Wal Fadjri is in the red. Like almost all private Senegalese media companies, the group founded by the late Sidy Lamine Niass is experiencing severe economic turmoil. This situation has prompted its CEO, Cheikh Niass, to consider the possibility of cutting staff.

In an interview published this Monday in issue 10,000 of Walf Quotidien, the young boss warned: "There will be difficult measures that will have to be taken if the economic situation does not evolve positively in the coming weeks. I am thinking in particular of technical unemployment of all or part of the staff, redundancies, voluntary departures, or even the closure of certain departments that are not or are not very profitable."

In the eyes of Sidy Lamine Niass's son, this possibility will be inevitable if the economic situation that has struck the Senegalese media does not change for the better. "Today," he confesses, "we are living in the red, and if the bank lets us down, we will inevitably have to resort to a redundancy plan. We have more than 200 million [CFA francs] in banking commitments, which is to say that my greatest wish is to keep the torch going without losing any staff members, but the country's macroeconomic situation will necessarily have to be more positive."

Walf's situation is all the more complicated because the Front de terre group is reportedly deprived of vital financial resources for its operations. "Wal fadjri doesn't have its share of the [advertising] market, either in the private sector or with the state," notes Cheikh Niass, who also regrets that the compensation promised for the numerous outages of its signal under Macky Sall has not been paid.

"Yet," the CEO rewinds, "the opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, who came to my office in 2023, had promised to compensate Walf for all the inconvenience caused by the outages. […] I have won several times against the State before the Supreme Court, which sanctioned the National Audiovisual Regulatory Council (CNRA) for failure to provide formal notice, and the Ministry of Communication for abuse of power. Despite these resounding legal victories, and the advent of the new regime, the State is dragging its feet. We are continuing the legal proceedings to seek compensation for our losses, even though I would have preferred an amicable resolution, given the urgency and the difficulties the group is facing."

Another pitfall raised by Cheikh Niass: the non-payment, for two years, of press aid. "If there is one grievance I can make against the President of the Republic [Diomaye Faye], whom I have never met in my life and who has never made me any promises, it is this blockage," the Walf boss asserts. "Nothing can justify it, and I usually say that press aid is for us what a scholarship is for a student: a fundamental right."