardship.
Wade regularly presents himself in propaganda as akin to figures such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, as if he shares their commitments to social justice. Yet instead of addressing the growing homeless population who live amid crumbling streets and the stench of open sewers, he puts energy into projects of prestige, which at best only benefit the rich.
Even then, these projects are built in cheap replica, much like the fake Gucci watches sold on every street corner. The Grand National Theatre, recently built by a Chinese company, is a perfect example. Inside it is actually a beautiful building, though one wonders where Senegal is going to find enough people who can pay for tickets to fill it. But a visit to the washroom reveals shoddy plumbing with junky fittings that do not align. No doubt this kind of work will result in multiple leaks throughout the building within a few years - as one finds in so many of the luxury apartment buildings being rapidly thrown up in the downtown core. In two decades the theatre will likely join ranks with the buildings that sit as empty relics surrounding Independence Square. Built in the enthusiasm of the early post-independence period, they now sit as evidence of dreams that failed to materialise.
Declining terms of trade
Although the global scramble for Senegalese wealth is helping to enrich foreign business and a small local comprador class, the rest of the economy has been suffering. Agriculture still provides the main source of economic activity for 77 per cent of the labour force, but it remains highly dependent on increasingly unreliable weather patterns. Local peanut production - the most significant agricultural export - has declined, in part due to the privatisation of Sonacos, the state marketing and processing company, but also as a result of changes in climate and soil health. The fishing industry faces declining stocks as foreign trawlers poach along the West African coast with impunity. Poor employment prospects for youth have fuelled a stream of illegal migration to Europe among people longing for a better world - even though on arrival they risk death at the hands of racist gunmen, among the other forms of daily indignities.
The latest World Bank data shows the current account balance of Senegal at -$1.029bn. The country exports $3.236bn (2009) and imports $5.919bn. (This inclues foreign aid and remittances.) The exports are of course much larger in actual volume, leading to more shipments leaving the country, but those exports are primary commodities. The value of goods coming in is therefore much greater and is usually manufactured, such as mobile phones, clothing and electronics. This is precisely what nationalist thinkers such as Amilcar Cabral warned would be the fate of neocolonialism.
Land deals and the statue
In spite of the declining economy, Wade's political allies have been able to profit heavily from a combination of outsourced government contracts and land speculation. Land deals have underlined the statue construction, which overlooks the northern portion of the peninsula of Dakar. The statue sits alongside a newly built road that connects the downtown core with a growing luxurious district known as the Almadie. The Almadie has had a massive facelift, while the road has been turned into a boulevard reminiscent of Malibu or Miami.
With the construction of the new port, south of Rufisque, the city is undergoing a significant geographic shift that is creating new areas of land speculation. Journalist Abdoulatif Coulibaly has described the ways Wade's family and friends cashed in on a construction boom heavily subsidised by the government to build four- and five-star hotels in preparation for an international Islamic conference in 2004. The hotels sit alongside the same road that stretches to the Almadie and the famous statue.
The land under the statue was also the source of much controversy - some the subject of diplomatic cables - because it was state-owned land essentially given over to a friend of Wade's: Mbackou Faye, who then sold a portion of it back to the government at enormous cost. According to the cables, with the remaining land, Faye was believed to be planning to build "270 luxurious residences, each of which will cost USD $300,000". A drive around the area shows Faye's project is only the tip of the iceberg.
The strengths and limits of opposition
In some respects, the current state of opposition may be more powerful than Al Jazeera's Barnaby Philips noted some days ago. While Philips' impressions were derived from Dakar, it has actually been surprising that demonstrations have managed to gain significant support in smaller towns throughout the country, from which Wade has tended to draw his base support.
At the same time, the opposition is nevertheless rather disconnected from the everyday struggles of working people. Over the past year there have been a number of labour disputes, vaguely reported in the media, though often quite powerful in impact. It is often very difficult to establish to what degree these are labour or capital strikes. For example, most recently, taxi and transport workers managed to stop service for a three-day period with a near-100 per cent participation rate as they protested both the rise in fuel prices and police harassment and bribery.
Before that, the union at the national broadcasting corporation participated in a protest and brief labour disruption over claims that the company was being used for Wade's propaganda purposes rather than upholding standards of journalism. For the past three months, there has been a nationally coordinated strike of college and university professors who face ever-growing class sizes but cannot afford basic housing. These are significant social grievances, yet demonstrations reveal no practical links with the unions leading these struggles.
In this context, the opposition fails to provide analysis that helps people to understand the functions of the economy and provide alternatives. People on the street can only claim that "Wade is too old", and the other leaders simply boast of their credentials for office. For most of them these are credentials they actually gained in Wade's party, the PDS. They prove themselves to be rather opportunistic and self-interested, coming and going from the PDS based on Wade's offers of the day, rather than any political principles. Void of platform, their rhetoric is limited to childish character debasement by people who simply want to occupy his throne.
Y'en a Marre members reveal a greater interest in popular education and grassroots action, but are highly marginal in society and as a result face heavy police repression. They draw inspiration from a long history of non-violent anti-colonial resistance - especially as it existed among the Mauride Brotherhood - but they haven't been able to extend it beyond symbolic gestures into actions that actually obstruct the economy or galvanise large crowds prepared for police violence. The one time an M23 demonstration of a few hundred managed to get to Independence Square, they scattered from one blast of a US-made Long Range Acoustic Device and a couple of teargas canisters. That is a far cry from what it took to secure Tahrir Square. The brave young men of Y'en a Marre are not only marginalised by the formal economy, but have a hard time gaining support from women and older generations. This is a highly polarised society, with highly polarised political attitudes. The fractures do not occur neatly.
The deeper reality is that on a global level, neoliberal economic policy is detaching itself from its brief, dishonest association with liberal democracy. In the pages of the Financial Times, Wade himself chastised the West and boasted of his ability to work with the Chinese - within the logic of free-market capitalism pushed on Senegal by Europe and North America. He followed their dictates, which ultimately undermine their control over him - and he now has a whole number of trading partners that really have little concern about ceremonial facades of democracy. He is the new breed of comprador in a multi-polar capitalist order.
For their own part, Senegalese people need to stop looking for heroic figures, and should instead re-consider the ideas that lay behind the independence struggle. Leaders bound to a failed ideology that prevents them from making change will only ever be able to placate citizens with statues and spectacle.
Concluded
Source: Aljazeera
