Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
06DAKAR1554
2006-06-30 12:29:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Dakar
Cable title:  

MOODY RIVER: WADE'S STANDING IN THE NORTH

Tags:  PGOV ELAB SOCI ECON PINS PINR SG 
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VZCZCXRO6082
PP RUEHPA
DE RUEHDK #1554/01 1811229
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 301229Z JUN 06
FM AMEMBASSY DAKAR
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 5592
INFO RUEHZK/ECOWAS COLLECTIVE
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DAKAR 001554 

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/21/2011
TAGS: PGOV ELAB SOCI ECON PINS PINR SG
SUBJECT: MOODY RIVER: WADE'S STANDING IN THE NORTH

REF: A) DAKAR 1011; B) DAKAR 0817; C) 05 DAKAR 3321

CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR
REASONS 1.4 (B) AND (D).

SUMMARY
-------
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DAKAR 001554

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/21/2011
TAGS: PGOV ELAB SOCI ECON PINS PINR SG
SUBJECT: MOODY RIVER: WADE'S STANDING IN THE NORTH

REF: A) DAKAR 1011; B) DAKAR 0817; C) 05 DAKAR 3321

CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR
REASONS 1.4 (B) AND (D).

SUMMARY
--------------

1. (SBU) We traveled along the Senegal River Valley,
from the dust-ugly but sugar-prosperous city of Richard
Toll; to opposition fief Podor, which President Wade is
contesting by building public works; and to a poverty-
distraught Matam that is asking what Wade has done for it
lately. We visited during a national teachers' strike
and amid talk of new farmer militancy. Based on this
trip and others to the center, east, southeast and south
(Refs A and B),we conclude Wade faces severe electoral
challenges in the countryside. END SUMMARY

SUGAR, SUGAR AND THE RIVERBOAT QUEEN
--------------

2. (SBU) The trip east from Saint Louis is a venture
into ever-deepening poverty, but the disorderly and
unkempt sugar-industry town of Richard Toll is an
exception. It has stagnated somewhat recently, but there
was a building boom in the 1980's and cane fields and the
Senegalese Sugar Company still provide jobs. The Senegal
River is navigable from here to Saint Louis and is
unexpectedly lush and beautiful around the city's sole
hotel, so for several years a circa-1950's French
riverboat has been drawing European tourists seeking a
taste of colonial lifestyle. (Locals gleefully recount
their version of the boat's arrival in Senegal. To allow
it into the river, Saint Louis' ancient trademark
rotating bridge was opened for the first time in years;
turning mechanisms stuck; and the island city was cut off
for several embarrassed hours while an engineer was found
who recalled how to fix it.)


3. (SBU) Sugar company accountant and Democratic League
activist Silba Ba told us he backed Wade in 2000 but was
deeply disenchanted, as were many others. Wade's local
PDS (Democratic Party of Senegal) boss, Sire Fall, once
led most of Richard Toll's political and labor leaders en

masse to Dakar to cheer Wade at the presidential palace.
Now, shadowed by Wade's unpopularity (and allegedly by
failure to make certain promised political cash
payments),Fall was now "in hiding." Social problems
were likely in any case, whatever the 2007 election
results, with the people tense and the PDS capable of
violence: "If Wade loses," Ba sighed, "there will be
riots, but if he does not lose it will be crisis."

ROTTEN TOMATOES FOR WADE -- AND ONIONS, TOO
--------------

4. (U) The River Valley road is a gallery of 200-lb
onion sacks awaiting transport to Dakar, and heaps and
rows of tomatoes in serial stages of spoilage and rot.
There are also a few sweet potatoes and nothing else!
In no other part of Senegal have we seen so little farm
produce, and towns manifest the starkest poverty: there
are few soft drink stands; few people lounge about the
oily-greasy truck stops chatting with friends or chance
acquaintances; and no vending ladies run to your car
hawking fruit. Locals have no money for such luxuries
anyway; one opposition figure claimed many families are
down to one meal a day, and from what we saw onion sauce
figures in every meal and has become virtually a staple.


