One Thursday morning in March, I watched as a bull was butchered outside the house of Macky Sall in Fenêtre Mermoz. The then Senegalese opposition leader was living in this affluent quarter of Dakar, close to the Atlantic-facing corniche and a regional office for Oxfam. In the alley behind the house, men spread out the skin of the bull in the dust close to an abandoned airport scanner machine. They piled hunks of meat into metal tubs. Inside the house stood a woman of uncertain portfolio, holding a Victoria’s Secret carrier bag.

The departure of Sall’s campaign convoy was scheduled that morning for 11 o’clock. The hour came and went. His press attaché, a slim man with protruding ears, became increasingly uncomfortable. Finally the candidate emerged; cufflinks fastened the sleeves of his gleaming white boubou, or ankle-length robe. Approximately 90 minutes late, Sall’s caravan struck out into Dakar on a mission to win a presidential election.

On 25 March Senegal, a former French possession on the west coast of Africa, held the second and concluding round of its presidential poll. The contest featured Abdoulaye Wade, the octogenarian incumbent and leader of the Parti Démocratique Sénégalais (PDS), who had been first elected to the post in 2000 and was reluctant to hand over power. There had been demonstrations against him in the city, an opposition movement had sprung up and some opponents had died in confrontations with the state security services that had turned violent.

The protests in Dakar before the Senegalese election led to speculation that this might be the beginning of a sub-Saharan African spring. I flew in to Dakar just before the run-off. In the first round on 26 February, Wade got 34.8 per cent of the votes, the highest total of any candidate, but not enough to secure an outright win. Macky Sall, a geologist by profession who held various portfolios in Wade’s government before breaking away to form his own Alliance pour la République (APR), was the highest-scoring opposition candidate in the first round, winning 26.6 per cent. The other 12 opposition candidates had formed a coalition with Sall with the intention of ousting Wade.

The vision thing

One afternoon, I absconded from the journalists’ minibus and rode on the back of Sall’s pick-up as his convoy toured the city. We entered Guédiawaye, a working-class suburb of Dakar where concrete-reinforcing iron rods prod out of roofs. A crowd surged on either side.

Sall seemed an uncomfortable campaigner. Bespectacled and in his white boubou, he stood in his truck and waved both fists in the air but his movements were awkward. At one stage, addressing the crowd in the Wolof language, he declared: “Guédiawaye – you have given me a victory in the first round. I know the second round will be a confirmation of what you gave me. I know Guédiawaye has already chosen its side. Victory has been proven, visible and realised. If ever Wade tries to snatch my victory, the population will revolt.”

Despite his anti-Wade rhetoric in Guédia­waye, Sall is in some respects the man’s protégé: he served as prime minister under Wade until 2007, and ran Wade’s successful re-election campaign that year. His break with Wade came after he questioned the actions of the old man’s son, Karim, who many thought was being groomed by his father to succeed him as president.

The next morning I swapped sides. The French-colonial-style presidential palace on what used to be called the Avenue Roume has a gleaming white frontage. Sculptures of lions stand outside. Sprinklers were at work on trim lawns. Soldiers in red tunics stood guard outside the gates.

The presidential stretch Mercedes S600 was parked and waiting. Around the sunroof ran a handrail, rather like the equipment installed in lavatories for the disabled. I noticed a dent, too, on the rear right wheel arch.

On the morning of Friday 23 March, the last day of the campaign, President Wade, dressed in white slippers and a brilliant blue boubou, went out to meet his people. He was officially 85 at the time of the election but many Senegalese believed him to be older. As his convoy passed through Dakar, his supporters chanted “Gorgui”, a Wolof term of respect meaning “elder” that has become a moniker for the PDS leader. A white woman appeared out of the roof of the S600. This was Viviane, Wade’s French wife, standing beside her man.

In the colourful Marché des HLM quarter, Wade addressed a crowd of voters. “The people used to have $500 in a year. Now it’s above $1,000. That’s what the UN says, not what I said. We are not a poor country any more.”

Wade is a complicated figure, one of the last few survivors of the post-independence generation of African leaders. As an opposition stalwart, he fought and lost four presidential elections against the dominant Parti Socialiste du Sénégal before unseating Abdou Diouf in 2000. His record in office was mixed: new roads were built, Dakar was modernised and work began on a new airport. But he was accused of cronyism and nepotism, especially when he appointed his son to a super-ministerial portfolio overseeing international co-operation, air transport and infrastructure.

The most apparent evidence of the eccentricity of the Wade years stands on a hilltop above the Atlantic in Dakar, close to the Mamelles Lighthouse. At 49 metres, the Monument of the African Renaissance is taller than the Statue of Liberty. The gigantic bronze edifice depicts a man holding a child aloft. A third figure, a woman with her skirts blown up as if by the wind, leans towards the man. It cost $27m to build the monument and took a year’s work by North Koreans.

