Senegal axes MPs to save money
2007-12-05 12:13
Dakar - Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade cut the number of ministers in his government by more than a quarter on Tuesday in a belt-tightening show of solidarity with citizens hit by rising fuel and food prices.
Wade reduced the number of cabinet posts to 28 from 38, with the ministers of livestock farming, public hygiene and competitiveness among the casualties. The savings would be put into a "national solidarity fund", said officials.
Presidential adviser Hassan Ba said: "The aim is to make the state live more modestly and make significant savings on the budget."
Octogenarian Wade pledged a month ago to trim his cabinet and cut ministerial salaries in a bid to "lessen the suffering" of the country's poor, who had seen the price of basic goods like rice and bread rise sharply in recent months.
Cops try to evict vendors
Riots swept the normally tranquil capital, Dakar, two weeks ago, with stone-throwing protesters complaining about widespread unemployment and rising prices at a time when the government was building luxury hotels and four-lane highways.
The unrest, which locals said was among the worst in recent years, was triggered when police tried to evict street vendors - most of them young men with no other way of making a living - from the pot-holed city centre.
The former French colony was one of the first countries in Africa to espouse multi-party politics in the 1970s and had long been regarded as a haven of stability in turbulent West Africa.
But diplomats, economists and rights groups were growing concerned about the increasingly intolerant style of Wade's administration and about the transparency of public spending.
Wade's critics said the austerity measures, which included using energy-saving light bulbs and internet telephony to halve the estimated $30m spent by civil servants on phone calls each year, did not go far enough.
"The number of ministers we have is still well above the number in developed countries which are much larger in size and a lot more important than Senegal," Habib Sy, director of Senegalese anti-graft group Aid Transparency, said.