VZCZCXRO0599
PP RUEHPA
DE RUEHDK #0817/01 0931423
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 031423Z APR 06
FM AMEMBASSY DAKAR
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 4748
INFO RUEHZK/ECOWAS COLLECTIVE

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DAKAR 000817 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O.  12958: DECL: 03/24/11 
TAGS: PGOV EAGR PINR PINS KISL SG
SUBJECT:  WADE'S CAMPAIGN PRIORITIES:  THE TOWN WITHOUT A 
HEART 
 
 
CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR 
REASONS 1.5 (B) AND (D). 
 
SUMMARY 
------- 
 
¶1.  (C)  Old-timers claim populous and centrally-located 
Kaolack was once a beautiful, prosperous and charming 
city -- rather than a seasonally dust-choked or rain- 
sodden topographical smear on the road to somewhere else. 
With his Democratic Party of Senegal (PDS) fragmented 
locally into at least nine rival factions, President Wade 
is hard-pressed to keep the majority he won in previous 
elections.  He wants to reinvigorate a depressed economy 
and win votes by constructing a new "Heart of Kaolack." 
End Summary. 
 
SALT MINES UNDER A GOLDEN SUN 
----------------------------- 
 
¶2.  (C)  An American who volunteered in Kaolack 20 years 
ago recalls prosperity, hospitality and tranquility.  Few 
who visit today, though, can overlook the noise, poverty 
and overall sense of desperate ill-arrangement.  Deputy 
Mayor Ousmane NDour bemoans a "dying city" with only two 
industries: a troubled peanut facility and salt farms 
that hire only a few locals.  There were textile and 
gunny sack factories, but both are gone.  Kaolack was 
once a West African and Sahel crossroads, a depot for 
goods from Guinea, Mali and as far away as Burkina Faso. 
Three boats a week plied the arm of the sea called the 
Saloum River to transship Sahel goods and peanuts or 
peanut oil from rich and extensive nearby fields.  Now, 
says NDour, the "river" is silted up; the trains no 
longer run; poor rainfall has driven farmers south to the 
Casamance; the young have no jobs; and Dakar pays little 
attention.  With 247 full-timers and 100 on contract, the 
mayoralty is Kaolack's top employer. 
 
OPPOSITION STRONGHOLD 
--------------------- 
 
¶3.  (C)  Mata Sy, Senegal's only female Regional Council 
President, is a gruff, earthy woman with no intellectual 
pretensions and, apparently, a keen political talent. 
She tells us Wade offered her the prime ministry in 2001 
to replace Moustapha Niasse, her party leader in the 
opposition Alliance des Forces de Progres.  When she 
refused, she says, Wade came back with a counter-offer in 
2003:  become Minister of State with, if she wished, an 
official residence in nearby Kaffrine.  When she declined 
that as well, she says Wade told Macky Sall, "if Mata Sy 
does not join us, I'll select people with financial means 
to go down there and snatch the region away from her." 
 
¶4.  (C)  In fact, Mata Sy says, Wade's effort to hold 
Kaolack includes an ex-Minister of Construction, the 
President of the Kaolack Banque Credit Agricole, the ex- 
director of scholarships at the Education Ministry, the 
Parliamentary First Vice-President, and others with the 
means to try to unseat her.  Some of these, she noted, 
were long-time PDS loyalists, but Wade's Kaolack strategy 
hinged on enlisting ex-Socialists.  A side effect of this 
was to expand and intensify Kaolack's sometimes vicious 
intra-PDS rivalries. 
 
¶5.  (C)  AFP deputy leader and Kaolack MP Madieyna Diouf, 
speculated to us that PDS fractionalization in his home 
town was the country's worst.  Local Socialist Diockel 
Gadiaga, sitting in the dark in his paint-peeled, party- 
out-of-power hovel-headquarters, claimed there are "nine 
PDS factions in the city and 20 in the region!"  SUD-FM 
reporter Pape NDiaye says that what has passed for PDS 
consensus after a recent visit by PM Macky Sall, "just 
delays the free-for-all (la pagaille)."  Fearing inner 
PDS turmoil may be directed to PDS rivals, Democratic 
League (LD) local leader Mapate Ba recalls that Kaolack 
was one of the few towns touched by violence in the 2000 
campaign.  When then-opposition chief Wade was in town, 
Ba said, PDS youth trapped a government coalition leader, 
pummeled him, "trussed him like a goat," and threw him 
into a Peugeot.  Hours later, Wade supposedly turned to 
the car owner to say, "you have a Socialist tied up in 
your back seat.  Better take him to hospital." 
 
