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P 301229Z JUN 06
FM AMEMBASSY DAKAR
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 5592
INFO RUEHZK/ECOWAS COLLECTIVE

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DAKAR 001554 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/21/2011 
TAGS: PGOV ELAB SOCI ECON PINS PINR SG
SUBJECT:  MOODY RIVER: WADE'S STANDING IN THE NORTH 
 
REF: A) DAKAR 1011; B) DAKAR 0817; C) 05 DAKAR 3321 
 
CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR 
REASONS 1.4 (B) AND (D). 
 
SUMMARY 
------- 
¶1.  (SBU)  We traveled along the Senegal River Valley, 
from the dust-ugly but sugar-prosperous city of Richard 
Toll; to opposition fief Podor, which President Wade is 
contesting by building public works; and to a poverty- 
distraught Matam that is asking what Wade has done for it 
lately.  We visited during a national teachers' strike 
and amid talk of new farmer militancy.  Based on this 
trip and others to the center, east, southeast and south 
(Refs A and B), we conclude Wade faces severe electoral 
challenges in the countryside.  END SUMMARY 
 
SUGAR, SUGAR AND THE RIVERBOAT QUEEN 
------------------------------------ 
¶2. (SBU)  The trip east from Saint Louis is a venture 
into ever-deepening poverty, but the  disorderly and 
unkempt sugar-industry town of Richard Toll is an 
exception.  It has stagnated somewhat recently, but there 
was a building boom in the 1980's and cane fields and the 
Senegalese Sugar Company still provide jobs.  The Senegal 
River is navigable from here to Saint Louis and is 
unexpectedly lush and beautiful around the city's sole 
hotel, so for several years a circa-1950's French 
riverboat has been drawing European tourists seeking a 
taste of colonial lifestyle.  (Locals gleefully recount 
their version of the boat's arrival in Senegal.  To allow 
it into the river, Saint Louis' ancient trademark 
rotating bridge was opened for the first time in years; 
turning mechanisms stuck; and the island city was cut off 
for several embarrassed hours while an engineer was found 
who recalled how to fix it.) 
 
¶3.  (SBU)  Sugar company accountant and Democratic League 
activist Silba Ba told us he backed Wade in 2000 but was 
deeply disenchanted, as were many others.  Wade's local 
PDS (Democratic Party of Senegal) boss, Sire Fall, once 
led most of Richard Toll's political and labor leaders en 
masse to Dakar to cheer Wade at the presidential palace. 
Now, shadowed by Wade's unpopularity (and allegedly by 
failure to make certain promised political cash 
payments), Fall was now "in hiding."  Social problems 
were likely in any case, whatever the 2007 election 
results, with the people tense and the PDS capable of 
violence:  "If Wade loses," Ba sighed, "there will be 
riots, but if he does not lose it will be crisis." 
 
ROTTEN TOMATOES FOR WADE -- AND ONIONS, TOO 
------------------------------------------- 
¶4.  (U)  The River Valley road is a gallery of 200-lb 
onion sacks awaiting transport to Dakar, and heaps and 
rows of tomatoes in serial stages of spoilage and rot. 
There are also a few sweet potatoes and nothing else! 
In no other part of Senegal have we seen so little farm 
produce, and towns manifest the starkest poverty:  there 
are few soft drink stands; few people lounge about the 
oily-greasy truck stops chatting with friends or chance 
acquaintances; and no vending ladies run to your car 
hawking fruit. Locals have no money for such luxuries 
anyway; one opposition figure claimed many families are 
down to one meal a day, and from what we saw onion sauce 
figures in every meal and has become virtually a staple. 
 
¶5.  (C)  Podor's PDS is divided into the usual factions, 
though their leaders represent an unusual range including 
a counselor to the president, the national director of 
ports (domaine portuaire), a tax inspector, and others. 
Given the reported fervor of these rivalries, the PDS 
Deputy Mayor, Mr. Sy, was remarkably laid back.  He had 
had a rough week, with city schools shut down by the 
national teachers' strike and parents unhappy, and he 
seemed resigned to more difficulties.  The strike was a 
nationwide effort to put pre-electoral pressure on the 
PDS, he guessed, and Wade and the PDS would be hard- 
pressed to repeat its 2000 win in Podor. 
 
