(Dakar) The new Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye on Friday appointed a “breakthrough” government largely composed of faces new to the general public and novices at ministerial level.
The government announced to the press at the presidential palace includes 25 ministers, including four women, for Foreign Affairs, Fisheries, Family and Youth and Culture. It also includes five secretaries of state, all men.
“The government established here on April 5, 2024 is a government of rupture […] it is a government which embodies the project, a systemic transformation acclaimed by the Senegalese people on March 24, 2024 through a first round election with 54.28% of the votes” of Mr. Faye, said Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko.
The list contains some names of executives from the party of the president and the prime minister, Pastef, on the front line of the confrontation in recent years with the old power.
Birame Souleye Diop inherits the Energy, Oil and Mines portfolio, strategic in a country which should start producing oil and gas in 2024. Other figures from Pastef, Malick Nidiaye is appointed to Infrastructure and Land Transport and aerial, and Moussa Balla Fofana for Regional Planning and Urban Planning.
A large majority will discover ministerial functions.
Bassirou Diomaye Faye, himself never elected to a national mandate, won a resounding victory in the presidential election by presenting his project as that of a “break” with a system in place for too long in his eyes and with the Macky Sall years .
The last three years of Mr. Sall’s presidency were marked by the standoff with Pastef and Mr. Sonko, and by unrest which gave rise to dozens of deaths and hundreds of arrests.
The new Minister of Justice, Ousmane Diagne, is a former prosecutor general at the Dakar Court of Appeal. His appointment to the Supreme Court in 2023 had been presented as a sanction by the press because he would have followed up on a complaint from Mr. Sonko in one of the various legal cases in which the latter was implicated and of which one led to the invalidation of his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election.
Mr. Faye, second to Mr. Sonko at Pastef, replaced him in the election.
Mr. Sonko stated on Friday as priorities of his government, youth and the employment of young people and women, the fight against the high cost of living, justice and the protection of human rights as well as “accountability”, “economic sovereignty” and development, the consolidation of national unity and the strengthening of security.