FT.com | TotalSearch | Global Archive | PrintSURVEY - SENEGAL: Beacon of
hope shines bright in a troubled region: Triumphs for the ballot box and
economic realism are cause for optimism - if real change continues, report
William Wallis and Nim Caswell
Financial Times, Nov 13, 2000

In the seven months since Abdoulaye Wade was sworn in as Senegal's new
president, events in West Africa have combined to make the peaceful,
democratic process which brought him to power all the more remarkable.
Further south, Ivory Coast has experienced its most turbulent year yet, with
polls rigged by a military regime, then overturned by a popular uprising.
By contrast, the elections in Senegal have revitalised a nation grown
fractious and dispirited under one of the continent's most entrenched
civilian regimes.
When Abdou Diouf, then president, bowed to the verdict of the ballot box in
March, the Senegalese proudly saw themselves as providing a much-needed
regional precedent for a peaceful transfer of power.
With its economy expected to continue growing this year at 5 per cent, the
country perched on Africa's western-most tip stands out as a beacon of hope
in a troubled region.
Until March, the Socialist Party had ruled Senegal for four decades.
Independence leader Leopold Sedar Senghor and Abdou Diouf, his annointed
successor from 1981, tolerated opposition, establishing one of the
continent's longest-serving pluralist systems.
But patronage and electoral fraud ensured that rivals could not succeed at
the polls. That Abdoulaye Wade - a 74-year-old lawyer who has been battling
the status quo for three decades - could upset the pattern was testament to
his own perseverance and to a wider thirst for change.
The relative strength of Senegal's civil institutions, from the electoral
commission to independent radio stations, also played a critical role.
Liberalising the airwaves, neighbouring autocrats learnt, makes it difficult
to manipulate the vote count in secret.
On paper, Mr Diouf's economic legacy was among Africa's most impressive
during the 1990s. GDP growth has averaged 5 per cent since 1994, when the 50
per cent devaluation of the CFA franc boosted competitiveness.
What growth there has been, however, has enriched a minority and left many
of Senegal's 9m population no better off than at independence. For Mr Wade,
simply maintaining the pace would fall short of the expectations of a
generation who believe they used their voting cards for a revolution, not
just to change government.
"During campaign rallies he (the president) asked those in the crowds who
were employed to put up their hands. Barely a hand went up. But when he
asked the unemployed to show their hands it was a multitude," says economist
Hakim Ben Hammoudda. "The lesson we can draw from Senegal is that managing
the macro-economics alone is not enough."
Mr Wade, an avowed free-marketeer, believes he can go further and succeed
where two decades of World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment have not.
He wants to achieve two aims during his presidency:
* to transform Senegal's essentially peasant economy into a private
sector-driven centre of agro-industry and services; and
* to capitalise on its relative proximity to Europe and the US to build a
regional trading crossroads.
His government lays great store by its plans for infrastructural investment
and expects some of the biggest projects to be privately financed.
A new international airport, expanded road networks, port developments,
irrigation and tree-planting schemes to combat encroaching desert in the
north, are all being assessed.
"For the first time, I think we're going to do without the World Bank to
build major projects using entirely private capital," says Mr Wade. "That's
the challenge I've set myself. For the first time in our development, it
will mean we can say to the World Bank: 'Thank you gentlemen for your past
contributions, but we've found private investors ready to take the risk
because they know it is viable.'"
In an early sign of his resolve, a special department attached to the
presidency, the Agency for the Promotion of Investment and Major Projects
(Apix), was created to speed through start-up approvals for new investments.
Meanwhile, Makhtar Diop, the finance minister, has invited Standard &
Poor's, the credit rating agency, to assess Senegal for a sovereign rating,
an unusual step in a region where governments have tended to hide behind
opaque accounting.
"Our aim is to compete for savings in the world marketplace on equal terms
with anyone else," says Mr Diop. "We won't get a triple-A, but we need the
sanction of the market to signal that we are confident and stable enough to
stand in our own right, and not to be judged purely by African standards."
Having said that, Mr Diop acknowledges concern about the contagious
influence of events such as those in Ivory Coast, Senegal's largest trading
partner in the region. Ivory Coast's declining economy is at the heart of
the West African franc zone's struggling efforts to achieve economic union.
Senegal may be ahead of the pack, but huge unfinished business remains.
In 1979, the country was among the first in Africa to embark on a structural
adjustment programme. A cycle of droughts and the distortions of a bloated
state-run agricultural marketing system had combined to bring the state to
near bankruptcy.
In the years since, loss-making state enterprises have been liquidated, cash
crops thrown open to world markets, trade barriers reduced and the main
utilities privatised.
The results have been mixed. While the books are better balanced, production
of what was once the country's biggest foreign exchange earner, groundnuts,
has continued to decline while today's number one export-earner, fishing, is
being exploited at unsustainable levels.
Education and social services have deteriorated, and state bureaucracy
remains sluggish.
In Dakar, the capital, the ranks of the unemployed are swollen with
redundant civil servants and impoverished farmers from the groundnut basin.
While a frenetic informal sector boasts some of the continent's most
talented craftsmen and indefatigable traders, most struggle to survive.
Relative political and economic stability has yet to translate into the
investment to propel Senegal to middle-income status.
Hopes are high that the West African offshore oil and gas bonanza will
extend round the coast. But the country still depends on aid. If a
commitment to an IMF poverty reduction programme is kept, it is destined to
bring a debt relief package worth Dollars 465m out of of external debt
totalling more than Dollars 3bn.
Senegal boasts the best communications technology in the region and internet
subscription is proportionately the highest in West Africa. But with the
exception of telecoms, much of the infrastructure needs upgrading.
If they are to meet the challenge, Mr Wade and his government will have to
work hard to translate the campaign promise of "Sopi!", meaning change in
the local Wolof language, into reality.
Although hope still prevails, the verdict from the street to the boardrooms
of businesses is that so far there is little sign of a turn- around.
The new government has lacked focus, made up as it is of a coalition of
ideological factions that came together to defeat Mr Diouf.
The danger is that the political flux that has reigned since the handover
will continue to blur the direction of policy and consume energies which
could be spent on furthering economic reform and solving issues such as the
separatist violence in Casamance, where rebels have fought an isolated but
persistent 18-year war.
The Socialist Party's continuing majority in parliament is expected be
overturned in legislative elections next year. Such a result would usher in
a more settled period. But President Wade is not young. Although he has a
seven-year term ahead of him, the struggle for the succession is already
beginning to manifest itself.
For now, the president continues to enjoy the honeymoon that has followed
elections. But he has still to prove that new government means a new way of
governing, and that it can meet expectations he has helped to raise.
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2000.

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