Abdou Diouf

Abdou Diouf: The Technocrat Who Conceded

On 19 March 2000, the sitting president of Senegal watched the runoff returns come in and read a number that ended his career: 41.5 percent against Abdoulaye Wade's 58.5. Forty years of Socialist Party rule in Senegal stopped there. Abdou Diouf did not contest the count, did not call out the army, did not stall. He conceded, and left office on 1 April. Wade, the man who had spent a decade being arrested and hounded by Diouf's government, later suggested his old adversary deserved a Nobel Peace Prize simply for going.

The Postman's Son

Diouf was born on 7 September 1935 in Louga, in what was then French West Africa, the son of a postman, into the Joof family — a Serer father, a Halpulaar mother, and a household in which Islam was practised devoutly. He was educated at the Lycée Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, the school that processed much of the colonial territory's future administrative class, then read law at the University of Dakar before continuing at the Sorbonne in Paris, taking his degree in 1959.

He returned to Senegal in 1960, the year of independence, and the state absorbed him almost immediately. In September 1960 he was Director of International Technical Cooperation; by November he was assistant to the Secretary-General of the government; by June 1961, Secretary-General of the Ministry of Defence. He joined the Senegalese Progressive Union — later the Socialist Party — in 1961. What followed reads less like a political career than a systematic tour of the machinery: Governor of Sine-Saloum from 1961 to 1962, director of cabinet at the foreign ministry in 1962, director of President Léopold Senghor's own cabinet from 1963 to 1965, Secretary-General of the Presidency from 1964 to 1968, and Minister of Planning and Industry from 1968 to 1970.

Chosen Because He Was Safe

When Senghor restored the office of prime minister in 1970, his calculation was defensive. Senegal had already survived one attempt on its constitutional order, and the poet-president wanted a deputy who could run the state without being able to seize it. Diouf fit precisely: a trusted administrator with no independent power base of his own, no region that was his, no faction that answered to him. He became prime minister on 26 February 1970 and held the post for nearly eleven years, to 31 December 1980.

Then, on 1 January 1981, Senghor did something almost unheard of in the Africa of that decade — he resigned, voluntarily, in Diouf's favour. The administrator inherited a country. He would run it for nineteen years.

Opening the Field

Diouf's first instinct in power was to widen the electoral aperture. Where Senghor's system had permitted four parties, Diouf's 1983 elections were contested by fourteen. He won them with 83.5 percent — a figure that says as much about the incumbency's grip as about the opening. The limits showed quickly. When opposition parties tried to build a common front in 1985, the constitution stood in the way: coalitions were prohibited, and fragmentation was thereby written into law.

The February 1988 elections were the ugly test. Diouf took 72.3 percent against Abdoulaye Wade's 25.8, amid allegations of fraud that Wade's supporters took to the streets. Diouf's answer was a state of emergency and the detention of his rival until May. It is the episode that most complicates the later reputation for democratic grace: the man who left quietly in 2000 had, twelve years earlier, jailed the opponent who beat him.

He was reelected in February 1993 with 58 percent, to a seven-year term. By the first round of February 2000 the arithmetic had inverted — 41.3 percent for Diouf against Wade's 30.1, with the opposition free to consolidate behind Wade in the runoff. It did, and Diouf lost.

The Region and the Epidemic

Two decisions define his substantive record. The first was regional and failed. On 12 December 1981 Senegal agreed a confederation with neighbouring Gambia, formally constituted on 1 February 1982 — Senegambia, an attempt to make two states behave as one. It dissolved in 1989, the same year the Mauritania–Senegal border war erupted in April, bringing ethnic violence and a diplomatic rupture with Nouakchott. The dream of West African integration ran into the reality that neither electorate had asked for it.

The second succeeded, and is the achievement most often left out of the political obituary. From 1986 — early, when many governments were still denying the problem existed — Diouf's administration ran a comprehensive AIDS-awareness programme through the media, the schools, and a system of registered sex work. Senegal's infection rate stayed below 2 percent while the epidemic devastated much of the continent. It was public health as statecraft, and it worked.

Abroad, he chaired the Organization of African Unity twice, in 1985–86 and 1992–93, and led ECOWAS, the Islamic Conference and the G-15. He was instrumental in founding the Gorée Institute. On 20 October 2002, at the Beirut summit, he was elected Secretary-General of La Francophonie unanimously, his only rival Henri Lopes having withdrawn. He took office on 1 January 2003, was reelected at Bucharest in 2006, and served to 31 December 2014 — twelve years running the institutional expression of the French-speaking world.

Why Abdou Is Called a Genius

The word does not sit naturally on Diouf, and the honest case has to begin by admitting it. Nothing in the record is intellectually original; he wrote no doctrine, founded no school of thought, produced nothing comparable to the poetry and philosophy of the man who promoted him. His gift was of a different and less glamorous kind: an exceptional capacity for the administrative state — for holding a whole apparatus in his head, moving through eight senior posts in a decade without failing at any of them, and being trusted by a president precisely because he was competent and unthreatening at once.

Where the claim to something more than competence lies is in restraint. Diouf twice made choices that cut against his own interest: opening the party system to fourteen competitors when four had been sufficient, and accepting a defeat in 2000 that a great many of his contemporaries would have annulled. Wade's Nobel remark is the closest thing in the record to an outside verdict, and it is telling that the praise is for what Diouf declined to do. The counter-case is substantial and belongs in the same paragraph: the 1988 state of emergency, the jailing of Wade, the constitutional ban on coalitions that rigged the field before a vote was cast, and a Senegambia project that collapsed in eight years. He was not a visionary. He was a very good administrator who, at the single moment when it counted most, chose the constitution over himself. That is rarer than genius and should not be confused with it.

Legacy

Senegal's reputation as one of Africa's more durable democracies rests partly on the fact that its ruling party lost, and accepted losing. Diouf's post-presidency — the Francophonie, the Sergio Vieira de Mello Foundation, the Fondation Chirac, the Information and Democracy Commission — extended the same institutional temperament by other means. He holds the Grand Cross of Senegal's National Order of the Lion and of France's Legion of Honour, and an honorary knighthood of the British Empire. His most consequential act took an afternoon and required him to do nothing at all.

Achievements

• Worked as politician, lawyer and head of government