Tivaouane, January 12 (APS) – The mayor of Tivaouane installed, on Saturday, the advisory council of the Tidiane religious city, made up of members with rich and diverse profiles, with Elhadj Malick Sarr, former director general of ANIDA, as coordinator, noted the APS.
“I am honored to install today in Tivaouane an advisory council composed of valiant sons of Tivaouane, with multidisciplinary expertise. They are doctors, international civil servants, senior executives of the Senegalese administration, who have been the pride of the public administration, the private sector and civil society and they will have to make their contribution, to a Tivaouane at the crossroads,” said Demba Diop Sy.
The councilor of the municipality of Tivaouane installed the members of the advisory council, created by order of the mayor, after deliberation of the municipal council, in accordance with decree 2021-1697 of December 9, 2021 and the General Code of local authorities, institutionalizing citizen participation.
Demba Diop Sy underlined the “great leap forward on all levels” that the Advisory Council is called upon to play in the development of the commune of Tivaouane.
According to Abdou Aziz Diop, former deputy national coordinator of the Civil Forum and member of the Advisory Council, it is “a way of articulating representative democracy and participatory democracy and of establishing good local governance, with some major principles, including participation, equity, effectiveness and efficiency, transparency and accountability”.
The structure will be coordinated by Elhadji Malick Sarr, former director general of the National Agency for Agricultural Integration and Development (Anida).
He underlined the “visionary” character of the mayor of Tivaouane, who chose “high-ranking personalities, who have experiences as diverse as they are varied in Senegal, Africa, Europe and Asia”.
“It is a great innovation to bring together, alongside the Municipal Council, intelligence like these engineers, these doctors, these pharmacists, these experts,” he commented.
He hopes that “all this human capital, all these legitimacy and skills will pool their different resources and engineering for the sole benefit of Tivaouane”, to make it a “pole of religious development”.
“The advisory council supports the municipal council and issues informed opinions, but the deliberative body remains the municipal council, which received the vote of the populations of Tivaouane,” said Mr. Sarr.
“It is not a second municipal council, given its composition with an apolitical majority, and its well-defined and supervised missions,” he adds.
The members of the advisory council have the mission, he said, to “build a futuristic vision which will benefit the sole future of Tivaouane” and to prepare the religious city, which in a few years will be the “only city in Senegal to the crossroads of two important highways: Ila-Touba and Dakar-Saint-Louis”.
“The Tivaouane Advisory Council will strive to provide informed, objective and constructive technical advice on all questions relating to good governance and local development for a Tivaouane of the future, reimagined but a city on a human scale,” indicates its coordinator.
This body can enlist, as part of its missions, the services of any resource person whose expertise it requires, informs Elhadji Malick Sarr.
He insisted on the need to anticipate the inconvenience that this connection between two highways within Tivaouane will cause.
He also underlined the importance of designing the Tivaouane of tomorrow with its interland, through a relationship between the rural and the urban, of taking into account its role as capital of the first mining department of Senegal, of its other advantages comparisons in the field of agriculture and market gardening, but also of the two highways which will make the city a supply hub.
This work was entrusted, according to Elhadji Malick Sarr, to “actors well versed in local development issues, land use planning and local development”.
MKB/ADI/MK/AB
