President Macky Sall had the most republican posture in which he welcomed the work done by the Court of Auditors in the context of the examination of the management of the funds released by the State of Senegal for the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Head of State sought to show the respect due to the various public institutions and declared that he strives to enable each of them to assume their full mission and prerogatives. He thus reiterates his commitment to transparency and good governance and can take pride in having implemented major reforms aimed at strengthening the skills and powers of control institutions of the State. But President Sall would really need to share his sense of stateliness and respect for institutions with many of his close collaborators and above all put a stop to the attacks regularly made against senior magistrates and other officials.
No Glory in Ministers Mansour Faye and Moustapha Diop Attitudes
It is known that, « insult is often the final argument of one who cannot find anything more to say ». In the December 22, 2022, edition of L’Observateur newspaper Minister Mansour Faye stepped up to react to the report of the Court of Auditors which points an accusing finger at the management of public funds made available to him. The minister brushed aside the conclusions of the magistrates, accusing them of being « hooded politicians » engaged in « political fights ». The insult is serious, an outrageous affront that does not honour its author. Only, where is the dignity in attacking a person who we know is incapable of defending himself? The magistrates of the Court of Auditors will remain stoic. The Chamber of Budgetary and Financial Affairs of the Court of Auditors, which produced the report on the management of response funds against Covid-19, has not rendered a judicial decision. It made a number of recommendations, including to bring the perpetrators of acts likely to be qualified as mismanagement or criminally reprehensible acts before the competent institutions. Meaning that the report is not a definitive document and any person implicated remains presumed innocent and will have, if necessary, the latitude to ensure his means of defence before the appropriate courts. At this level, an attitude other than insult or arrogance is necessary.
The statement of Minister Mansour Faye to slay members of the Court of Auditors is all the more regrettable and reprehensible as it seems to indicate a certain assurance, a guarantee of impunity that his personal situation as a member of the family of the President of the Republic could imply more. Indeed, we should be more demanding vis-à-vis him because « Caesar’s wife must be irreproachable », as the saying goes. Yet, Mansour Faye, reputedly hot-tempered, could have learned from his own turpitude. He stirred an outcry in April 2020 by accusing, with the same words, the media and all other people who queried the operations of purchase and handling of huge tons of food acquired by the Ministry of Community Development and Social and territorial equity. Sincerely, when we saw him sweating profusely to respond to those interpellations, we were convinced that Mansour Faye would return an immaculate sheet at the end of the exercise.
President Macky Sall and his Prime Minister Amadou Ba act as if they did not hear Minister Mansour Faye’s attacks on the Court of Auditors. Probably reason enough for another minister, Moustapha Diop, to rewind the old record of insults against these same magistrates. He also allowed himself to say, on December 30, 2022, before the Municipal Council of Louga, that the members of the Court of Auditors were directing a political operation against his person. Pushing the insult with derision, he affixed this high institution with the title of « Court of Scores Settling ». The statement was widely relayed by the media. It is also not certain that the President of the Republic and/or his Prime Minister will deign to address this serious prank.
Moustapha Diop is familiar with the facts. He regularly shines for making the Court of Auditors his « punching ball”. On June 8, 2015, the Chairman of the Public Enterprise Accounts and Control Commission, Abdoul Magib Guèye, and his colleagues, visited the headquarters of the Fund for the Promotion of Female Entrepreneurship (Fpef), to meet the new Director Abdoulaye Dahibou Ndiaye and his staff and present to them the work program of the verification they intended to carry out in accordance with their mission; an audit mission that was part of the commission’s annual audit program, approved at the beginning of the year and submitted for the approval of the Head of State. The Fpef was a structure under the Ministry of Women and the Family of which Moustapha Diop was the Director before being appointed to the government. This is how the minister-delegate at the time, Moustapha Diop, informed of the presence of the investigators, invited himself to the meeting. The Chairman of the committee then pointed out to him that his presence was not necessary because it was only a contact meeting. Enough for the mayor of Louga to fall out of his hinges and say to the auditors: « You are little magistrates worth nothing at all, paid to destabilise me. » Bitten by who knows what fly, he continued his monologue by telling his hosts that they were not part « of the Court of Auditors, but of the Court of Scores Settling « , and that he will not let it go. He did not stop in such a bad way, but ended the meeting and ordered the auditors out of the doors. We note that he has just resumed his “formula”. The revelation of this scandal by Le Quotidien had moved public opinion and in these columns, we strongly seared it. Moustapha Diop, accompanied by one of his friends, then came to my home to explain his « misunderstanding ». I told him, in his eyes, that it would be in his interest to fix the situation with the magistrates because I did not see President Macky Sall suffering from a standoff with the magistrates because of the turpitude of a minister delegate. The Union of Senegalese Magistrates (Ums) subsequently announced that it was filing a complaint against Moustapha Diop. The complaint will not have any legal action because President MackySall and the Minister of Economy, Finance and Planning, Amadou Ba, had invested a lot in smoothing things over with President Ady Sarr and the other members of the Court of Auditors. Moustapha Diop will regularly win stripes in the government. Who should then be surprised that Moustapha Diop is still at it? The culpable silence of President Sall and his head of government in the face of recurrent attacks by members of the government against judicial institutions now renders their anger illegitimate when other citizens desacralise republican institutions.
