02 June 2016
President Sall Strikes Again
Good news from sub-Saharan Africa.
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week, an ex-president of an African country was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Hissène Habré was president of Chad from 1982 to 1990. In those eight years he proved himself a ruthless dictator and brutal tyrant. He killed 40,000 of his own people and tortured more than 200,000. Many others were enslaved, many were raped. He himself personally committed atrocities and kept detailed reports of his victims’ sufferings.
But at last justice has caught up with him. Victims such as Souleymane Guengueng, who had sworn that he would make it his life’s work to collect evidence and pursue the guilty if he ever survived torture and captivity, had their day in court, a day which a spokesman for Human Rights Watch said “will be carved into history as the day that a band of unrelenting survivors brought their despot to justice. The verdict sends a powerful message that the days when tyrants could brutalise their people, pillage their treasury and escape abroad to a life of luxury are coming to an end”.
And the court where the tyrant was tried and justice was done; where was it? In the USA? In Europe? The UN’s International Court of Justice at the Hague, in the Netherlands, perhaps?
No. It was in Africa, at a special court in Senegal.
Hissène Habré fled to Senegal in 1990 when he was overthrown by the former military advisor and current President of Chad, Idriss Deby. He was indicted by a judge in Senegal in 2000, but for more than ten years nothing happened. And then, in 2012, Macky Sall was elected president of Senegal.
Remember President Sall? This isn’t the first time he has featured in Shaw Sheet. A geological engineer by profession, he became a government minister in 2001, served as Prime Minister from 2004 to 2007, and made headlines earlier this year when he proposed cutting the presidential term of office from seven years to five, introducing a two-term limit and expanding the powers of parliament – when many other African leaders are abusing their powers to achieve quite the opposite. The suggested reforms were subsequently put to a referendum and accepted, more than 60% voting in favour of changing the constitution. (Nevertheless, the Constitutional Council has ruled that they cannot take effect until President Sall has served the full term of seven years for which he was elected, so he will reluctantly have to serve those extra two years, until 2019 rather than 2017!). President Sall declared that “We have to understand, in Africa too, that we are able to offer an example and that power is not an end in itself”. See ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’, Shaw Sheet issue 42, 25 February 2016.
And now he has set another kind of example. The prosecution of ex-President Hissène Habré was his initiative, part of his wider campaign against corruption and immunity from prosecution.
In a week when the news has been full of horror stories about the sufferings and ordeals of refugees from other sub-Saharan African countries trying to flee north to Europe, it’s reassuring to remind ourselves that there is good news from that part of the world as well, even if it doesn’t always make the front page.
For the same reason, President Magufuli of Tanzania also deserves an honourable mention. He made the news last week by sacking his interior minister “following reports that he was drunk in parliament and failed to respond properly to questions”, as the Prime Minister said. When John Magufuli became President of Tanzania last year, he cut government spending, banned foreign travel and first class air tickets for officials, merged some ministries and abolished others (bringing the size of the cabinet down from 30 to 19), cancelled expensive independence day celebrations and dedicated the day to street-cleaning and improving sanitation instead. The budget for the traditionally luxurious banquet for the state opening of parliament was cut by 90% and the savings spent on hospitals and roadworks. He sacked the director of a hospital when he found patients sleeping in corridors. He has made it clear that he will not tolerate corruption among government officials and expects them to be hard-working and effective.
President Magufuli has been nicknamed the Bulldozer. He and other presidents like Macky Sall of Senegal are busy clearing the bad news out of Africa and building good news, even if we don’t always get to hear about it.
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