WADE'S CAMPAIGN PRIORITIES: THE TOWN WITHOUT A

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DAKAR 000817

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/24/11
TAGS: PGOV EAGR PINR PINS KISL SG
SUBJECT: WADE'S CAMPAIGN PRIORITIES: THE TOWN WITHOUT A
HEART


CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR
REASONS 1.5 (B) AND (D).

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


1. (C) Old-timers claim populous and centrally-located
Kaolack was once a beautiful, prosperous and charming
city -- rather than a seasonally dust-choked or rain-
sodden topographical smear on the road to somewhere else.
With his Democratic Party of Senegal (PDS) fragmented
locally into at least nine rival factions, President Wade
is hard-pressed to keep the majority he won in previous
elections. He wants to reinvigorate a depressed economy
and win votes by constructing a new "Heart of Kaolack."
End Summary.

SALT MINES UNDER A GOLDEN SUN
--------------


2. (C) An American who volunteered in Kaolack 20 years
ago recalls prosperity, hospitality and tranquility. Few
who visit today, though, can overlook the noise, poverty
and overall sense of desperate ill-arrangement. Deputy
Mayor Ousmane NDour bemoans a "dying city" with only two
industries: a troubled peanut facility and salt farms
that hire only a few locals. There were textile and
gunny sack factories, but both are gone. Kaolack was
once a West African and Sahel crossroads, a depot for
goods from Guinea, Mali and as far away as Burkina Faso.
Three boats a week plied the arm of the sea called the
Saloum River to transship Sahel goods and peanuts or
peanut oil from rich and extensive nearby fields. Now,
says NDour, the "river" is silted up; the trains no
longer run; poor rainfall has driven farmers south to the
Casamance; the young have no jobs; and Dakar pays little
attention. With 247 full-timers and 100 on contract, the
mayoralty is Kaolack's top employer.

OPPOSITION STRONGHOLD
--------------


3. (C) Mata Sy, Senegal's only female Regional Council
President, is a gruff, earthy woman with no intellectual
pretensions and, apparently, a keen political talent.
She tells us Wade offered her the prime ministry in 2001
to replace Moustapha Niasse, her party leader in the
opposition Alliance des Forces de Progres. When she
refused, she says, Wade came back with a counter-offer in
2003: become Minister of State with, if she wished, an
official residence in nearby Kaffrine. When she declined
that as well, she says Wade told Macky Sall, "if Mata Sy
does not join us, I'll select people with financial means
to go down there and snatch the region away from her."


4. (C) In fact, Mata Sy says, Wade's effort to hold
Kaolack includes an ex-Minister of Construction, the
President of the Kaolack Banque Credit Agricole, the ex-
director of scholarships at the Education Ministry, the
Parliamentary First Vice-President, and others with the
means to try to unseat her. Some of these, she noted,
were long-time PDS loyalists, but Wade's Kaolack strategy
hinged on enlisting ex-Socialists. A side effect of this
was to expand and intensify Kaolack's sometimes vicious
intra-PDS rivalries.


5. (C) AFP deputy leader and Kaolack MP Madieyna Diouf,
speculated to us that PDS fractionalization in his home
town was the country's worst. Local Socialist Diockel
Gadiaga, sitting in the dark in his paint-peeled, party-
out-of-power hovel-headquarters, claimed there are "nine
PDS factions in the city and 20 in the region!" SUD-FM
reporter Pape NDiaye says that what has passed for PDS
consensus after a recent visit by PM Macky Sall, "just
delays the free-for-all (la pagaille)." Fearing inner
PDS turmoil may be directed to PDS rivals, Democratic
League (LD) local leader Mapate Ba recalls that Kaolack
was one of the few towns touched by violence in the 2000
campaign. When then-opposition chief Wade was in town,
Ba said, PDS youth trapped a government coalition leader,
pummeled him, "trussed him like a goat," and threw him
into a Peugeot. Hours later, Wade supposedly turned to
the car owner to say, "you have a Socialist tied up in
your back seat. Better take him to hospital."