¶6.  (C)  Meetings with the opposition evoked tales of 
unmitigated social woe.  Moussa Ba, Ibrahima Agne's rep, 
called Podor, "forsaken and neglected, without jobs, 
young people on the streets ... and tax revenues not 
enough to accomplish anything."  The mayor's office was 
paying civil servants two or three weeks behind. 
Teachers are desperate," he said, "and their strike is 
justified, but it has paralyzed the town."  Above all, 
there was fatalistic River Valley despair that "If you 
want something, you have to be with those in power." 
Podor had backed Wade narrowly in 2000, and nothing was 
better.  In rainy season, river villages are isolated in 
 
DAKAR 00001554  002 OF 003 
 
 
a sea of flood and mud, and tomatoes rot because the 
processing plant is closed.  (We heard only after our 
trip that Wade has begun to build two small bridges to 
reconnect river villages to Podor.) 
 
¶7.  (C)   The Independent Labor Party's (PIT) Mor NDoye 
denounced what he called total PDS lack of interest in 
Podor:  "the mayor lives in Thies and we never see him." 
When Prime Minister Macky Sall came recently, the PDS was 
unable to attract locals and resorted to recruiting 
African-Mauritanians across the river for a rally.  NDoye 
lamented, "there is no real political life in Podor; only 
money counts."  Democratic League's Elhadj Assane Ndingue 
and Thierno MBodj commented that it is not just money 
that trades hands, charging that "the PDS mayoralty 
parcels out land to allies." 
 
¶8.  (C)  In all our conversations, we heard that local 
voter preferences had shifted markedly over the years, 
with Alliance des Forces de Progres leader Moustapha 
Niasse losing support, Ibrahima Agne gaining in 
popularity, and Socialist international lawyer and 
hometown favorite Aissata Tall Sall dominant overall, 
with admirers across the opposition coalition. 
 
MATAM:  A BRIDGE TOO FRAIL 
-------------------------- 
¶9.  (SBU)  In 2002, Wade raised Saint Louis Region's 
eastern department to regional status with its capital at 
Matam, a city endowed with administrative buildings but 
economically moribund.  Fuel tankers do not dare take 
rickety bridges over mud flats from highway to Matam, so 
it has no gas stations:  a lone and long unused 1950s 
"Phillips 66" gas pump may evoke the curiosity of any 
rare tourist who ventures by error into Matam's 
desolation.  The region's meager economic action, and 
garages, are in the upstart highway town of Ouro Sougi. 
 
¶10.  (SBU)  We had a single question to pose in Matam: 
will voters reward Wade for making Matam a region, or 
will votes reflect the region's economic misery and 
isolation?   In a long and raucous morning session over 
drinks in Ouro Sougi we asked three local reporters: 
Senegalese Radio and Television's Daouda Niang, Sud-FM's 
Babacar Nolao, and RFM's Aly Bandel Niang.  They framed 
their answer in terms of: a) a mentality of dependence, 
and, b) social backwardness symbolized by prejudice 
against the former slave class. 
 
¶11.  (C)  Matamois, Daouda Niang argued, were the most 
conservative in Senegal.  Local Islam is traditional (Ref 
C), but there is also the influence of the river, whose 
seasonal fluctuations and replenishment of the soil kept 
people tied to their farms.  Even as agriculture and 
fishing have become unrewarding, out-migration from the 
river valley remains low.  What was needed, Niang 
insisted, was a change in mentality, some spark of 
entrepreneurship as in Ouro Sougi. 
 
¶12.  Matam politics, Niang went on, had always been on a 
"cash or cousin" basis:  you voted for a relative or you 
voted for pay.  There was no gratitude for Wade:  when 
Prime Minister Macky Sall came to reorganize the PDS, 
which has no notable local leader, police had to break up 
a spirited protest against him.  If the PDS won this 
election, he insisted, it would be because villages were 
isolated and farmers had no access to voter registration 
centers.  The opposition had rented vans to transport 
villagers to register in Matam. 
 
¶13.  (C)  Reporters Nolao and Aly Niang contend Matam 
Region has "no positive self-identification.  It's just a 
vast expanse of unused land.  All investments here come 
from emigration, but it's all in houses or mosques, not 
anything that would produce jobs.  Even well-meaning 
projects go terribly awry, they recounted:  one semi- 
literate emigrant to Italy had made lots of money and 
built a "4-star" hotel in an isolated village of 3,000 
inhabitants.  Even that didn't work because the emigrant 
had not verified his land rights and the owners claimed 
the land and hotel.  Normally, he could have negotiated 
something with the owners, but since he was from the 
traditional slave class, no one was willing to condescend 
to deal with him fairly. 
 