5. (C) Podor's PDS is divided into the usual factions,
though their leaders represent an unusual range including
a counselor to the president, the national director of
ports (domaine portuaire),a tax inspector, and others.
Given the reported fervor of these rivalries, the PDS
Deputy Mayor, Mr. Sy, was remarkably laid back. He had
had a rough week, with city schools shut down by the
national teachers' strike and parents unhappy, and he
seemed resigned to more difficulties. The strike was a
nationwide effort to put pre-electoral pressure on the
PDS, he guessed, and Wade and the PDS would be hard-
pressed to repeat its 2000 win in Podor.


6. (C) Meetings with the opposition evoked tales of
unmitigated social woe. Moussa Ba, Ibrahima Agne's rep,
called Podor, "forsaken and neglected, without jobs,
young people on the streets ... and tax revenues not
enough to accomplish anything." The mayor's office was
paying civil servants two or three weeks behind.
Teachers are desperate," he said, "and their strike is
justified, but it has paralyzed the town." Above all,
there was fatalistic River Valley despair that "If you
want something, you have to be with those in power."
Podor had backed Wade narrowly in 2000, and nothing was
better. In rainy season, river villages are isolated in

DAKAR 00001554 002 OF 003


a sea of flood and mud, and tomatoes rot because the
processing plant is closed. (We heard only after our
trip that Wade has begun to build two small bridges to
reconnect river villages to Podor.)


7. (C) The Independent Labor Party's (PIT) Mor NDoye
denounced what he called total PDS lack of interest in
Podor: "the mayor lives in Thies and we never see him."
When Prime Minister Macky Sall came recently, the PDS was
unable to attract locals and resorted to recruiting
African-Mauritanians across the river for a rally. NDoye
lamented, "there is no real political life in Podor; only
money counts." Democratic League's Elhadj Assane Ndingue
and Thierno MBodj commented that it is not just money
that trades hands, charging that "the PDS mayoralty
parcels out land to allies."


8. (C) In all our conversations, we heard that local
voter preferences had shifted markedly over the years,
with Alliance des Forces de Progres leader Moustapha
Niasse losing support, Ibrahima Agne gaining in
popularity, and Socialist international lawyer and
hometown favorite Aissata Tall Sall dominant overall,
with admirers across the opposition coalition.

MATAM: A BRIDGE TOO FRAIL
--------------

9. (SBU) In 2002, Wade raised Saint Louis Region's
eastern department to regional status with its capital at
Matam, a city endowed with administrative buildings but
economically moribund. Fuel tankers do not dare take
rickety bridges over mud flats from highway to Matam, so
it has no gas stations: a lone and long unused 1950s
"Phillips 66" gas pump may evoke the curiosity of any
rare tourist who ventures by error into Matam's
desolation. The region's meager economic action, and
garages, are in the upstart highway town of Ouro Sougi.


10. (SBU) We had a single question to pose in Matam:
will voters reward Wade for making Matam a region, or
will votes reflect the region's economic misery and
isolation? In a long and raucous morning session over
drinks in Ouro Sougi we asked three local reporters:
Senegalese Radio and Television's Daouda Niang, Sud-FM's
Babacar Nolao, and RFM's Aly Bandel Niang. They framed
their answer in terms of: a) a mentality of dependence,
and, b) social backwardness symbolized by prejudice
against the former slave class.


11. (C) Matamois, Daouda Niang argued, were the most
conservative in Senegal. Local Islam is traditional (Ref
C),but there is also the influence of the river, whose
seasonal fluctuations and replenishment of the soil kept
people tied to their farms. Even as agriculture and
fishing have become unrewarding, out-migration from the
river valley remains low. What was needed, Niang
insisted, was a change in mentality, some spark of
entrepreneurship as in Ouro Sougi.


12. Matam politics, Niang went on, had always been on a
"cash or cousin" basis: you voted for a relative or you
voted for pay. There was no gratitude for Wade: when
Prime Minister Macky Sall came to reorganize the PDS,
which has no notable local leader, police had to break up
a spirited protest against him. If the PDS won this
election, he insisted, it would be because villages were
isolated and farmers had no access to voter registration
centers. The opposition had rented vans to transport
villagers to register in Matam.


