Faada Freddy has a message for Senegal's leaders: If they don't keep their promises they can expect a tightly rhymed tongue-lashing from his fellow rappers. The threat is more intimidating than it sounds.
Shunning their American counterparts' obsessions with gangsters, guns and girls, Senegalese rappers are among the country's loudest campaigners for social justice.
Already the vanguard of West Africa's explosive hip-hop scene, their voices are only going to get louder in the run-up to elections in 2007 when President Abdoulaye Wade is widely expected to seek re-election. He may need their help.
"It's not over," Faada Freddy told Reuters at his studio in the capital Dakar, a city perched on the Atlantic shoreline.
"When the rappers see that Abdoulaye Wade's party isn't doing its political job in the way we want, the rappers gonna whip him again, give him a slap in the face and say, 'We're here with our tongues to correct you when you're not acting right, and don't forget that we're still here,"' he said.
Expounding on the power of hip-hop, Faada Freddy, singer with Senegal's most successful rap group Daara J, remembers how rappers went on their own campaign trail encouraging young people to vote in the 2000 elections.
In their own eyes at least, the artists take at least some of the credit for ending four decades of rule by former president Abdou Diouf's Socialist Party and installing Wade's Senegalese Democratic Party in its place...
