“Try go out into the streets and call a rally without Ousmane Sonko and we see. Try it. We will see if you can gather 100 people. You cannot even win your own municipality in elections”, Sonko says as he fired at President Faye when tensions flared between them.
Ousmane Sonko, the influential leader of Senegal’s ruling party PASTEF/Les Patriotes, publicly detailed a widening political rupture with President Bassirou Diomaye Faye on Tuesday, accusing the president of sidelining the party that helped bring him to power and attempting to weaken its leadership.
However, Sonko, the President of the National Assembly, says his PASTEF party would not seek to bring down President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s government through a “motion of censure”, while simultaneously delivering one of his sharpest public attacks yet on the president’s political standing.
“We will not file a motion of censure unless the President and his people attack us first,” Sonko says in a lengthy press briefing, insisting that PASTEF was not seeking a confrontation with the government despite growing tensions between the former allies.
“We are not the adversaries of President Diomaye Faye and his government,” he says, urging supporters to remain calm and avoid responding to what he described as provocations.
“They are engaged in schemes and conspiracies,” he adds. “The referral to the Constitutional Council is part of that.”
“If they use the machinery of the state against us, we will use every constitutional and legal avenue at our disposal to respond effectively. We will respond in kind.”
Sonko revealed that he met President Faye only after mediation efforts involving new Prime Minister Al Aminou Lo and other intermediaries.
“In the end, we met after mediation by Al Aminou Lo and other individuals,” he says. According to Sonko, President Faye sent him a message late Monday evening inviting him to the Presidential Palace, but he postponed the meeting until the following morning.
Throughout the briefing, Sonko accused President Faye of attempting to weaken PASTEF by bypassing the party’s leadership structures and negotiating directly with individual members.
“He is pursuing strategies aimed at destabilizing PASTEF. That is why he tried to negotiate directly with party members without going through the party’s leadership institutions.”
On newfound dalliance with some figures in President Macky Sall’s administration, Sonko states, “He’s holding discussions with people who did nothing to help bring him to power. People who caused us too much pain.”
Mr. Sonko also disclosed details of discussions with President Faye about Senegal’s economic challenges. He says the president told him that “debt restructuring” was not currently under consideration but could become necessary if the country’s economic situation deteriorated. According to Sonko, President Faye also said he was not considering tax increases for now, though such measures could not be ruled out if economic pressures persisted as his government engages with IMF.
The PASTEF leader reserved some criticism for the new Prime Minister Al Aminou Lo as well, urging him to remain a technocrat and avoid partisan politics.
“I am taking this opportunity to ask Al Aminou Lo to remain a technocrat and to stay away from the political games,” he said, adding that he was aware of “many things” concerning recent “political machinations”.
