APA-Dakar (Senegal) Having grown up under the political wing of former Prime Minister
Idrissa Seck, Dethie Fall is now rubbing shoulders with the crème de la crème of the country’s elites and hopes to become Senegal’s fifth president.
By Abdou Khadir Cisse
Dethie Fall, 48, from Saint-Louis in the north of the country, is one of 19 candidates in the presidential election on 24 March.
A graduate of the Re mi party of Idrissa Seck, a polytechnic engineer is into his twentieth year
in the Senegalese political arena with a programme that should herald the advent of a “Senegal that is good to live in and beautiful to see.”
He theorises about freezing the bosses’ assets.
Firmly anchored in the opposition despite his mentor’s brief rapprochement with Macky Sall’s regime in 2019, Mr. Fall decided to assume his responsibilities after “touring Senegal and its diaspora several times.”
Following citizen consultations, he came to the “bitter conclusion” that the Senegalese people are experiencing “unprecedented social stress and are very sceptical about the possibility of bright prospects.”
However, the head of the Republican Party for Progress (PRP), which he founded after his break with Idrissa Seck, indicates in the first strategic objective of his political scheme, which he identifies as “a Senegal that is of a far better future than it had ever been in its 63 years of independence.
He has a strong conviction that his compatriots should give his political experiment a chance because he knows the levers for “transforming Senegal into a totally sovereign country, with a completed democracy and an emerging economy driven by industrialisation supported essentially by the national private
sector.”
Restoring confidence
The first strategic axis of the Fall scheme is based on three pillars. Under his leadership, the rule of law will help to “restore trust in our institutions.” The economy will be used to achieve “a better
distribution of wealth in a more inclusive economy,” while the government will constantly strive to “satisfy social demand.”
Giving his word as a soldier, this reserve officer trained at the Ecole nationale des officiers d’active (ENOA) in Thies, 70 kilometres from Dakar, intends, if elected president, to make “consolidating corrections” to Senegal’s democratic gains in terms of its institutions and bodies monitoring good governance.
With Dethie Fall, the principle of the three independent and mutually controlling powers of the executive, legislative and judiciary “will remain the foundation of the republic.”
“However, I intend to eliminate all constitutional congenital defects that could allow one power to have legal ascendancy over another, to the detriment of the rule of law and democracy. The aim is to erect constitutional barriers to prevent any abuse of power by individuals embodying an institution,” promised the coordinator of the Yewwi Askan Wi (liberate the people) coalition in the 2022 legislative elections,
in which he demonstrated his qualities as a political strategist.
He succeeded in putting together an inter-coalition, dubbed the “Plan Dethie Fall (PDF),” with candidates close to the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), enabling the opposition to take almost half of the 165
seats in parliament.
Institutional reforms
At institutional level, the former vice-president of Rewmi intends to make progress to, among other things, prevent the president of the from being the leader of a party or a coalition of parties.
These reforms will also lead him to provide for constitutional recourse for the impeachment of the president, constitutionally limit the size of the government to a maximum of thirty ministers and propose a law to have at least 25 percent of young people under the age of 35 on lists to compete in legislative
and local elections.
To combat bad governance and corruption, Dethie Fall intends to propose a law to criminalise corruption in public affairs. As head of state, he will set up a financial prosecutor’s office with a prosecutor appointed for a five-year term with no possibility of removal, and will give audit bodies the possibility of referring cases directly to the financial prosecutor’s office to follow up on misappropriations found during their audits.
In the second pillar of the first strategic objective of his programme, which will be based on “the structural transformation of the economy to make it more inclusive,” Mr. Fall indicated that this
economic transformation will be “driven largely by agriculture and industrialisation with strong national capital.” This orientation “should result in more inclusive economic growth leading to emergence
in ten years, and consequently the realisation of my vision of making Senegal a country that is good to live in and beautiful to look at,” he stressed, promising to carry out a major campaign to optimise
public expenditure.
Agriculture as the engine of development
To realise his ambition of making agriculture “one of the main roots of our economic development,” the President of the PRI will focus his responses on access to land. He also promised to work towards the
permanent availability of water and energy, technological upgrading, training and support for those working in the field, infrastructure, opening up production areas, protection against international
competition, and so on.
To enable the electrical energy sector to achieve its strategic objectives of supporting industrial and agricultural development, providing universal access to electricity and increasing demand, all of which will make Senegal a better place to live, Dethie Fall intends to deregulate the sector by opening it up to private investors, with priority given to national investors, introduce structural reforms to Senelec, the national electricity company, to give it a solid foundation on which to face up to the competition that will result from liberalisation, and accelerate the programme of universal access to electrification in order to complete it by 2025.
As we approach the exploitation of Senegal’s oil and gas resources, he recalled “the historic responsibility to exploit them in a patriotic and rational manner so that they serve our economic development without compromising the share that belongs to future generations”.
In the field of health, the programme he is proposing will provide answers to the question of the availability of health infrastructures and equipment equitably distributed throughout the country, a
sufficient number of well-trained medical staff; the existence of basic services in all health infrastructures and the handling of emergencies throughout the country. To this end, it intends to include first aid courses in school curricula from secondary level upwards, to establish the national SAMU as a level 4 health institution and to develop health insurance as a means of fully covering basic care (post
office, health centre, EPS) and emergency care.
An adequate living environment
The second strategic objective of the programme is devoted to spatial planning, housing and the living environment. With regard to regional planning, Dethie Fall’s vision is to create a pleasant living
environment for the population, to ensure territorial equity in the distribution of national resources, activities and people, and to interconnect the whole of the Senegalese nation in order to create
sustainable development throughout the country.
In terms of housing and the living environment, its ambition is to give the Senegalese people access to decent, affordable housing and a living environment conducive to the development of hearts, bodies and minds.
“The aim of the programmes that will be implemented is to give Senegalese people easier access to decent housing, provide an appropriate living environment and bring down rental prices. Rental
charges should represent no more than 8 percent of household expenditure at national level and 10 percent in Dakar,” Mr. Fall pledged.
ODL/ac/fss/as/APA