SENEGAL: Opposition blasts president’s scheme to delay polls to fund flood relief

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

DAKAR, 30 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - Senegalese opposition leaders are up in arms over a plan by President Abdoulaye Wade to postpone parliamentary elections by a year to free up funds for a flood relief plan for the capital, Dakar.

In a broadcast to the nation over the weekend, Wade said by fusing the parliamentary elections, due in 2006, with presidential elections scheduled for 2007, Senegal could cut costs and free up money to help those people who had been hardest hit by some of the heaviest rains in 20 years.

He mapped out a US $96.5 million plan to relocate people from low-lying shantytowns around the capital that have been flooded and overhaul the communities.

"The success of the operation depends on a decision by the national assembly to push back the legislative elections,” Wade said. “In fact, it is not reasonable for a poor country to devote $13 million for elections in 2006 and the same amount for other elections in 2007."

Opposition leaders are vowing to resist the plan, saying Wade is capitalising on the floods to fix political problems within his ruling Democratic Party of Senegal. They say the move would be a blow to democracy, undercutting the system of separate elections on which all parties reached consensus 13 years ago.

“The floods are nothing but a pretext,” said Serigne Mbaye Thiam of the Socialist Party, Senegal’s biggest opposition party which ruled from independence in 1960 until Wade won elections in 2000.

“President Wade’s party is torn apart by internal battles and he has no achievements to show; that’s why he is not ready to go before the voters," Thiam told IRIN on Tuesday.

“It is scandalous to use the institutions of the state like the national assembly where Wade knows his party is in the majority to pull off a political coup de force that undermines our democracy," he said.

Veteran opposition leader Wade enters his sixth year as president battered by a row with his former prime minister, Idrissa Seck - considered Wade’s most formidable political rival - as well as increasing condemnation by the opposition.

Amath Dansokho, the vice president of the national assembly and a leading member of the Independence and Labour Party, said the move to merge elections would be completely illegal. He said opposition party representatives are scheduled to meet with Wade on 8 September.

“We will tell him we will not accept the unacceptable,” Dansokho said.

In his Sunday broadcast, Wade seemed to pre-empt the opposition complaints.

“I appeal to all Senegalese - first and foremost to the representatives of the people [in the national assembly] to support the government’s proposal, whose motive is none other than to allow our country to face an unexpected catastrophe,” Wade said.

Consolidating the elections would save about $13 million - the remaining money for the restoration plan coming out of the government’s budget for 2006 independence day festivities, he said. He noted that calamities had forced changes to election timetables in some European countries in the past, citing France after the two World Wars.

Opposition leaders expressed dismay at Wade’s rationale.

“This is shocking in a democracy, especially to use people’s misery to sort out one’s political problems,” the Socialist Party’s Thiam said. “To face the problems caused by the floods, the money could be found elsewhere.”

Government officials declined to comment when contacted by IRIN on Tuesday.

A schedule for formal presentation of the proposal and a vote has not yet been declared.

[ENDS]