For crying out loud, leave Senegal alone; go home Grandpa Wade

How the Senegalese, especially those thronging the streets and getting fatally shot at, must be wishing that Mr Abdoulaye Wade would just disappear, preferably six feet under. The man, however, wants a third seven-year term.

At 85 President Wade still wants to be a part of the Senegalese future. Some ambition! I have nothing against aged citizens. I write, after all, as the grandson of a centenarian whose only quarrel with this world, the last I saw her on Christmas Eve 2011, is that reading her beloved Bible is quite a task now.

I have issues though with super senior citizens who behave badly. According to Reuters, before he became Monsieur Président, Mr Wade fought hard as hell as to change the politics of his country.

Reuters noted the other day: “he had been a main mover behind Senegal’s transition to multi-party politics and had campaigned with success for an easing of restrictions on civil and democratic rights.”

That campaign landed him “short spells in prison accused of inciting riots.”
This is the same dude – 12 years after entering the presidential palace at “his fifth attempt” – who is presiding over murder on the streets of Dakar. He is forcing himself onto his people and the people are pushing back.

Apparently, Senegalese are not just being silly. They have genuine grievances. A vast majority of them get rubbish health and education services. Their living standards are horrible.

Yet their leader is building massive statues in the true spirit of Ozymandias just because he can. He is getting his packed courts to do his will – pave his way to a third term, with reported dynastic plans of handing power to his beloved son Karim before the new term is done. The people are pissed big time.

I have never held any leadership position, not even class monitor. So I have no idea what gets into people’s heads once they get power. They never want to leave. President Bill Clinton would have grabbed a third term if he could change the term limits-clause in the Constitution like some leaders within these borders. President Olusegun Obasanjo tried and got humiliated.

The British have no term limits, but at least leaders who lose their shine get drummed out of office like the Labour leaders did to Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Look at a certain Vladimir Putin today. Or even Mr Thabo Mbeki three years ago. Once in State House, leaders want to die there.

We have some examples. Gnassingbe Eyadema and Omar Bongo. Okay, Togo and Gabon have not collapsed. The latter is even co-hosting the Africa Cup of Nations and things are going pretty well. But we also have the post-Houphouet-Boigny Cote d’Ivoire. The way Mr Wade is going, he may take Senegal down with him.

There is another way that Mr Wade could go to spare the continent yet another spectacle of an octogenarian being stretchered from jail to court every other day. “By calling it a day,” Reuters analysts noted, “Wade would have pulled off Senegal’s first democratic handover of power and then been able to join the small but prestigious band of African leaders who have quit of their own accord.”

God knows Zimbabweans, Cameroonians, Equatorial Guineans, Angolans would love for their leaders to quit of their own accord. By the look of things, that will not happen just yet.

It appears hard for many of our rulers to draw inspiration from the Festus Mogaes and the Rupiah Bandas of Africa. They would rather they were lumped together with the “pseudo” Africanists such as Laurent Gbagbo. The African Spring may not be a fantasy anymore. From Dakar it may just sweep all the way east.

Mr Wade’s unseemly quest for another term speaks to something else: beware of people who try so hard to get power because once they sit in the chair, more like the throne, they never want to leave for a second, not even to go to the bathroom. They try to overcompensate, these people. They thus come conceive of themselves as superhuman. And the rest of us pay dearly.

Mr Wade is a well-read man who should take the message on a banner from protests in Dakar last year, with its simple exaggeration, seriously. It read: “Get out of here, Wade, you’re 100 years old!”

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com