By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Senegal is just concluding a political transition that did not need to be as eventful as it was if the outgoing president, Macky Sall, had not tried to be too clever by half.

Sall has been something of an oddity, someone who acceded to power in controversial circumstances wrought by his predecessor, but who was not above trying monkey tricks of his own when it was time for him to leave.

Senegal itself, in fact, is something of an oddity, by not answering to the stereotypical African politics we got used to in the 1960s and through the ‘90s. Its first president, Leopold Senghor, crafted a semblance of guided democracy in which he was almost above criticism but opponents could have their say, if they did not mind a few spells in jail every when they went “too far.”

Like Julius Nyerere, Senghor retired of his own volition in 1980 — in fact, he beat Mwalimu to the act by five years —helping to set the precedent of African heads of state who relinquished power voluntarily rather than via military coups.

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Senghor’s nemesis was Abdoulaye Wade, dubbed le professeur, who eventually won the presidency from Senghor’ successor, Abdou Diouf, in 2000, for the first time the country witnessing the victory of an opposition party.

But soon Wade wanted to go the “African way” by amending the constitution to stay on beyond the term limits, which led to resistance, riots, and fatalities before calm was restored and a new president was elected in the person of Macky Sall.

Unbelievably, Sall himself fell into the same trap, not by wanting to hold onto power himself but rather wanting to impose a candidate of his choice, and making life difficult for a militant young man who was opposing him.

Sall machinated the disqualification of this young man; the latter picked a surrogate candidate to run against Sall’s anointed candidate; Sall put both young men in prison but, when they were released only a week before polling day, they beat Sall’s man in a first-round landslide!

You can draw as many lessons as you wish from this tale, but here is my take in a number of pointers. One, it is good to put up a fight against a bully, but one should never lose sight of the possibility of replacing a bully with another.

What we have seen in the case of Senegal is that it is too easy for a succession of bullies passing through revolving doors, each pointing at the last one as the bully as they take turns doing the same thing.

Two, the young men and women of Africa have had it “up to here” with the old diktats handed down by those in power, and they now want their voices, the voices to be heard. All the unfulfilled promises they have been given have inured them to anything new their elders may have to say. They want a fresh dispensation in which the young men and women will constitute the driving force.

Three, old arrangements and set-ups no longer hold water. We were used, for far too long, to a West African subregion where la francophonie held sway and francafrique decided everything in countries whose heads of state were marionets of the French and who received and executed orders telegraphed from Paris.

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That is no longer the case. Some countries in the region are redrawing the rules of engagement and are showing little respect for the French and their supposedly “superior” culture: French as a language is a medium of communication, but beyond that it becomes just Moliere’s vernacular. There is a new air in the atmosphere, and I think it is a breeze of emancipation, kind of.

We have witnessed the collapse of the traditional strictures that would have us believe that dictatorships are alright as long as they are practised by “civilian” rulers while it is clear that those so-called “civilians” cannot enforce their writ except through the military and the police.

In fact, the more I pore over the mess that governance has become on the continent, the more I realise that, for the past six decades, we have been taken for a number of rides, and the movement has been in a huge merry-go-round without ponies.

The myth of “Independence” was exploded sometime ago, but our failure to link our countries’ “independence” to our people’s meaningful freedom has kept that “independence” as something hazy and illusory. Our governance structures, institutions and processes have remained firmly anti-people and our electoral processes have given us only parodies of elections.

What we are hearing from Senegal are the rumblings I like to talk about, rumblings we ought to be heeding and listening to, because they are pregnant with meaning.

It is instructive that the West African regional community, Ecowas, has softened its stance on the military takeovers in the region. That is the way to go, because the military boys and girls are also sons and daughters of their countries, no less so than the non-military, and there is no logic in disenfranchising them.

What remains to be done with those regimes that are still called “civilian” is to demilitarise their governance systems and processes by making them more civil.