DAKAR, Senegal - The seaside highway, one of the Senegalese president's bold building initiatives, winds past the scruffy shop where a 62-year-old tailor and his two sons eke out a living sewing scraps of cloth into curtains. It's a beautiful highway — no doubt about it, says Barry Mamadou. "But I can't eat the road," he says, explaining why, having twice voted for President Abdoulaye Wade, he is now siding with one of 14 opposition candidates in Sunday's presidential election.
The 80-year-old president's projects range from the new sea-hugging highway to a second airport and a pan-African university. Yet in a country where half the population of 12 million is unemployed, some say they would settle for three meals a day and a decent job.
The priorities should be better organized, said Alex Segura-Ubiergo, the International Monetary Fund's representative in Senegal.
"There seems to be a disconnect between ideas that on paper look good and what is actually happening on the ground," he said.
Wade, who spent three decades in the opposition and ran four times for president before winning by a landslide in 2000, says he has thought a lot about what Senegal needs and claims his critics are missing the larger picture.
"I am a man in a hurry because Africans are not in a hurry, and the chasm that divides us from the West is big and is getting bigger. So we need to run faster to catch up. We can't fix the divide by going slowly," he said in an interview in the presidential palace on Thursday.
The West sees this mostly Muslim country as an oasis of progress on a continent beset by authoritarian rule, corruption and grinding poverty. The government has never been overthrown in a coup, so corporations feel comfortable here, and the election campaign looks fair and clean. Wade has the advantage of incumbency and a fragmented opposition, but opinion polls are banned in election seasons, so predictions are difficult.
Whatever the outcome — and it will go to a runoff if no one tops 50 percent Sunday — jobs are the leading issue.
Ibrahima Seck, a 31-year-old engineering graduate, was a machinist at a chemical plant until it shut down. Now he hawks imitation Chanel No. 5 on the streets of the seaside capital.
Each perfume bottle nets him $2, and days can go by without a sale. His goal: to save about $1,000 for a ticket on a perilous 900-mile voyage by wooden boat to Spain's Canary Islands and a better livelihood in Europe.
The surge of West Africans onto the high seas from Senegalese shores is among the biggest stains on Wade's last seven years in office. Hundreds have died, yet at least 31,000 people undertook the voyage last year from West Africa.
"What the old man promised us, he didn't do," Seck said of Wade. "I need a real job, not a nice road. Not an airport. As soon as I save enough money, I will take the boat, even if it means losing my life."
Wade points to an IMF-confirmed annual growth rate of just under 5 percent, compared with 1 percent during the 40 years of socialist rule before he won office, and to job-creating initiatives such as raising crops whose oil can be used for biofuels.
But infrastructure has deteriorated. Electricity cuts are far more frequent because power plants are aging and oil prices are rising.
While inflation overall has remained low, the price of some basic commodities has spiked. The cost of a 13-pound canister of cooking gas rose 57 percent last year.
Wade's government has also been criticized by human rights groups for jailing opponents, including, for a time, his former prime minister, Idrissa Seck, now one of the candidates running against him.
Also a key contender in Sunday's race is 68-year-old Moustapha Niasse, a veteran opposition leader who was Wade's first prime minister.
"We love him, but we're suffering," says Mamadou, silencing his sewing machine to speak about why he will not be voting for Wade this time.
"Our president, he wants our city to look beautiful. And so do we. But what's the use of seeing a nice sight on an empty stomach?"
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