Wake

The National Assembly of Senegal approved on March 11 a reform increasing the maximum prison sentence for homosexual relationships to ten years (up from five) and criminalizing the “promotion” or “apology” of homosexuality. Despite the ambiguity surrounding how “apology” could be proven and punished, all deputies voted in favor. No opposition. Three abstentions. The usual commentators also cited the usual explanations: religion, culture, African values.

Here is what is actually happening: a government drowning in debts, unable to keep its electoral promises and protect its students from police violence, resorts to the oldest tool in the postcolonial playbook: governing and monitoring the bodies of the most vulnerable when unable to govern anything else.

Perfect Targets in Times of Crisis

The fiscal crisis in Senegal is severe, and its extent must be made clear. The administration of the African Patriots of Senegal for Labor, Ethics, and Fraternity, resulting from the 2024 elections, uncovered over $13 billion (€11.3 billion) in hidden loans, concealed from citizens, creditors, and the incoming government.

Payments on external debt now consume over 50% of public revenue. In March alone, the same month the anti-homosexuality law was adopted, the government paid $471 million (€409 million) to international creditors, while closing 19 state agencies and leaving student scholarships unpaid.

When states can no longer keep their promises, IMF conditionality limits budgetary leeway, and social transformation must be abandoned, symbolic governance fills the void of legitimacy. Moral legislation mobilizes religious authority, nationalistic sentiment, and cultural anxiety at minimal cost.

But the fiscal crisis does not create moral governance out of thin air. It exploits a preexisting patriarchal architecture. Queer individuals do not become available for state discipline when the economy collapses. They are already perfect targets, made available because patriarchy has constructed them as legitimate objects of state regulation, regardless of economic circumstances.

A Privatized University System

On February 9, Abdoulaye Ba, a medical student at Cheikh Anta Diop University, died during a police intervention following protests demanding unpaid scholarships and protesting deteriorating living conditions on campus. The government termed it an accident. Students, their associations, and the Autonomous Union of Higher Education (Saes) pointed to what the facts suggest: police violence.

Saes has linked Abdoulaye Ba’s death to a documented genealogy: Balla Gaye, 2001; Bassirou Faye, 2014; Mouhamadou Fallou Sène, 2018; Alpha Yéro Tounkara and Prosper Clédor Senghor, 2024; Abdoulaye Ba, 2026, and so forth.

Saes unequivocally condemned what it termed the excessive and blind use of force, holding the government accountable for the chronically failing management of university crises.

Abdoulaye Ba died within a university system lacking resources, overrun with excessive force, and governed by an administration repeatedly warned of the untenable situation. The same day, the Dakar gendarmerie arrested twelve men for “unnatural acts” and purported intentional transmission of HIV. By early March, at least thirty-seven suspects were in provisional detention in that case. Three weeks later, the same administration further tightened legislation against homosexuality.

The timing is not a coincidence. When a state cannot govern its universities, cannot pay its students’ scholarships, and refuses to take responsibility for the deaths its security forces cause on campuses, it resorts to another type of governance.

Conservative American Interference

Reuters revealed that Senegal’s supporters of anti-LGBTQI legislation have direct contact with MassResistance, a US-based organization in Massachusetts that views homosexuality as a health threat and has been advising African activists for years.

On March 13, following the law’s adoption, Senegal signed a five-year bilateral health cooperation agreement with the United States totaling $90.4 million (€78.7 million), under Trump’s “America First” global health strategy. The deal allocates $63.1 million (€55 million) to combat HIV and malaria, with Senegal co-financing $27.3 million (€23.7 million). This agreement significantly reconfigures health cooperation priorities by deliberately excluding, based on available data, sexual and reproductive health frameworks and transformative gender approaches that characterized US engagement under previous administrations.

Taken together, these developments reveal a worrying and specific transaction. Under severe fiscal pressure, the government simultaneously toughens penalties for its most marginalized citizens and signs health agreements with an administration that has made hostility toward queer rights a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Exclusion of Vulnerable Populations from Prevention Policies

The public health consequences of this legislation are already severe. According to the 2021 annual report of the National Council for the Fight against AIDS, HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men reaches 49% in certain parts of Dakar (compared to a national prevalence of 0.3% for the general population). Health agents have consistently warned that criminalization drives people underground, making prevention and HIV treatment programs inaccessible to those who need them most.

The result is a deliberately designed public health architecture that excludes the most vulnerable, instrumentalizing religion, as was the case in Ghana. This is not a policy failure. It is the intended purpose, and the bodies paying the price are already suffering.

When politicians invoke African authenticity to justify these laws, coordinated with a Massachusetts organization, fueled by American Christian nationalists, and carried out under the shadow of a health agreement with Trump, they do something remarkable: they use the language of decolonization to enforce discriminatory laws against Senegalese citizens, just like in colonial times, under foreign influence.

Abdoulaye Ba’s death, the long history of police violence on campuses, the criminalization of queer individuals, coordination with MassResistance, and the “America First” health agreement are all part of the same story told from different perspectives, through different geographies of power and bodies.

Summit Confrontation

There is something else happening within the ruling coalition that warrants examination. Diomaye Faye [the president] and Ousmane Sonko [the Prime Minister], elected on the promise of a manly friendship as a political duo project – “Sonko moy Diomaye, Diomaye moy Sonko” (“Diomaye is Sonko, Sonko is Diomaye”), are engaged in a silent yet escalating struggle for political authority and masculine legitimacy.

Faye governs through institutional pragmatism: he must work with international financial institutions, manage the machinery of a state in fiscal crisis, govern in the ungrateful register demanded by $13 billion in debts and a sixth death on a campus. Sonko governs through fire: he is the charismatic, confrontational, and morally authoritarian voice of populist resistance, while the families of electoral protest victims continue to await justice.

Queer bodies are not the focus of this competition. They are collateral damage, just like the students waiting for answers on the deaths of their colleagues, Saes demanding structural reforms, and HIV-positive queer individuals who can no longer access life-saving treatments.

Until honest answers are provided to these questions, moral governance will remain what it has always been: a center stage of power played out on the bodies of the most vulnerable, fueled by domestic political calculations and transnational geopolitical exchanges, and called “African sovereignty.”