BIRTH OF THE MAMADOU DIA FOUNDATION

Academics, relatives and former collaborators of Mamadou Dia proceeded on Saturday to the launch of a Foundation bearing the name of the former president of the Senegalese Governing Council from 1957 to 1962, with a view to perpetuating his work.

Called the Mamadou Dia Foundation for the Human Economy, the new structure was set up during a constituent general meeting held in Dakar.

The French academic and socio-anthropologist Roland Colin, former chief of staff of Mamadou Dia, was brought to its presidency.

Moustapha Niasse, president of the National Assembly of Senegal and also a former collaborator of Mamadou Dia, holds the vice-presidency.

Roland Colin, author of a biography on Mamadou Dia, also takes advantage of his links with Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal who was his teacher at the National School of Overseas France.

He claims a “double proximity” with Mamadou Dia and Léopold Senghor, whose political antagonisms and rivalry at the head of state led to the political crisis of 1962 in Senegal.

The ”events of 1962” refer to an institutional crisis against a backdrop of political differences linked in particular to opposing visions of decolonization.

Mamadou Dia was in favor of a break with France, unlike Senghor, who remained attached to the former colonizer until the end.

Opposing visions that led to a crisis of the regime and the breakdown of the friendship between the two men, who had deep relations born of political battles they waged after 1945 and until independence.

Mamadou Dia and four of his ministers, accused of an attempted coup, were arrested and sentenced to heavy sentences. They will be detained for a long time in a special detention center in Kédougou, in the south-east of Senegal.

Mediation undertaken by Roland Colin facilitated the release of Dia and his companions (Valdiodio Ndiaye, Ibrahima Sar, Joseph Mbaye and Alioune Tall) in 1974.

According to Moustapha Niasse, the establishment of the Mamadou Dia Foundation for the Human Economy constitutes “an act of human nature to perpetuate the legacy of a multidimensional personality”.

“Beyond the statesman that he was, you always have to see the Sufi behind”, he said about Mamadou Dia, a man who, according to him, “always combined rigor and morality” in everything he did.

He returned, with many anecdotes, to the stay of the former President of the Council in Kédougou, which the interested party considered as “a spiritual retreat and not as penance”.

The choice of the Graduate School of Applied Economics (ESEA, ex ENEA) to host this constitutive general assembly represents in his eyes an important symbol, especially since this establishment will also serve as the headquarters of the Mamadou Dia Foundation for the human economy.

Moustapha Niasse recalled that the National School of Applied Economics (ENEA) is a creation of Mamadou Dia aimed at giving substance to “self-management socialism, rural animation and popular education” of which he was the cantor. .

According to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, it was Mamadou Dia who, in 1962, had asked the French Minister for Cooperation at the time to help him create in Senegal a high-level training establishment for executives. Senegalese development.

”Experience has shown that it is often disastrous to send cooperative executives abroad for training, because they find themselves absolutely cut off from the realities of the African peasantry, the European cooperative movements offering only a distant analogy, in most respects, with African cooperation”, he wrote at the time in correspondence addressed to the French minister.

Fatou Samb, granddaughter of Mamadou Dia, welcomed this initiative, on behalf of the family of the former president of the Senegalese government council.

The Mamadou Dia Foundation for the Human Economy is called upon to contribute to making the former President of the Council better known, but also his economic vision, she declared.

She says she keeps the image of the patriarch as a “rigorous, just man imbued with moral values”.

A teacher by training, Mamadou Dia was secretary general of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc (BDS), ancestor of the current Socialist Party for 13 years.

From 1949 to 1955, Dia was a French senator, before sitting at the Palais Bourbon (Paris) as a deputy for Senegal from 1955 to 1956.

He also served as mayor of the commune of Diourbel, before becoming vice-president, then president of the Government Council.

In December 1962, due to deep differences between him and President Léopold Sédar Senghor, who accused him of fomenting a coup, he was arrested and sentenced to life in 1963.

Pardoned in March 1974 then released, he was granted amnesty in April 1976, a month before the restoration of multiparty politics in Senegal.

Despite everything, he held no grudge against Léopold Sédar Senghor, who was altruistic to the point of praying for Senghor’s recovery when he fell ill.

In a documentary film shown during the ceremony, Moustapha Niasse testified that ”Senghor and Dia were two figures who complemented each other”. Senghor embodied the nation, he said, Mamadou Dia, the state.

Mamadou Dia died on January 25, 2009. He remained, for posterity, as the champion of a “socialist vision of development” inspired primarily by local realities.

BIRTH OF THE MAMADOU DIA FOUNDATION