SENEGAL: VOTING IN A TENSE KEDOUGOU

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 DAKAR 000427

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SENSITIVE

DEPT FOR AF/W, AF/RSA, DRL AND INR/AA
Paris for Africa Watcher

TAGS: PGOV PREL PINS KDEM ECON SG
SUBJECT: SENEGAL: VOTING IN A TENSE KEDOUGOU

Ref: Dakar 409

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1. (SBU) SUMMARY: The city of Kedougou used to be a sleepy
backwater in the extreme southeast of Senegal near the Malian and
Guinean (Conakry) borders, but riots, destruction, and death on 23
December 2008 linked to commercial gold mining nearby ended all
that. It was thus to everyone's relief that the March 22 local
elections occurred peacefully in Kedougou and surrounding areas,
despite the obvious frustrations of the population. The
pro-government SOPI Coalition won both on the regional and municipal
level, but the eventual completion of a highway between Kedougou and
Dakar will probably do more to transform the region. END SUMMARY

PROVINCIAL SOUTHEASTERN SENEGAL: ISOLATION, POVERTY, GOLD FEVER
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2. (SBU) Voting in Kedougou went calmly, but the city and
surrounding areas were tense due to the aftereffects of the rioting,
destruction, pillaging, and shooting of a demonstrator on 23
December, reported in reftel. Campaigning was quiet and rival
coalitions were respectful of each other, but phalanxes of soldiers
and gendarmes visibly patrolled in the city center and near
government buildings. Many in Kedougou and in the greater Kedougou
area ("commune") are alienated from the rest of the country due to
distance and poor roads. Tensions have been further exacerbated as
a result of the recent influx of professional gold mine prospectors
from Europe and wildcat miners from the neighboring Mali,
Guinea-Conakry, and "Senegal," i.e, northern Senegal, as the people
of this region call these domestic migrants. A combination of anger
at the lack of money staying in the region despite the alleged
presence of abundant gold, combined with the disinclination of the
mining concerns to hire locals due to their lack of professional
qualifications, has created a lot of frustration. Gold fever has
translated into a desire for quick money and that and poverty is
creating a flourishing prostitution industry that has alarmingly
pushed up the HIV-positive rate to 7 percent in the mine region near
Kedougou and to 2 percent in the Kedougou City itself.
Historically, Kedougou and the surrounding region are closer
culturally and ethnographically to Mali and Guinea-Conakry.

THE LOCAL ELECTIONS
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3. (SBU) Interviews with government and party personnel on the two
days before the election resulted in a variety of assertions about
the elections. The army-uniformed clad governor of the region
proudly said that the election would occur calmly. The female
leader of one of the most important of the six Coalition SOPI
factions, who barely spoke French, said that her group would spent
Saturday "going door to door to show people how to vote." The
opposition Benno Siggil Senegal and AND Ligguey leaders warned
against the effects of vote-buying prior to the vote. They warned
that corrupt voters would bring already-stuffed envelopes into the
voting place, and that pay-for-vote would occur outside the polling
place after voting.


4. (SBU) Embassy election observers concluded after visiting all
seven voting centers before, during, or after the official 8:00 a.m.
opening time that these polling places would have been able to open
on time had all the material arrived before 08:00 a.m., but in all
cases were not. Voting only began around 10:00 a.m. once all the
ballots, including SOPI ballots, had arrived at the polls.


SMOOTH VOTE, SOME MUFFED VOTE COUNTS
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5. (SBU) Voting went smoothly. Citizens were anxious to vote. Men
and women were placed in separate lines and alternately voted so
that the men would not elbow their ways to the front. More women
voted than men and older people voted more than young. Women, many
of whom were wearing their Sunday best, tailored their wait at the
polling places to their morning and early afternoon household
cooking and small-scale selling duties. Soldiers and gendarmes with
empty rifles were posted at polling places. Embassy election
observers noticed nothing at the polling places that called into
question the vote's integrity. Some voters had to be shown the
voting procedure, but no coalition poll watcher or Senegalese human
rights organization official noted any irregularities in this regard
or in the voting in general.


