A crucial election for Senegal’s press

A decade or so ago, following his election as president of Senegal, Macky Sall promised that no journalist would be jailed for their work on his watch. Over the years, Sall has reiterated the pledge. Earlier this month, he again defended the importance of a free press after Maimouna Ndour Faye, an outspoken TV journalist, was stabbed overnight near her home in Dakar, the capital. (She survived; who perpetrated the attack and why was initially unclear.) “I firmly condemn this cowardly and inexcusable act of violence,” Sall wrote on X. “Freedom of the press is a fundamental right that must be protected and respected in all circumstances.”

Between Sall’s early pledges and his recent comments, however, the freedom of the press has increasingly come under threat on his watch. In 2023 alone, no fewer than ten Senegalese journalists passed through the country’s jails. Some were released under strict conditions, but at least five were still behind bars when the Committee to Protect Journalists conducted its annual global census of jailed journalists in early December, the highest such figure for Senegal since CPJ began the exercise in the early nineties. (Indeed, until 2022, Senegal hadn’t featured on the census at all since 2008, several years before Sall took office.) The journalists arrested last year faced various charges, but many of those were clearly linked to their work, including allegations that they spread “false news,” discredited state institutions, “usurped” the function of a journalist, and, in one group of cases, even incited “murder without effect” under a Senegalese law criminalizing verbal provocation, according to CPJ.

This deteriorating climate for press freedom has closely tracked a broader political crisis in Senegal, which has long been hailed as a bastion of democracy in a region increasingly marked by conflict, repression, and instability. This broader crisis led to the jailing not only of several Senegalese journalists, but of a populist opposition leader and some of his associates—as well as the postponement of elections scheduled for the end of February.

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