Republican Lessons From Serigne Mountakha Mbacké and Serigne Babacar Sy Mansour
In the game of politics, republican institutions and their servants are violently attacked, even aggressed. Nothing is more frustrating than that, especially since it is rare to find voices that matter, defend them publicly and that the legal mechanisms to ensure defence and protection of these officials do not always operate effectively. Opponents of President Sall‘s regime will need no excuses for their posture in vilifying judges each time a decision is not favourable to them while they do not fail to congratulate themselves on verdicts in their favour. We have regularly castigated this vulgar opportunism, especially during the judicial treatment of the Khalifa Sall case and to shock us “If We Have to Boo the Judges” (July 16, 2018). But it is most distressing that some attacks are directed against these institutions by judicial actors, “Those Judges Who Do Not Care About Justice (September 4, 2020). “The blows to the credibility of judicial institutions are often, first and foremost, due to the actors of justice themselves. They thus give the stick to be beaten (…)Depending on the verdicts, the judges are applauded or have their ears whistled if what they render is not pleasing to us. If our judges, because of personal rivalries, struggles for influence or conflicts of any other nature, continue to fight and shoot each other, it is the credibility of a major part of our Republic that loses its change. (…). The media terrorism on magistrates has gone to the point where some heads of jurisdiction find it difficult to compose Chambers to judge certain cases. What is to be regretted in this is that magistrates have fallen for this duel in the public sphere, of a quest for stardom and that the function is nowadays marked with the iron of an unfounded rivalry between magistrates of an old guard who are accused of all possible sins and young magistrates with the probity of gods”.
Hope is still permissible as news of recent months reveals that the duty to protect the republican ideal, institutions and public officials is endorsed by new actors, paradoxically coming from religious circles known for a certain conservatism, not to say feudalism. The management of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the republican and eminently responsible posture of the Caliph General of the Tidianes, « Serigne Mbaye Sy Mansour, the Example » (July 19, 2021). The Caliph General of the Tidianes had the appropriate and relevant speech regarding the protection of public health agents and the security forces, for the success of vaccination campaigns and other prophylactic measures, in particular the closure of places of worship. The Caliph General of the Mourides, Serigne Mountakha Mbacké was not left out. Not only did he not listen to the enlightened people who sought to set him up against our column » A Thousand Lashes for How Many Senegalese Men? » (October 24, 2022) but Serigne Mountakha Mbacké took on his own our remarks which advocated the restoration of the authority of the State security services at the level of the city of Touba. “Certainly, the passivity of the state has made the nest of the proliferation of religious militias that have ended up turning into religious police to arrest even people found smoking a cigarette! Women presumed to be sex workers, found in private places, were molested and some of their tormentors punished them by taking advantage of their prey to satisfy their libido. Other women who are poorly dressed for their liking have had their hairstyles or false eyelashes ripped off (…) The public authorities are walking on eggshells and pushing « Pontius Pilatism » to the point of prohibiting the intervention of the forces of public order in localities. We have seen religious militias arrest (we do not know under what circumstances and conditions) people and bring them, in a rare moment of leniency, before the State police who thus take over. What form of cooperation could be envisaged between a religious police force and a republican police force of a Democratic State when they do not share the same rules of positive law? President Abdou Diouf was able to convince the Khalif General of the Mourides, Serigne Abdoul Ahad Mbacké (1968-1989), to install the state police force in the city of Touba, which had the tendency to become a den of thugs, bandits of all kinds and drug traffickers. For example, when canine units were deployed in the city, the excitement was such that the caliph was able to establish authority and accept the presence of sniffer dogs throughout the city with a formula that has stayed in our memory: « These dogs only track their fellows! »
Serigne Mountakha Mbacké smiled whilst making a firm statement on December 27, 2022, to dissolve the religious police, Dahira Safinatoul Aman in Touba, and to request that the sovereign public security missions be now exclusively carried out by the services of the State. We can only welcome this when we see the disaster caused in Iran, for example, by the consequences of the actions of religious police units.
By Madiambal DIAGNE / mdiagne@lequotidien.sn
- Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE
