Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko took to the esplanade of the Grand Théâtre to make a spectacle of himself, shooting at anything that moves and issuing his share of flat threats to bring us impertinent people to heel. He pulled out all the stops, using his social networks and mobilizing his party’s sections. He mobilized militants, financed the convoy and offered snacks. A new deal for the man who saw militants contribute large sums of money to support all his initiatives. Who was it who said that unpopularity begins the day you take power? A whole tribune will be erected to hurl invective, flex muscles and play at establishing order for someone whose entire rise is nothing more than the rent of the chaos and disorder he has sown along the way, since his entry into our political scene.

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I’ve long had a religion about the outings of the now all-powerful Pm, whenever he took the liberty of entertaining the gallery with cheap thoughts, rigorist and fundamentally hollow speeches, or nationalist mirages that have little operability with the real issues facing our country. As for his show last Sunday at the Grand Théâtre, the media reports and a few publications by personalities in response to his outing were enough to tell me that there are men whose importance and the rigor of a station cannot change one iota. You have to know how to embody certain positions and have a certain ability to rise above them, something which is sorely lacking at the moment.

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The press, « tax evaders » in his eyes, will have had a field day. It’s an ideal target, after having been his footstep and the relay for his zany ideas and crazy theories. He half-heartedly chastised our editorial staff over the General Kandé affair, to turn himself into a publishing gendarme, ready to strike, in the event of a repeat offence. Who would have imagined that a few months ago, this man was posing huge paving stones to come to the rescue of journalists who had run afoul of the law? The extraction of the first barrel from Senegalese waters on the Sangomar field is a tragic reminder that in 2016, our almighty PM told us that a network of pipelines on the high seas was helping to pump hydrocarbons out of Senegal and send them far from our shores. His main opponent at the time, Var, reminded him that he had made statements that no amount of washing down could erase from memory. The embarrassment caused by bringing them back into the public eye remains a heavy burden, insofar as anyone wants to look the other way or put it down to statements made by opponents to amuse the gallery or irritate the government of the day.

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To the almighty PM’s threats against the press, activating every lever to paralyze it or bring as many media outlets to their knees as possible, he should undoubtedly be reminded that he is in a free country. It’s because voices have always been free that he’s been able to have any kind of ascendancy in our public life. He needs to get his head around the fact that words to the contrary will rise up against his story and his way of seeing things. He will always see counter-arguments to anything he can come up with. Senegal is a country where, to paraphrase the Italian writer Erri de Luca, many people would gladly accept criminal convictions rather than a reduction in vocabulary.

The lack of reverence for the figure of the President of the Republic was also an incongruity in PM Sonko’s outing. To mock the country’s highest authority by caricaturing him as Serigne Ngoudou, and to call for respect for institutions, goes down badly.

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From the Prime Minister’s Grand Théâtre statements, he has shown staggering contempt for all those he considers to be adversaries or players with interests contrary to his own, and this is indicative of a factionalist dynamic. The procedures manual is a classic among all populists: create a logic of otherness and antagonism with domestic enemies, who will inevitably be in the pay of « hidden interests » with all-powerful masters pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Sympathizers and activists are called upon to rally around the supreme work that twisted minds will try to heckle. The « Us » is constantly confronted by a « Them ». Everything is read in a Manichean grid, with good people on our side and those bearing all the blemishes to fight against on the other side. Isn’t this the dynamic that motivated the Sonko-show at the Grand Théâtre last Sunday? Unfortunately, the seriousness of the State and the reality of the issues at stake cannot be offset by loud noise. In future, the Prime Minister will certainly spare us an event of this type, which will have done him more harm than good. I would have understood such a meeting with the youth if he came with the good news of a petro-gas future for the country, which would be an opportunity for them to reach the materialization of a Senegalese dream, rather a Project (the word is important!).

 

“Fascism is contempt. Conversely, all forms of contempt, when they intervene in politics, make fascism possible and strengthen it”, said Albert Camus. I wouldn’t have wished to remember these words in the week when this country, so dear to us, has produced its first barrel of oil from an offshore field.

By Serigne Saliou DIAGNE / saliou.diagne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH