By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Little-known outside Senegal, anti-establishment candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye just won the country’s presidential vote, in one of the most dramatic moments of recent African politics.

On March 13, Faye was sitting in prison together with Ousmane Sonko, the more charismatic president of his banned African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (French: Patriotes africains du Sénégal pour le travail, l'éthique et la fraternité, Pastef).

Faye had been Pastef’s secretary-general. He had been arrested in April 2023, and Sonko in July, in what was seen as a wider plot by President Macky Sall to eliminate strong rivals from the race.

With his second term coming to an end, Sall seemed to want to wangle a third term, provoking violent national protests. Undeterred, Sall’s government proscribed Pastef and, in January 2024, a pliant Constitutional Council barred Sonko from the election.

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Faye was not barred, so he promptly threw his hat in the ring. Still in jail, he became Pastef’s write-in candidate, with Sonko backing him in glowing terms.

Sall then postponed the elections scheduled for February and, again, hell broke loose as Senegal, a largely democratic and temperate corner of Africa, looked likely to boil over. This time a panicked Constitutional Court couldn’t do Sall’s bidding, and ruled that the election would be held on March 24. Finally, Sall and co put their tails between their legs and retreated.

On March 14, together with Sonko, Faye was released from prison. He had only nine days to campaign in a frenzied schedule before the vote on the 10th day. The rest is history.

At 44, Faye is the youngest democratically elected African president since Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina won the vote in 2018, at the same age. Rajoelina had a spell from 2009 to 2013, heading a military-instituted High Transitional Authority of Madagascar (HTA) that was set up following a crisis resulting from a popular uprising that he led.

Faye projects himself as a new generation of leader, and promises to fight corruption, distribute Senegal’s wealth fairly, reform a crooked judiciary, and is big on national sovereignty; what has been described as “left-wing Pan-Africanism”.

Talking up the solidarity of African peoples and vowing to fight the "French economic stranglehold" on his country, he sits in the new tradition of hard-line anti-French politics in its former colonies in the Sahel and West Africa, which has seen elected civilian leaders, French diplomats and troops driven out, especially in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, by junta leaders who came to power at the head of popular military coups.

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Faye’s victory is, therefore, significant because he is the first left-wing Pan-Africanist leader who will come to office with a constitutional electoral mandate. It also spotlights the silent advance of left-wing Pan-Africanism in Africa, and its many hues.

In 2022, Kenya’s President William Ruto mounted a populist campaign, in which he positioned himself as a New Age champion of the “Hustler Nation,” the men and women on the street, against “the Dynasties”.

Ruto, though he had fallen out with his president, Uhuru Kenyatta, remained in government, and faced off with veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga. Raila was backed by Uhuru. Uhuru is the son of Kenya’s founding president Jomo Kenyatta.

The Kenyatta family is arguably the wealthiest in Kenya. Raila’s father was briefly Kenya’s first vice-president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, before falling out with Kenyatta and going on to be a stalwart of the opposition. The Odinga family, too, is moneyed.

They could not have painted a better picture of Ruto’s dynasties privilege and entitlement. Ruto won the election, with Raila contesting the outcome in court.

Unlike Faye’s, Ruto’s version was of the social-democratic Pan-African variety. It is much the same in Uganda, with the hottest opposition politician of the moment, Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine, when he was a musician.

More Pan-Africanist in his rhetoric than both Faye and Ruto, he gave long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni a run for his money in the 2021 elections, until he ran into a wall of guns, violence, handcuffs, and vote-fiddling that put him down.

In South Africa, the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters and their fire-spewing leader Julius Malema offer the most militant version of left-wing Pan-Africanism; staunchly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-white, railing against colonial borders in Africa, and promising a massive redistribution of wealth and land to the masses. Malema, however, is unlikely to find favour as Faye did in the South Africa’ May elections.

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This populist, left-wing Pan-Africanism might be ant-imperialist, anti-French, and anti-racialist, but it is also driven by many internal developments, best exemplified by Ruto's “Hustler Nation” crusade.

Nearly three decades of peace in most of Africa, and a similar period of economic progress, have created the largest number ever of rich upper-middle class in Africa, with close ties to international capital. In most of these countries, it has also spawned the highest levels ever of wealth inequality ever. South Africa has the world’s highest wealth inequality and, with little variations in the data, six of the 10 most unequal countries in the world are in Africa.

With the privileged folks taking their offspring to the slew of expensive private schools that have mushroomed at home in the past two decades, and universities abroad, their children have returned to dominate most of the best jobs in the new technology and creative economies. These beautiful, sweet-smelling and happy people stand in sharp contrast to the vast mass that has been produced in Africa’s record population explosion.

The surprise is that a Faye wasn’t elected earlier, and that Malema is unlikely to win.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X@cobbo3