Apart from its giant-killing football team, Senegal has little more going for it than its moral weight.
Its population of 10-million live on an average of just R7 a day. Yet the democratic tradition of presidents Leopold Senghor and Abdou Diouf makes it an example for African states. They presided over 40 years of socialism until the peaceful election in 2000 of lawyer and former political detainee Abdoulaye Wade.
So when journalists take action to protest against attempts to muzzle them, human rights proponents notice. Certainly this would ring alarm bells with image-conscious members of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) Secretariat in Midrand.
Wade is a member of the five-man Nepad steering committee along with presidents Thabo Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. This makes Senegal part of the flagship of African good governance and respect for democratic values.
On Tuesday most independent newspapers stayed off the streets. Commercial radio stations substituted music for news bulletins and reported only items related to the imprisonment of Madiambal Diagne, publication director of independent daily Le Quotidien.
Diagne has been held since July 9 for publishing articles about alleged fraud in the customs service and alleged government interference in the judiciary.
His lawyer, Boucounta Diallo, says Diagne faces several years in jail if convicted of ”publishing secret documents, publishing secret information, and acts and manoeuvres likely to cause public unrest and discredit public institutions”.
On June 23 Le Quotidien reported allegations of fraud in the customs service. It referred to a secret letter from Minister of Finance Abdoulaye Diop to Wade concerning an inquiry into the scandal.
Two weeks later the newspaper reported that Wade and Minister of Justice Serigne Diop had assigned independent judges to rural areas and promoted tamer but less qualified judges to senior positions.