The long caravan led by the leader of the PASTEF party drew a large crowd into the streets of Sédhiou before holding a brief meeting at the town hall roundabout. Ousmane Sonko made a diagnosis of the region with his cliché of ambient poverty opposed to a paradox of availability of rich unvalued potential. He promises to correct this ambivalence if citizens grant an overwhelming majority to their list on the evening of November 17.
It was at the town hall roundabout that the PASTEF leader’s caravan stopped for around thirty minutes shortly after dusk to address the crowd who had been waiting for them since mid-morning. Ousmane Sonko asked the party’s secretary general, Mouhamed Ayib Daffé, to present Sédhiou’s candidates, who are himself Ayib Dafffé and Holimata Bayo on the departmental list and Ndèye Fatou Mané on the national list.
From the top of his vehicle, Ousmane Sonko observed that Sédhiou has rich potential but without investments to develop it: “the Sédhiou region is categorized among the three in Senegal where poverty is rife. And yet, the potential that exists here is rare to find elsewhere in Senegal. Sédhiou has all the potential needed to develop and investments still need to be made to get the region off the ground,” he emphasizes. And the leader of PASTEF dwells on this lack of infrastructure which places Sédhiou and its region among the most deprived. “Sédhiou is one of the regions with the highest rate of temporary shelters. Sédhiou suffers from an infrastructural delay because Sédhiou experienced a long delay before being established as a region. And yet it was the first administrative capital of natural Casamance. Sédhiou lacks health structures, high schools, universities, roads, crossing structures and youth infrastructure.”
Regarding the cessation of construction work on the Boudié loop, Ousmane Sonko first castigated the misinformation carried, according to him, by the opposition, attributing to them the deliberate desire to block the construction site and to specify the following: “with This project, we realized that the environmental impact studies had not been carried out. Great Britain, which financed this project, demanded that these studies be done first. Worse, they had committed commissions of forty-seven billion to be shared between them. It is the opposition which maintains this vagueness of discourse on this subject,” he explains. Finally, the leader of PASTEF invited the populations of Sédhiou to withdraw their voter cards and vote on their list on November 17 for an overwhelming majority allowing them to complete the process of change and unequivocally conduct the affairs of the country.
Moussa DRAMA
Senegal
