DAKAR, Senegal — President Bashir Diomae Faye was sworn in as president of the West African nation of Senegal from prison within 10 days in March, becoming the continent’s youngest elected leader and rocketing to international fame.
He carried the hopes of the planet’s youngest and fastest-growing population, who looked to him for a fresh start and a break with many of Africa’s ageing presidents and military juntas. Yet until now, he had given few interviews.
In an interview with The New York Times last week, his first with Western media, he made the case for a different world order that places more emphasis on Africa.
Before flying to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, Faye called for “reform of the world system and equality for people.”
Faye said demographics should help determine who holds power at the UN, noting that Africa’s population will be close to 2.5 billion by 2050, by which time one in four people on earth will be African.
His comments come amid growing calls for permanent African representation on the U.N. Security Council. The United States said this month it would support two permanent seats for African countries. But analysts say that is unlikely to happen soon because many other countries are also pushing for permanent seats and any change would require the consent of all five veto-holding members.
Faye said the current world order was hurting African people.
For example, Africa bears little responsibility for climate change, but when emissions from developed countries cause polar ice sheets to melt, “this affects our coasts,” he said. He cited the town of Bargny in Senegal, which suffers from coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels and where dozens of homes were recently swept away.
He also denounced the injustice of developed countries continuing to burn coal while refusing to fund fossil fuel projects in developing countries. Senegal’s first offshore oil project recently began production, and the country is working to build infrastructure to convert natural gas into electricity.
Mr. Faye spoke amid the opulence of Dakar’s presidential palace, decorated with red carpets and gold lions, but he has made his office a bit more modest, discarding some of the furniture from his predecessor, Macky Sall’s.
Faye, 44, said he felt he was uniquely placed to understand the challenges facing young people in Africa, whose main desire, he said, is “to be useful, to be useful to themselves, their families and their countries.”
“We have to give young people answers so they don’t fall into permanent despair,” said the soft-spoken Fay, adding that greater despair will encourage migrant traffickers and jihadist groups to recruit them.
Just outside the palace stretches the sparkling Atlantic Ocean, where thousands of Senegalese of Faye’s generation lost their lives trying to reach Europe by boat.
Strengthening vocational training for young people is one of his top priorities, he said.
“The key is for young people to have qualifications,” he says, “so that when jobs become available they can apply for them, or, if they choose to migrate legally, be employed in the host country.”
President Faye and Prime Minister Sonko charmed Senegalese youth by denouncing the political elite, promising to negotiate better deals with oil and gas companies and pledging to reform the French-backed regional currency, the CFA.
But six months into his term, young people continue to flee the country in search of a better life: Nearly 20,000 migrants arrived in Spain’s Canary Islands by boat from the coast of West Africa in the first half of 2024 alone, up 167% from 2023, according to the UN migration agency. Dozens of shipwrecks have also been recorded.
“People expect the government to take measures to address the high cost of living and youth unemployment,” said Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla. But he said the country’s leaders are hampered by high debt burdens inherited from the previous government. “There is very little they can do in these areas.”
Faye recently called a general election for November after failing to pass some of his proposals in the opposition-controlled Parliament. He acknowledged that the people who elected him with “great expectations” would judge him on one main thing: his ability to change their future.
“In a country like Senegal, everything is a priority, everything is urgent,” he said.
