Universities closed after violent nationwide protests

The University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (UCAD), Senegal’s leading university, is one of several higher education institutions that have been closed until further notice, following violent protests throughout the country after a political opponent of President Macky Sall was sentenced to prison.

UCAD was especially badly damaged by protesters, with buildings and vehicles set on fire, campuses ransacked and violent clashes involving armed forces and supporters of Ousmane Sonko, a political leader popular with young people who has been convicted of ‘youth corruption’ with a two-year sentence that, if upheld, could make him ineligible to run in the 2024 presidential election, reported Le Monde.

Sud Quotidien reported that at least 15 people were killed during riots, mostly in Dakar and at Ziguinchor in the south of the country, where Sonko is the mayor.

Demonstrations of a “rare violence” were triggered on UCAD’s social science campus, where students’ living quarters are located, with students supporting Sonko’s Pastef-les-Patriotes party confronting supporters of the republican movement Meer, reported Sud Quotidien. When law and order forces intervened, the rioters retreated and set fire to university buses and other vehicles.

Protesters who invaded the academic campus vandalised several faculty buildings – including humanities, medicine, sciences, and economics and business – and a student support centre.

The CESTI school of journalism, which is located at UCAD, was stoned and set on fire, its director Mamadou Ndiaye told Le Monde.

Previously, pro-Pastef students had barred the avenue Cheikh Anta Diop, demanding the release of one of their members, Midou Karamaba, who had been arrested after taking part in a television programme in which he said there were “students who know how to make a molotov cocktail”, reported Sud Quotidien. Police intervened and responded with tear gas to students’ stone-throwing.

Other universities that have closed until further notice are Assane Seck in Ziguinchor, Alioune Diop in Bambey and Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis.

SAES, the union representing academics in higher education, strongly condemned the “unacceptable vandalism of public and private property in the universities” and called on the government to “fully play its role as guarantor of individual and collective freedoms”, reported the Agence de Presse Sénégalaise.

The union expressed concern at the “tense national socio-political situation”, and said that, in spite of efforts by teachers and researchers to follow “a normal university calendar, the detrimental political situation nationally and the widespread vandalism of educational property risk was reducing all the sacrifices to nothing. — Compiled by Jane Marshall.

This article is drawn from local media. University World News cannot vouch for the accuracy of the original reports.