Senegal Jails Three Pro-PASTEF Commentators for Offending the President

Senegal · POLITICS

A Dakar court has sent three commentators from a pro-government media outlet to prison for insulting the president, in a case that lays bare the split inside Senegal’s ruling party and the criminal-speech laws the party once promised to repeal.

What the court decided

On Wednesday 5 August 2026, Dakar’s Tribunal des flagrants délits convicted three commentators from the online outlet Feeñal Digital of offending the head of state and of statements contrary to public morals. Mandoumbé Diop, who broadcasts under the name Lamignou Darou, was sentenced to three months in prison. Two others, who appear under the names Oustaz Thiep and Ndiaye Touba, received two months each. Each was also fined 500,000 CFA francs, roughly US$870.

The sentences are custodial, not suspended. They are also lighter than the prosecution asked for: the state had sought a year, with six months to be served, against Lamignou Darou, and three months against the other two. RFI reports that Lamignou Darou had already been convicted in October on similar facts.

The rulings are first-instance decisions and are not final. The defence lawyer, Me Aby Nar Ndiaye, said he was surprised and disappointed and that nothing in the file supported the offences alleged by the prosecution. His clients, he said, had never spoken about the President of the Republic. Lawyers for all three have announced an appeal.

The video and the arrest

The case turns on a video posted to TikTok in late July. In it the three men pray for misfortune and death to fall on, in their words, the one who betrayed the Pastef project. No name is used. Investigators and prosecutors took the target to be President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who was himself carried to office by PASTEF and won the March 2024 election with 54.28 percent of the vote.

Officers from Senegal’s Division spéciale de cybersécurité, a police cybercrime unit, arrested the three men inside the Feeñal Digital newsroom in Dakar on 27 July 2026, according to contemporaneous Senegalese reporting; RFI dates the arrests to 28 July. They were held in police custody and, on Thursday 30 July, brought before the public prosecutor and remanded pending trial.

In court all three argued that the video was a private conversation between friends, filmed for comic effect, and that they had named neither a person nor an institution. The prosecutor rejected that reading, telling the court there was no doubt about who was meant. Synpics, the national union of information and communication professionals, criticised the decision to make the arrests inside a newsroom, though its statement drew criticism in Senegal for being too mild.

A ruling party at war with itself

This is not a case of opposition figures attacking the state. All three men present themselves as militants of PASTEF-Les Patriotes, the movement founded in 2014 by the former tax inspector Ousmane Sonko on an anti-corruption and national-sovereignty platform. Their anger was directed inward.

That matters because PASTEF has split at the top. The party swept the November 2024 legislative elections, taking roughly 130 of 165 seats. Since then the alliance between Faye and Sonko has broken apart, chiefly over how to handle a debt crisis that emerged when the new government discovered large borrowings concealed by the previous administration. The International Monetary Fund put total public debt at about 132 percent of national output at the end of 2024, against a lower government estimate of about 119 percent, and negotiations with the Fund remained unresolved through mid-2026. Sonko opposed restructuring on sovereignty grounds; Faye pressed on with the IMF.

In May 2026 Faye warned publicly against what he called excessive personalisation, saying the party was bigger than any one man. On 22 May he dismissed Sonko as prime minister and dissolved the government. Three days later, on 25 May, he named Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo, an economist who spent almost four decades at the regional central bank, the BCEAO, in Sonko’s place. On 26 May PASTEF deputies elected Sonko speaker of the National Assembly with 132 votes, installing a rival centre of power inside the same party. From the speaker’s chair Sonko replied that you cannot do Pastef without Pastef. He was re-elected party leader on 6 June 2026.

Seen against that background, the Feeñal Digital case reads less as a defence of public order than as a test of who is allowed to define what the party’s project means, and at what cost.

The law being used

Article 254 of the Senegalese Penal Code makes offending the President of the Republic a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine. It is an inheritance from an older legal order, and Senegalese human rights groups have long called for its repeal. It was used repeatedly under former president Macky Sall, and it is still on the statute book under a government elected on a promise of rupture.

By the standards of recent cases these sentences are heavy. RFI notes that in comparable prosecutions the trader Adama Ndiaye and the activist Azoura Fall each received one month in prison, on six-month sentences that were otherwise suspended. Here the court imposed straight custodial terms.

Senegal’s press-freedom record has moved in both directions. Reporters Without Borders ranked the country 49th in 2021, then 94th in 2024 after a period of internet shutdowns, arrests and the suspension of the broadcaster Walfadjri. It recovered to 74th in 2025 before slipping to 78th of 180 in the 2026 index. CIVICUS, which tracks civic space, moved Senegal in the opposite direction to the general trend last year, upgrading it from repressed to obstructed. The picture is one of partial recovery that has stopped rather than a straight-line collapse.

A fragile press, and a regulator trimmed by the courts

Senegalese media are financially weak. Advertising is thin and unevenly distributed, state support was frozen for two years before being restored in early 2026, and two of the leading sports dailies closed in 2024. Outlets that depend on public money are poorly placed to resist pressure from the state.

The government has also used registration rules as leverage. On 22 April 2025 the communications minister, Alioune Sall, ordered 381 outlets to stop publishing for failing to comply with the Press Code; of 639 outlets reviewed, only 258 were declared compliant. That registration procedure was struck down by Senegal’s Supreme Court in December 2025.

A new regulator has met the same fate in part. The National Assembly adopted the law creating the Conseil national de régulation des médias on 3 March 2026. On 7 April 2026 the Constitutional Council struck down provisions of articles 31 and 33 as unconstitutional, criticising sanctions it called disproportionate and restating that limits on freedoms belong to judges. The rest of the law stands. The courts, in other words, have checked the executive on media regulation even as they convict its critics.

Why this matters beyond Senegal

For investors the case is a small but useful signal. Senegal is in the middle of a debt renegotiation, its ruling party contains two rival power centres, and speech offences are now being used against people on the government’s own side. When party discipline and criminal law overlap, political risk and regulatory risk become hard to separate.

Senegal has for two decades been cited as one of West Africa’s most durable democracies, at a time when several of its neighbours are under military rule. That reputation is part of what makes it financeable. France, which retains commercial and military interests in Dakar, and newer partners in China, the Gulf and Turkey will all read the handling of this case as evidence about how the government intends to manage dissent, a theme explored in our pillar Africa: The New Scramble.

The appeal is the next test. It will show whether the higher courts treat Article 254 as a live instrument or as a relic — and whether an administration elected to break with the repressive habits of its predecessor is prepared to turn them on its own supporters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• RFI via allAfrica: three pro-Pastef commentators convicted, 5 August 2026
• Senegal24News: sentences and fines
• Senego: the arrests at Feeñal Digital, 27 July 2026
• Reporters Without Borders: Senegal country profile and index scores
• Al Jazeera: Sonko elected parliament speaker
• Media Foundation for West Africa: 381 outlets suspended
• Dakaractu: Constitutional Council partly strikes down the CNRM law

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error

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