Macky Sall
Macky Sall was president of Senegal from 2012 to 2024, the geologist and former prime minister of Abdoulaye Wade who broke with Wade in 2008 when, as speaker, he summoned the president's son to answer for the spending on an Islamic summit, founded his own party. He beat Wade in the run-off of March 2012 by two to one after the eighty-five-year-old had run for a third term against the constitution and the June 23 movement had filled the streets. The twelve years were the oil and gas found off Saint-Louis and Sangomar in 2014-16 and the first production in 2024. There was the Emerging Senegal plan of motorways, the new city of Diamniadio, the Dakar regional train, the new airport and the stadium, built with Chinese, French and Turkish loans that took the debt from forty per cent of output to seventy-five. There were the family allowances and the universal health cover, and the referendum of 2016 that cut the presidential term from seven years to five. There was the jailing of Wade's son and of the mayor of Dakar Khalifa Sall before the election of 2019 that he won in the first round. Then came the years of the opposition leader Sonko, whose rape case and convictions kept him off the ballot and whose supporters were shot in the streets in March 2021 and June 2023, some sixty in all. Sall let the question of his own third term hang for two years before ruling it out in July 2023. He was born in Fatick in 1961, the son of a peasant who became a watchman, studied geology at Dakar and petroleum engineering in Paris, ran the state oil company. He was mayor of Fatick, minister of mines, of the interior, and prime minister from 2004 to 2007. He was the manager of Wade's re-election of 2007. The attempt of February 2024 to postpone the election by ten months, three weeks before the vote, which the parliament passed with the opposition removed from the chamber by gendarmes, was struck down by the constitutional council in a week. The election held on 24 March was won in the first round by Sonko's stand-in Bassirou Diomaye Faye, released from prison ten days before. Sall handed over on 2 April and moved to Morocco. He was the African Union's chair in 2022, when he went to Sochi to ask Putin for the grain. He is the envoy of the Paris pact for the people and the planet, while the new government audits his debt, which it says was understated by a third.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Senegalese
- Roles: president, geologist, politician