Mamadou Diouf, a Senegalese who is professor of African studies and history at Columbia University in New York, told me that Wade regarded himself as the best leader for Senegal. “It’s also a vision,” Diouf said. “He’s a man who believes he knows everything, and knows everything better than any Senegalese.”

But it was Wade’s actions before the elections that stirred the protests against him. In June last year, he attempted to pass a constitutional measure that would allow him to win the first round of a poll with only 25 per cent of the vote. Anger at this power grab gave birth to a protest group, the Mouvement du 23 juin (M23).

The day before the run-off vote in March, I arranged to meet Alioune Tine, one of the leaders of the M23, at the Pointe des Almadies, the westernmost point in mainland Africa. In a restaurant where the awnings advertised Beaufort beer, the 63-year-old literature professor, dressed in a robe, sat at a table. “The current constitution of Senegal has all the power with the president,” he said. “The National Assembly is very weak, the judiciary is very weak.”

Before the first round of the election, the M23 had failed to force Wade not to stand for a third term. Senegal established a two-term constitutional limit for presidents in 2001. Wade unilaterally decided that the limit should not apply to his first term in office, which started a year before the law was passed. Now the M23 had hitched itself to Sall’s coalition.

The protests against Wade before and during the election were restricted to a small number of events. Senegal does not have the large pools of disaffected and educated young people who were the kindling in the fires of the Arab spring. Yet it would be unfair to write off the movement altogether. Vincent Foucher, a civil rights researcher in Dakar, pointed out that for the first time in Senegalese history people’s participation in the campaign was based on conviction, rather than the expectation of largesse from a party boss. “I think it’s a very significant and important thing,” he told me; “it’s a new thing in Senegalese politics.”

Boo to the president

25 March Election day in Dakar began with lines in the sand – snakes of men and women whom I watched queue in the northern Parcelles Assainies quarter of the city. I failed to find a Wade supporter among them.

“We’ve had enough of him, though we know he’s done some great jobs,” said Gora Gaye, a tailor. “In 2000, in 2007, I voted for Wade, but now our hopes are dashed.”

Later, I went to see Wade vote in the Pointe E neighbourhood close to the seafront. There was tension. A marabout – one of the Muslim leaders who wield significant influence in Senegalese politics – had instructed his followers to come down to the polling station to show their support for the president. The authorities were struggling to control the crowd. Shortly after I arrived, police in black fatigues threw grenades of tear gas or smoke, it was unclear which. The violence did not escalate.

When Wade arrived to vote, he was wearing a white boubou. He had been booed when he voted in the first round, but not this time. Afterwards, he stood up through the sunroof of his car, looking backwards as it drove away, an old man all in white, retreating through the crowd like a piece of stage machinery.

By early evening, results were being announced on radio as they were posted at individual polling stations. It was not looking good for Wade. That night, I went to Macky Sall’s headquarters in the Scat Urbam quarter, home to large housing estates. Crowds had gathered outside. Some people had climbed trees; others were firing rockets; many were dancing. The atmosphere inside the building was party-like, APR and other opposition supporters excitedly massing.

At about half past nine, word filtered through that Wade had telephoned Sall to concede. Then when a rumour emerged that Sall would be at the Radisson Hotel on the corniche, I went over there. By the time I arrived, the French press corps had gathered. After midnight, Senegal’s new president appeared in a tent in the grounds of the hotel and addressed those gathered before him.

“We have shown in the face of the world that our democracy is mature,” Sall said. “I respect also those who voted for the other candidates.
I will be the president of all the Senegalese.”

When the final results were announced on 27 March, they showed that Sall had won a landslide victory, by 66 per cent against Wade’s 34. The peaceful transfer of power in an African election is an undeniable achievement. Overshadowing my time in Dakar were the events in neighbouring Mali. There, on 21 March, junior army officers launched a putsch that ousted the democratically elected government of Amadou Toumani Touré.

There is a strong democratic tradition in Senegal; it remains the only nation in mainland West Africa never to have experienced a coup since independence, which it won in 1960. Wade wanted to remain in power. However, unlike Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire, who refused to accept that he had lost an election in 2010 to Alassane Ouattara and caused a civil war, he had no choice other than to concede defeat in that night-time telephone call to his opponent. Wade would not have been able to command the loyalty of the military, and Senegal does not have the same kind of ethnic fissures to exploit as in Côte d’Ivoire. It also has a vigorous and free press, and its presidential election underlined the point Barack Obama once made to an audience of MPs in Ghana – that Africa needs strong and open democratic institutions, rather than more strong men.

Simon Akam is the Reuters correspondent based in Sierra Leone