Senegalese at NYC protest say: ‘Wade must go!’

Special to Workers World

Senegalese immigrants took to the streets of Harlem in New York City on March 19 in protest against the regime of President Abdoulaye Wade. They rallied in front of the Senegalese Consulate on East 125th Street and then marched to an area along West 116th Street known as “Little Senegal” due to the growing Senegalese population living and working there.

According to Fallou Gueye, a member of the organizing committee for the march, it focused on three main issues facing Senegalese in the diaspora: their right to participate in next February’s election for the president of Senegal; opposition to Wade’s candidacy in that election, which they say is illegal under the Senegal Constitution; and an unbearable rise in the cost of living.

This West African country, like so many others on the continent, has a rich past, but it was left impoverished by the slave trade and intense foreign exploitation by Dutch, Portuguese, British and French invaders beginning in the 1600s.

Gueye is also a member of the Secretariat of the Union of African Workers/Senegal, one of several political parties and Senegalese groups in the U.S. that organized the protest.

Their slogans included “Enough is enough! Wade must go!” and demands to start the process of registering voters in the diaspora now.

Wade, who is 85, has been president since 2000. He had tried to advance his son as a presidential candidate, said Gueye, “but his plan has failed because of a strong opposition by the political parties, the civil society groups and even within his entourage or party.” Speakers at the protest said Wade’s attempt to run again is a violation of the two-term limit set by the Senegalese Constitution. Since his first election, the term of the presidency has been reduced from seven to five years amid growing charges of corruption.

In Senegal, as in New York, many marches, rallies, sit-ins, protests and rap concerts, authorized and unauthorized, took place on March 19, the date of Wade’s first election in 2000 and the end of 40 years of power by the so-called “Socialist” Party of Leopold Senghor and Abdou Diouf. People took to the streets in Dakar and other parts of the country to voice their anger and disappointment in Wade’s politics and to ask him to resign.