Our colleague, media owner, Maïmouna Ndour Faye, has just escaped death. The circumstances of the attack, the motives and the instigators will be discussed at length. We hope that the investigation will one day, as soon as possible, reveal the culprit and, without a doubt, those who ordered the attack.

A few weeks earlier, Absatou Hane, another colleague and Seneweb reporter, was harpooned and beaten up by the police while covering a demonstration by disgruntled politicians. There were plenty of journalists covering the event. Except that she was a woman.

Maïmouna Ndour Faye and Absatou Hane do nothing more than journalism, and nothing less. Each does her job as best she can, as she has learnt it, understands it, with varying degrees of success.

Read the column – A Quick Guide to Departure and Controlled Skidding…

These days, there are more and more of our fellow citizens who consider that being a woman, educated, independent, fulfilled, the bearer of an opinion, with savoir-vivre, a way of being, is an insult to what they are: destitute, ignorant and idle, in short, small-time breadwinners lost in the midst of these troubled times, who don’t know which charlatan to turn to.

When all the energy that life offers us is driven by feelings of inferiority, ignorance and idleness, the resulting alchemy can easily spill over into hatred of ourselves and others.

I have the great honour of being from the old school; from that generation that has scruples about hating, to whom the Republic asks to repress the shame of its origins, its inferiority complexes, its unfulfilled vanities, in order to overcome its ignorance, climb the steps of success and brave the world to be better because it gives us the same opportunities.

Of course, mafiosi, scoundrels, outlaws and even luminous bastards exist throughout the world and in all eras.

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Except that, in this day and age – and it’s a shame to admit it – no one is really resigned to it. And the State ensured that the scoundrel is in prison, and the honest man on the boulevards.

Admittedly, our history includes a few anti-heroes who carry hatred as an ideology, greed as a logic and vanity as a remarkable identity. Burning down the country is their mad dream… Remember those illuminati who planned to set fire to the presidential motorcade in the early 1970s, because the Molotov cocktail was a family trademark.

Well, they’ve had a few offspring.
Half a century later, the same Molotov cocktails from the family recipe, in addition to the material damage, killed two innocent children of ordinary people. If it’s any consolation to all those decrepit revolutionaries in perdition, good for them. Except that the neo-colonised Senegalese bourgeoisie that they hate continue to live on a high train and that these sweet pyromaniac dreamers will remain frustrated spectators of our History for the rest of their lives.

Read the column – The Soul of the Nation, the Mysticism of the Republic and the Invisible Hand of the State

Senegalese who hate their compatriots have been around since the dawn of time. The Republic disturbs them, citizenship gives them the hives, the contagious happiness of our fellow citizens, despite their misery, exasperates them.
Until now, we cultivated this shame to be ashamed, because we had the soul of the Nation and the mysticism of the Republic hanging over our heads, making us believe in ourselves, despite the crossings of the desert inherent in human destinies, the storms and setbacks inevitable in normal lives, which ultimately make us smile in the face of our liabilities.

And then comes the time when feeling inferior is a remarkable identity. Claiming one’s humble origins, not to measure one’s journey to the top, but to be one of the many. A completely switched-on candidate for universal suffrage makes it a point to flaunt her modest origins, invent memories of her childhood when there was no electricity at home and, in the darkness of her austere home, exchange cuddles with snakes.

Before her, the accomplice in the assassination of a judge in 1993, the bomber in 1988, has been swaggering around TV studios for decades, where ingenuous journalists beg him to share his expertise on public life.

The amnesty law, which proposes to wipe out even bloody crimes, just makes official what we have become: the people of deadly sins… Because a government chooses to absolve without trial the repeated rapes of Madame Adji Raby Sarr, the disrespect for institutions, the murders of nearly fifty compatriots, the ransacking of public and private property.
President Macky Sall has clearly lost his way and is beginning to feel that his time is coming to an end… Should we let him drag us down in his spleen to the point of compromising the future of our descendants?

To pass this law, which wipes out everything and to restart, is to institutionalise hatred as an ideology and violence as a political strategy. It will also encourage unpunished murderers and their backers, to do it again and again to ensure that terror reigns, their unique way of thinking, before every local kingpin decides to make the law according to what his muscles and pocket knife allow them.

A Prime Minister worthy of the name, in the name of the Republic that has given him everything, should never have proposed such a bill and should have resigned, along with his entire government, so as not to endorse such a shameful act, to ensure that hatred is never institutionalised.

Only, see: Did Amadou Ba ever have a heart? And it wants to preside over our destinies…

By Ibou FALL