Abdou Diouf
Abdou Diouf was president of Senegal from 1981 to 2000, the six-foot-six administrator whom Senghor had made prime minister in 1970 and to whom he handed the presidency on New Year's Day 1981, the first voluntary retirement of an African head of state. He governed nineteen years of the country's ordinary decline and extraordinary stability. The multi-party system was opened fully in 1981 from Senghor's four. There was the structural adjustment of the 1980s under the IMF, the devaluation of the CFA franc by half in January 1994 that he led the francophone states into accepting, and the groundnut economy that did not recover. There was the Casamance rebellion from 1982 that his army fought for the rest of his term, the Senegambian confederation of 1982-89 with The Gambia that dissolved, and the border war with Mauritania of 1989 in which hundreds died in pogroms on both sides and a quarter of a million were expelled. There were the elections of 1988 and 1993 that Abdoulaye Wade said were stolen and the riots that followed, and the election of March 2000 that Wade won in the run-off and that Diouf conceded on the night by telephone, which made Senegal the West African democracy that changes governments. He was born in Louga in 1935, the son of a postal worker, studied law at Dakar and at the Sorbonne and administration at the École nationale de la France d'outre-mer, and came home in 1960 to be a prefect at twenty-five. He was Senghor's chief of staff, planning minister, and the prime minister who ran the government for ten years while the poet-president wrote. He chaired the Organisation of African Unity in 1985-86 and 1992, when he took the organisation into the Rwandan and Liberian peace efforts, and was secretary-general of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie from 2003 to 2014, its longest-serving, making it a political body that suspended the coup states. He lives in Paris and Dakar at ninety-one. He was the country's elder through Wade's attempt to hand the presidency to his son and through Sall's attempt to postpone the election of 2024. In both cases he said that the constitution was the point, which is what he had done in 2000.
- Lived: 1935 CE – ?
- Nationality: Senegalese
- Roles: president, politician
