Since the announcement made on Sunday, December 13, 2020 by Oumar Gueye, Minister of Territorial Collectivities, Development and Planning of Territories on a possible abolition of the City of Dakar, the political debate is agitated in Senegal. This deletion implies a change of status for Dakar. The capital will only become a department and therefore, no need to have a mayor at its head.
‘We cannot be both department and common at the same time. Today we have to comply with the code. That is to say, to the existence of two entities that are the department and the commune”, these are the remarks of the minister Omar Gueye in the program Jury du Dimanche sur ITV concernant la question de la suppression.
Adama Diouf, President of the Union of Local Elected Representatives’ Associations, who was invited on IRadio, said that: The code says, in its first article, that the territorial collectivities of Senegal are the department and the commune, it did not cite a city in this article. So substantially, the city should not be in our chosen architecture because it is not mentioned in the institutional architecture of our communities.” Then, a little more clearly, he considers that “the city has the same competences as the department, it is quite conceivable that the city should become a department.”
A completely flawed reasoning by Amadou Sène Niang, consultant in territorial governance. For him, Minister Oumar Gueye does not really master the general code of local authorities. The city is created by the law to which it asks us to conform and this same law advocates the creation of cities to say common that have a territorial homogeneity to pool their competences and their means. If the minister allows himself to say that this same law only recognizes the department and the municipality, I think he is mistaken,’ he said in Soir d’infos sur la TFM.
Therefore, he finds in this new government initiative an additional political strategy to fight the opposition. “First, they tried to asphyxiate all the initiatives taken by the cities, then they talked about the appointment of the mayor of the city. I think this is also in bad faith because it is a step backwards for decentralization in Senegal,’ says the decentralisation expert.
The coordinator of the Civil Forum, Birahime Seck gives less importance to this debate which he considers superfluous and inappropriate. For him, the focus should be on holding territorial elections.
In any case, if such a measure is implemented for Dakar, it should
