In Senegal, good governance is strongly impacted by the management of official vehicles and accommodation as well as diplomatic passports. Indeed, more and more, public officials, elected or appointed by the outgoing power, are reluctant to restore these privileges made available to them within the framework of their missions. Hence the recent standoff engaged by the new power against all these recalcitrants who are reluctant to restore the trappings of the Republic dedicated to them within the framework of their functions in the old regime.
The summons of the former general director of the Société Télédiffusion du Sénégal (Tds) Sa under the previous regime, Dr Nafissatou Diouf, as part of the procedure for recovering the Presidency’s official vehicles relaunches the debate on the report of the Senegalese man with the heritage of the State, even the public good. Indeed, even if the hearing of the latter by the Gendarmes of the research section made it possible to establish that she has nothing to do with this Peugeot 508 brand vehicle registered in her name, it must be recognized that the restitution of privileges made available to certain civil servants within the framework of their function constitutes a serious problem. The proof before this debate on the presidency’s automobile fleet was the question of the restitution of the diplomatic passports of former ministers and other dignitaries of the ex-regime which was on the agenda of the public debate. From vehicles to official accommodation to diplomatic passports and others, the observation is always the same.
Some civil servants considering these privileges as a luxury are often reluctant to return them at the end of their mission, thus forcing the State in certain cases to incur additional expenses to equip the newly promoted. This phenomenon is particularly accentuated following democratic changes in power where the new regime is often obliged to resort to public force to recover part of the State’s heritage, as is currently the case. Hence this operation launched by the National Gendarmerie for the recovery of official vehicles that the former head of state had made available to some of his collaborators as part of their former functions and which they now refuse today to return.
We remember the operations to immobilize “Hoover” vehicles initiated by the Gendarmerie and the National Police that the State, under the presidency of Wade, had purchased from the company “Espace Autos” of the Ccbm Group. But also those that the former head of state had made available to certain religious leaders, village chiefs and local elected officials and that Macky Sall had considered during the campaign as a strategy of his predecessor to corrupt the beneficiaries in sight to have their vote. To this, we must also add the official accommodation that certain ex-ministers, magistrates and officials continued to occupy at the expense of the Senegalese taxpayer. This situation had pushed the former Prime Minister and Benno’s unsuccessful candidate in the last presidential election, Amadou Ba, Minister of Economy and Finance at the time, to issue a summons to inform that the State will no longer pay any francs to the “renters without rights” from June 2014. At the time, our colleagues from “Libération” had informed that “certain officials did not hesitate to take accommodation at 800,000 francs while their salary barely exceeds one million “.
#Senegal
