Senegal presidential drivers reveal their bosses’ secrets

Following the turn over ceremony of five presidential limousines of Senegal’s last three leaders early this month to the army museum, the drivers of these cars have made startling revelations about the “unknown” personalities of the ex-presidents.

The Sunday Monitor correspondent monitored all of them beginning with Alioune Fall, 81, the man who drove Senegal’s first president Leopold Sedar Senghor’s presidential limousine from 1969 to 1981.

Fall still recalls the late leader’s “modesty and respect for his personnel, high or low but he was not an ordinary person…whenever he was around, you feel the presence of some invisible person.” He recounted that President Senghor liked to greet people and even his garage staff every morning, “but whenever he approached us, my colleagues would shy away and the President would ask me ‘why are they always dancing away when I come around’?”

Fall said it was probably for this reason that many other chauffeurs who attempted to drive President Senghor’s limousine were frequently involved in accidents.
“I should have not allowed you to go on pilgrimage to Mecca,” Senghor told Fall upon his return from Saudi Arabia in 1975. During his absence, Fall said, his colleagues were involved in several accidents with Senghor on board. “They almost killed me when you were away,” Fall recalled Senghor (a fervent Catholic) telling him when he resumed duty after the pilgrimage. The presidential driver was illiterate in French but spoke and wrote Arabic fairly.

It was for this reason also that Senghor never parted with Fall who found it very difficult “to fulfill my responsibility as head of a polygamous family of three wives.” But Fall described Senghor as a “generous man and very punctual”. He quoted Senghor as always saying “when it is time it was time, before the time it is not time and after the time it was not time!”

The former driver who obtained his driver’s license in 1957 and retired in 1987 also recounted that Senghor often got annoyed and at that moment, “he would remain very silent.” “Sometimes when I am driving him and something made him annoyed, he would ask me to stop and he would walk out of the the car, break a tree branch and observe with high concentration for a while. He would then throw it away and get back into the car,” Fall said, adding, “no one understood his behaviour when he was vexed.”

One thing that always struck the driver was that the former president almost never carried money with him, “I even used to purchase newspapers for him from my own pocket and he would gladly receive them.” But he explained that Senghor’s First Lady, the Frenchwoman Collette Senghor was “not stingy” because “she frequently left an envelop containing up to 50,000 francs (about $100) in the back seat of the presidential car when ever I drove her for shopping or to Church.” When he was recruited to drive the president, his salary was 21,600 francs and eventually rose to about 75,000 francs along with fringe benefits.

Of Abdou Diouf
Fallilou Diop, 72, the man who drove ex-President Abdou Diouf limousine from 1981 to 1996 described the second Senegalese president as a “a real statesman…very sober, introvertive and discrete and hence I even do not know much about his private life”.

But the only thing he said that was true for him and many of the people who were not highbrows but maintained constant contacts with the leader was that “if you want him to do anything for you, you better go through his wife” (Elizabeth, a mulatoo and believed to have one of her parents possibly her mother of Cape Verdean origin).

“But he (Diouf) paid great attention to people while he remained firm and concentrated on his job,” Fallilou Diop said. The retired limousine driver now lives in Saint Louis, his home town, in northern Senegal. He recounted that one day a minister in government wanted to offer a gift to the president but consulted Fallilou for his advice. The driver responded that he absolutely did not know what to say since “the president was only interested in his job and was rarely or never praising anyone for any kind of job even if well done”.

Fallilou said “it was difficult to know when Diouf was annoyed or happy because he concealed his sentiments…even when I drove him in his limousine, he spoke but very little with his aide-de-camp but with me our relations were more professional and underpinned by mutual respect”. Fallilou said he rarely heard about the impression the president had of him… “but one day when he left power and my daughter saw him in Paris and introduced herself to him (Diouf) he told her that your father was a very well dressed and discrete person.”

Of Abdoulaye Wade
Mamadou Diop, 60, was ex-president Abdoulaye Wade’s driver from 1976, two years after he (Wade) set up the first opposition party in Senegal in a virtually single-party system and hence he said it was a risk that many drivers feared but he accepted the challenge because he was educated by Wade. “My parents urged me to remain loyal to him for life and throughout the 34 years I served him, we never had any brushes,” Diop said. But what really amused the former president was the nick names he was called “he laughed at them seriously”, the driver said.

Among the most risible are the nomenclature “fantomas” or ‘ghostly’ and “Jomboor” or ‘cunning rabbit’ by which ex-president Senghor called him (Wade) because he convinced Senghor that he (Wade) was setting up a political party not to rival with Senghor, but to accompany him and give his (Senghor’s) regime a democratic outlook. But when that was established, Wade came out openly to campaign for power to replace Senghor.

Humorous president
“He was and is still a humorous person,” Diop continued, saying that Wade was “more than a generous person and maybe that is why there are all these scandals about him today”. He said even before becoming president, “he was gay when he had money but could shut himself up in his office and work till 2am when he was angry and had no money”.

Unlike his predecessors who hardly travelled with their drivers, Wade took his chauffeur almost everywhere he travelled “and hence I have been to almost every country in the world,” Diop said. “I was his advisor sort of…he consulted me on practically every issue because I was everywhere with him: I took his food to him in prison when he was in the opposition…he is a courageous and determined person with dignity!”

Many people grossly misinterpreted Wade to be a temperamental person but that is because he has a strong personality that makes people afraid of him, Diop said, adding “he mingles intrinsically with people of all walks of life even at 86 he was still going strong and could stand up and talk for hours especially with his party militants at 1am…he’s a talkative!”

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