6. (SBU) The vote count went less smoothly. Poll workers were
evidently better trained to execute the vote than the vote-count.
Three of the eighteen polling stations in the city of Kdougou did
not post their results, at least one due to a "lack of rigor," as
one Senegalese observer put it, which resulted in an inability to
reconcile the number of envelopes in the ballot boxes with the total

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number of signatures in the electoral rolls. Embassy election
observer advised the head polling official at another station at
which he witnessed a count not to hand out piles of ballots and
count them randomly, but to count them separately and put the
envelopes in one place. This vote count then proceeded efficiently,
but the head of the polling place faltered once again at the
overly-complicated stamping, signing and placing in envelopes of the
voting reports after the actual counting of the ballots.
Nevertheless, of the counts that Embassy election observers saw, no
party or coalition observer heard any objections.

SOPI VICTORY, BUT WHY?
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7. (SBU) With one exception, notably a small polling station five
kilometers from Kdougou, Coalition SOPI won more than 50 percent of
the vote in each polling place. In the Embassy's informal count,
the totals of the fourteen polling places had SOPI winning 53
percent of the vote in the regional elections and 50.7 percent in
the municipal election. Benno Siggil came in a distance second in
both elections with less half the votes of SOPI. Voter
participation was 44 percent of the registered 6,401 voters in these
fourteen polling places.


8. (SBU) Ground-level research and opinions vary as to why SOPI won.
In a tense and quiet city suspicious of outsiders, interpreting the
results was not easy. Election observers might have deterred
vote-buying or envelope substitution in the privacy of a voting
booth, but would not have been likely to have seen SOPI give money
to extended family heads to distribute to voting family members (the
local Benno Siggil chief said that SOPI agents went to family heads
with CFA 50,000 to distribute to family members in amounts from CFA
1,000 to 5,000). However, in a sampling of public opinion in the
main market of Kedougou, FSN election observer ascertained a
simmering anger at rioters for destroying government buildings
thirteen weeks before, including one young woman who told him that
she was angry that the rioters destroyed her files at the prefecture
that documented her academic qualifications. The electoral code
forbids campaigning by politicians not on the ballot, but President
Wade's "economic trip" to Kedougou days before the election, in
which he offered "development" projects to the sub-region, and his
recent release of 19 people imprisoned for rioting and destruction,
might have influenced voters. In an unguarded moment after the
vote, one woman said that she had voted SOPI because President Wade
said that he would install a working water faucet near her home,
this in a city with a remarkable number of wells in home courtyards
and public water taps.

SUSPICIOUS MINDS
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9. (SBU) Elections unfolded better in Kedougou than in surrounding
areas: some polls didn't open up until 5:00 p.m. because the planes
were late in getting election materials to the polling stations.
One SOPI faction leader, an ex-Minister of Culture and longtime
Democratic Party of Senegal (PDS) member, said that this "was the
most poorly organized vote he has seen, ever, ever." Despite the
civil tone of the campaigning, mistrust was high to the point of
irrational on the part of the opposition, who thought that the late
delivery of ballots, most importantly those of SOPI, was somehow a
plot to delay and rig the elections. Embassy election observer
reminded these people that the opposition is typically cheated out
of an election with a lack of opposition, not with a lack of
pro-government ballots. But an opposition figure told Emboff in a
post-election phone call that on the day after the election he
noticed a sudden and unusual presence of very poor people spending
large amounts of money at the main market, suggestive of a general
vote payoff. This same person added that many voters outside
Kedougou City had boycotted the election because they were unhappy
with what they saw as the gerrymandering of the new administrative
districts that cut them off from people with whom they were formerly
affiliated administratively.

Comment
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10. (SBU) SOPI's Kedougou victory is part of a countertrend to
opposition party victories (Kedougou was long the stronghold of the
doyen of the Senegalese left, Amath Dansokho) that have
characterized this election. Yet much will now fall on the
shoulders of the new local administration as Kedougou, at 695
kilometers from Dakar, is the most remote and also the poorest
region in the country. The governor was confident that things would
remain calm. The extra troops and the gendarmes are reported to be
staying only for the election. In a response to a question, he said
that after serving 20 years in the Casamance he does not think that
the correct constellation of combustible elements exist in the

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region for a rebellion ` la Casamance. However, the sub-prefect,
whose house and car were burned during the rioting, sees the
possibility of continued trouble if the local population's rising
expectations are not met. The only clear fact is that Kedougou is
an area of increasing importance that bears more watching.

BERNICAT