13. (C) Reporters Nolao and Aly Niang contend Matam
Region has "no positive self-identification. It's just a
vast expanse of unused land. All investments here come
from emigration, but it's all in houses or mosques, not
anything that would produce jobs. Even well-meaning
projects go terribly awry, they recounted: one semi-
literate emigrant to Italy had made lots of money and
built a "4-star" hotel in an isolated village of 3,000
inhabitants. Even that didn't work because the emigrant
had not verified his land rights and the owners claimed
the land and hotel. Normally, he could have negotiated
something with the owners, but since he was from the
traditional slave class, no one was willing to condescend
to deal with him fairly.


14. (C) Responding to our key question, the journalists
said Matamois had been eager to be independent of
"distant and disinterested" Saint Louis, but they
insisted "nothing had changed in Matam" since 2002. We
doubted that until, in Matam later in the day, the PDS
deputy mayor seemed to be sharing their script: "nothing
has changed in Matam." The government had laid the first
stone for a new road from Matam through the heart of the

DAKAR 00001554 003 OF 003


country to Dakar, but the road remained far from travel-
worthy and Matamois still had to pass through Saint
Louis. Even worse, he added, the region was not yet
administratively free of Saint Louis: many official
seals of approval still had to be obtained there.


WHO COUNTS? TEACHERS AND FARMERS
--------------

15. (C) Aware that we were leaving for the North on the
first day of what was billed as a nationwide teachers'
strike, we met with Mamadou Diop Castro of the UNSAS
teachers' union. Castro said the strike was the first
labor action he could recall since 2000 in which every
concerned union, pro-Wade and opposition alike, was
taking part. By closing schools nationwide, he said, the
teachers would make Wade listen to specific demands while
reinforcing their power as the only opinion-makers with
influence throughout the country. In both Podor and
Matam, at least, we observed that the strike appeared
total, with teacher union political influence confirmed.


16. (C) To gauge the leadership of the other social
force in the countryside, we saw the leaders of the
Conseil National pour la Coordination des Ruraux (CNCR).
We met Cheikh Abdoul Khadre Cissokho in an upscale Indian
restaurant, and he was playing a role of bumpkin to
perfection, dressed in a country style gown of course
cloth and earth tones, big-boned with a long-unshorn
beard and a peasant's innocent smile. Luckily we had
read his bio before, understood that he had a French
wife, took French Senate Presidents fishing on the coast
and had been National Assembly President for eight years.


17. (C) Although he is a Socialist, Cissokho seemed to
be striving for impartiality, alternately praising and
criticizing Wade's farm policies. Social protection for
farmers, he argued, had to be won gradually via dialog
and not confrontation: he condemned "a splinter group"
that championed farmer rights in May Day celebrations.
Meanwhile, the younger Mamba Gueye, Fisherman's Union
leader and nominal CNCR president, sat with deep respect
but clear impatience for Cissokho, and managed to slip in
that farmers, herdsmen and fishermen were everywhere
deeply unhappy with Wade's failure to provide quality
seeds, transport to market or guaranteed fair prices.

COMMENT
--------------

18. (C) Wade seems doomed to lose in Podor, which is
dominated by the Socialists' Aissata Tall Sall. Still,
he is not conceding, and is using public works, the
building of bridges, to at least cut losses. In
addition, we were puzzled to hear after our trip that he
had dispatched Casamance independence leader Abbe
Diamacoune Senghor to Podor to praise Wade's attempts at
reintegrating the war-torn region. We cannot help
doubting that that will win Wade many votes in the north,
though, since the River Valley sees Casamance as a very
distant place indeed.


19. (C) Wade believes Matamois are grateful to him for
transforming their isolated and poor departmental center
into regional capital. He may be right, but the economic
misery of the region's towns and countryside, local PDS
structural weakness and dependence on buying votes, lack
of any real development activity save the first steps in
building a road to Dakar, and his abandonment by most of
the Left will make it difficult for him.


20. (C) Combining what we saw in the North with what we
learned earlier in the center, east, southeast and south,
we conclude that Wade and the PDS have not come anywhere
close to satisfying social and economic demands of
farmers and small-town dwellers who deserted the
Socialists in 2000 to vote for Wade. While we have not
this year visited the rural northwest around Louga and
Linguere, we believe that by and large the PDS will find
it extremely hard to win parliamentary seats in rural
areas. Despite Wade's tangible contributions, including
village solar lamps and building schools, he will
likewise find it hard in the presidential election to
overcome rural disappointment with his performance.

JACOBS