WADE'S MONUMENTS VS REGIONAL TRADITION 
-------------------------------------- 
 
¶6.  (C)  The LD's Mapate Ba is among those who think they 
can predict Kaolack's election outcome by crunching the 
numbrs:  he computes that the PDS coalition won 2002local elections by 800 votes, that the LD with sevral 
 
DAKAR 00000817  002 OF 003 
 
 
thousand votes is now in opposition; so Wade will lose. 
 
¶7.  (C)  Others are not sure it will work out that way, 
and believe the two forces most in play are opposition 
co-leader Moustapha Niasse's personal standing, versus 
Wade's willingness to rebuild parts of the city.  The 
autonomous Kaolack branch of the Tidjane Brotherhood, 
which is active throughout West Africa including Nigeria, 
is dominated by two rival branches of the maraboutic 
Niasse family and the Niasse name is golden.  Moustapha 
Niasse's links to this family are apparently only distant 
and tenuous, but he nonetheless has the name and benefits 
from it. 
 
¶8.  (C)  To combat Niasse and dispel local disappointment 
with his performance, Wade intends to rebuild the Kaolack 
town center.  One project would transform the disused 
railway station and a stretch of track into a commercial 
center and broad showpiece boulevard.  A second would 
construct a new "Heart of Kaolack," which Deputy Mayor 
Ndiaye told us will also be a commercial center.   The 
problem, Regional Council President Mata Sy told us, is 
that Wade never consulted locally, at least not with her, 
before starting construction, and few are really sure 
what the site will include.  Mata Sy is clearly not well- 
disposed to the project, reports (a tad gleefully?) that 
one of the buildings has already collapsed, and predicts 
the project's "zinc roofs are going to launch into the 
sky in our next tornado."  Fortunately, she adds, there 
will be few by-standers when that happens, since the site 
is relatively distant from the busier parts of the city. 
 
WE SEE THE PEANUT ISSUE CLEARLY NOW 
----------------------------------- 
 
¶9.  (C)  In Dakar, both Socialist Party big-wigs and PDS 
parliamentary front-benchers will gladly discourse on the 
arcana of agricultural policy.  In Kaolack, its adjunct 
city of Kaffrine and the village of MBirkelane midway 
between them, debate is much simpler.  In local terms, 
the difference is that Socialists think farmers should 
continue to plant peanuts, with government support, while 
the PDS wants to replace peanuts with vegetables or 
Wade's crop-of-the-year, in turn maize, manioc, the local 
juice-fruit bissap, or now grapes. 
 
¶10.  (C)  MBirkelane's PDS MP, Mamadou Diallo, strikes us 
as highly unusual, in that he seems to be often in his 
constituency.  He joked with us, in fact, that "if you 
ask about me at Parliament, they'll say, 'who?'"  He said 
peanuts, once the basic crop of all central Senegal, can 
no longer provide a living.  Middlemen are offering 
prices below planting costs, and growers survive only by 
using peanut straw for animals.  He encourages farmers to 
diversify, at least to millet, and to use water 
catchments or valleys to plant household vegetables.  He 
has also had built a village generator to run a millet 
mill and is encouraging artisanal workshops. 
 
¶11.  (C)  Kaffrine used to be tied closely to Kaolacak, 
where it sent its peanuts to be pressed for oil.  With 
introduction of small-scale presses, though, the oil is 
now produced locally and Kaffrine is rapidly turning away 
from Kaolack and becoming a dependency of the Mouride 
Brotherhood's dynamic capital of Touba.  Kaffrine Deputy 
Mayor Malick Dia told us his city may be Senegal's 
poorest, and that, since it is built in a depression, it 
floods every year.  The opposition coalition controls the 
town. 
 
COMMENT 
------- 
 
¶12.  (C)  Kaolack is Senegal's fourth largest urban 
center, after Dakar, Touba and Thies.  With its PDS 
perhaps hopelessly divided, its vote appears up for grabs 
in the next election.  It and neighboring Kaffrine suffer 
from deepening immiseration; the local peanut industry is 
in rapid decline; and there is no consensus as to whether 
to revivify or replace it.  Dakar has not paid the region 
a great deal of attention, at least until recently, with 
President Wade's plan to rebuild the Kaolack city center. 
Even that relatively large-scale infrastructure 
development may suffer, though, since construction was 
undertaken without consultation with local political 
powers.  End Comment 
 
¶13.  (SBU)  This cable is the first of several examining 
the political balance in what the Senegalese call the 
"voter pools," or "bassins electoraux," the cities and 
Dakar slums where the next elections will be won or lost. 
 
 
DAKAR 00000817  003 OF 003 
 
 
JACKSON