WADE'S MONUMENTS VS REGIONAL TRADITION
--------------


6. (C) The LD's Mapate Ba is among those who think they
can predict Kaolack's election outcome by crunching the
numbrs: he computes that the PDS coalition won 2002local elections by 800 votes, that the LD with sevral

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thousand votes is now in opposition; so Wade will lose.


7. (C) Others are not sure it will work out that way,
and believe the two forces most in play are opposition
co-leader Moustapha Niasse's personal standing, versus
Wade's willingness to rebuild parts of the city. The
autonomous Kaolack branch of the Tidjane Brotherhood,
which is active throughout West Africa including Nigeria,
is dominated by two rival branches of the maraboutic
Niasse family and the Niasse name is golden. Moustapha
Niasse's links to this family are apparently only distant
and tenuous, but he nonetheless has the name and benefits
from it.


8. (C) To combat Niasse and dispel local disappointment
with his performance, Wade intends to rebuild the Kaolack
town center. One project would transform the disused
railway station and a stretch of track into a commercial
center and broad showpiece boulevard. A second would
construct a new "Heart of Kaolack," which Deputy Mayor
Ndiaye told us will also be a commercial center. The
problem, Regional Council President Mata Sy told us, is
that Wade never consulted locally, at least not with her,
before starting construction, and few are really sure
what the site will include. Mata Sy is clearly not well-
disposed to the project, reports (a tad gleefully?) that
one of the buildings has already collapsed, and predicts
the project's "zinc roofs are going to launch into the
sky in our next tornado." Fortunately, she adds, there
will be few by-standers when that happens, since the site
is relatively distant from the busier parts of the city.

WE SEE THE PEANUT ISSUE CLEARLY NOW
--------------


9. (C) In Dakar, both Socialist Party big-wigs and PDS
parliamentary front-benchers will gladly discourse on the
arcana of agricultural policy. In Kaolack, its adjunct
city of Kaffrine and the village of MBirkelane midway
between them, debate is much simpler. In local terms,
the difference is that Socialists think farmers should
continue to plant peanuts, with government support, while
the PDS wants to replace peanuts with vegetables or
Wade's crop-of-the-year, in turn maize, manioc, the local
juice-fruit bissap, or now grapes.


10. (C) MBirkelane's PDS MP, Mamadou Diallo, strikes us
as highly unusual, in that he seems to be often in his
constituency. He joked with us, in fact, that "if you
ask about me at Parliament, they'll say, 'who?'" He said
peanuts, once the basic crop of all central Senegal, can
no longer provide a living. Middlemen are offering
prices below planting costs, and growers survive only by
using peanut straw for animals. He encourages farmers to
diversify, at least to millet, and to use water
catchments or valleys to plant household vegetables. He
has also had built a village generator to run a millet
mill and is encouraging artisanal workshops.


11. (C) Kaffrine used to be tied closely to Kaolacak,
where it sent its peanuts to be pressed for oil. With
introduction of small-scale presses, though, the oil is
now produced locally and Kaffrine is rapidly turning away
from Kaolack and becoming a dependency of the Mouride
Brotherhood's dynamic capital of Touba. Kaffrine Deputy
Mayor Malick Dia told us his city may be Senegal's
poorest, and that, since it is built in a depression, it
floods every year. The opposition coalition controls the
town.

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


12. (C) Kaolack is Senegal's fourth largest urban
center, after Dakar, Touba and Thies. With its PDS
perhaps hopelessly divided, its vote appears up for grabs
in the next election. It and neighboring Kaffrine suffer
from deepening immiseration; the local peanut industry is
in rapid decline; and there is no consensus as to whether
to revivify or replace it. Dakar has not paid the region
a great deal of attention, at least until recently, with
President Wade's plan to rebuild the Kaolack city center.
Even that relatively large-scale infrastructure
development may suffer, though, since construction was
undertaken without consultation with local political
powers. End Comment


13. (SBU) This cable is the first of several examining
the political balance in what the Senegalese call the
"voter pools," or "bassins electoraux," the cities and
Dakar slums where the next elections will be won or lost.


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JACKSON