¶14.  (C)  Responding to our key question, the journalists 
said Matamois had been eager to be independent of 
"distant and disinterested" Saint Louis, but they 
insisted "nothing had changed in Matam" since 2002.  We 
doubted that until, in Matam later in the day, the PDS 
deputy mayor seemed to be sharing their script:  "nothing 
has changed in Matam."  The government had laid the first 
stone for a new road from Matam through the heart of the 
 
DAKAR 00001554  003 OF 003 
 
 
country to Dakar, but the road remained far from travel- 
worthy and Matamois still had to pass through Saint 
Louis.  Even worse, he added, the region was not yet 
administratively free of Saint Louis:  many official 
seals of approval still had to be obtained there. 
 
 
WHO COUNTS?  TEACHERS AND FARMERS 
---------------------------------- 
¶15.  (C)  Aware that we were leaving for the North on the 
first day of what was billed as a nationwide teachers' 
strike, we met with Mamadou Diop Castro of the UNSAS 
teachers' union.  Castro said the strike was the first 
labor action he could recall since 2000 in which every 
concerned union, pro-Wade and opposition alike, was 
taking part.  By closing schools nationwide, he said, the 
teachers would make Wade listen to specific demands while 
reinforcing their power as the only opinion-makers with 
influence throughout the country.  In both Podor and 
Matam, at least, we observed that the strike appeared 
total, with teacher union political influence confirmed. 
 
¶16.  (C)  To gauge the leadership of the other social 
force in the countryside, we saw the leaders of the 
Conseil National pour la Coordination des Ruraux (CNCR). 
We met Cheikh Abdoul Khadre Cissokho in an upscale Indian 
restaurant, and he was playing a role of bumpkin to 
perfection, dressed in a country style gown of course 
cloth and earth tones, big-boned with a long-unshorn 
beard and a peasant's innocent smile.  Luckily we had 
read his bio before, understood that he had a French 
wife, took French Senate Presidents fishing on the coast 
and had been National Assembly President for eight years. 
 
¶17. (C)   Although he is a Socialist, Cissokho seemed to 
be striving for impartiality, alternately praising and 
criticizing Wade's farm policies.   Social protection for 
farmers, he argued, had to be won gradually via dialog 
and not confrontation:  he condemned "a splinter group" 
that championed farmer rights in May Day celebrations. 
Meanwhile, the younger Mamba Gueye, Fisherman's Union 
leader and nominal CNCR president, sat with deep respect 
but clear impatience for Cissokho, and managed to slip in 
that farmers, herdsmen and fishermen were everywhere 
deeply unhappy with Wade's failure to provide quality 
seeds, transport to market or guaranteed fair prices. 
 
COMMENT 
------- 
¶18. (C)  Wade seems doomed to lose in Podor, which is 
dominated by the Socialists' Aissata Tall Sall.  Still, 
he is not conceding, and is using public works, the 
building of bridges, to at least cut losses.  In 
addition, we were puzzled to hear after our trip that he 
had dispatched Casamance independence leader Abbe 
Diamacoune Senghor to Podor to praise Wade's attempts at 
reintegrating the war-torn region.  We cannot help 
doubting that that will win Wade many votes in the north, 
though, since the River Valley sees Casamance as a very 
distant place indeed. 
 
¶19.  (C)   Wade believes Matamois are grateful to him for 
transforming their isolated and poor departmental center 
into regional capital.  He may be right, but the economic 
misery of the region's towns and countryside, local PDS 
structural weakness and dependence on buying votes, lack 
of any real development activity save the first steps in 
building a road to Dakar, and his abandonment by most of 
the Left will make it difficult for him. 
 
¶20.  (C)  Combining what we saw in the North with what we 
learned earlier in the center, east, southeast and south, 
we conclude that Wade and the PDS have not come anywhere 
close to satisfying social and economic demands of 
farmers and small-town dwellers who deserted the 
Socialists in 2000 to vote for Wade.  While we have not 
this year visited the rural northwest around Louga and 
Linguere, we believe that by and large the PDS will find 
it extremely hard to win parliamentary seats in rural 
areas.  Despite Wade's tangible contributions, including 
village solar lamps and building schools, he will 
likewise find it hard in the presidential election to 
overcome rural disappointment with his performance. 
 
JACOBS