A rather pleasant and decent journalist with me in private never stops throwing all kinds of insults and insanities at me when he is on social networks, certainly intoxicated by the Twitter crowd, who love the smell off blood and serious accusations. Recently, he vented as usual about some wrongdoing by the regime and took the opportunity to once again accuse the « republicans » (the quotation marks are his) to whom I belong, deemed complicit in all the faults of the people of Benno bokk yaakaar. He is not the first to use these vicious quotation marks to sideline people who say they are part of the fierce defense of the Republic. One of our compatriots, a cultural broker, an intelligent, sympathetic and level-headed character until he decided to campaign for a party that has since been dissolved, used the same quotation marks in the adjective republican to point an accusing finger at those who judged that the Republic should be the first compass in action at the heart of the city.

Far from the playful gesticulations of these internet workers, paid by retweet and like, there is a real issue in the defense of the republican ideal in our country, and has been for a long time. A mass of people, from all political sides and from all segments of society, want to put an end to the Republic. For my part, 2000 was a turning point. The liberals broke down all the dikes of practice and custom in matters of state management and preservation of republican culture. This is how attacks against secularism and against practices inherited from ancient times have multiplied and which until now have preserved our country from disorder and the relegation of the Republic to the status of an old-fashioned decor of little interest.

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Living together has since been threatened in a sort of morbid enterprise where in the political or moral chapels the discourse to put an end to the Republic is no longer hushed or whispered. The voices become more audible, the demonstrations more virulent and the feelings more expressive about a step backwards and a desacralization of what makes us a People united in the diversity of its components. The fractures are real in the Senegalese social bloc, as in many countries which face the populist mantra whose raison d’être is chaos.  Here we are in a young country where allegiances are diverse and paths disparate. What unites us and protects us from civil war is our common allegiance to the Republic whose secular nature allows the expression of all religions without hindrance but with respect for the neutrality of the State vis-à-vis the clergy. 

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In recent years, the political parties of the Republican arc have been overwhelmed by populist groups, Islamist social movements, activists with villainous methods, some of whom are financed by a plethora of powers and lobbies. All these beautiful people have an agenda fuelled by conspiracy and distrust of republican institutions and whose entry ticket remains the denunciation of “French imperialism”. These republican parties, still wanting to exist in the face of the so-called anti-system machine, have given in to one-upmanship, are falling into excess and will not shy away from any denial to obtain votes.  This observation is the same for many intellectuals and academics who have also given in to populist demagogy and no longer even realize that the terms of public debate are now xenophobic and conservative.

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A nauseating climate is established in the country in which we continue to index the other, to call for a hackneyed nationalism, to advocate withdrawal into oneself and to divide individuals according to cramped categories which ignore any form of complexity. Imprisoning public debate in this way is preparing minds for violence and renouncing the beautiful promises of humanism of our founding fathers.

Nowadays, few people are shocked that bigots are stalking and threatening a university professor who owes his salvation only to death, that they are organizing hand-in-hand marches with political parties for futile back-to-back guard fights, that they hunt down artists and intellectuals and want to impose halal thinking in a country of freedom.

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We all almost let it happen when certain press and social networks made abject accusations against the Prime Minister, described as a Guinean citizen. And worst of all, those who fabricate these rumors, their accomplices who spread them and the press which echoes them claim a pan-African conviction every day. These patents of Senegal are unacceptable in the Republic of Senegal, because we are the country open to all fertile winds, which has welcomed artists, politicians and statesmen threatened or martyred elsewhere. We are Senegal.

The public debate is mediocre and shameful because few people within it have high demands on the Republic and work to defend and preserve it whatever the cost.

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The attacks against secularism, the xenophobic speeches, the use of ethnic arguments, the superiority invoked by parliamentarians within the Hemicycle of their brotherhood conviction on the laws they make, the regionalist invocations… All these lead to a collapse of the Republic and the multiplication of fractures through which those who promote intolerance and want to impose their faith through violence can pass.

My conception of the Republic is uncompromising. It does not use quotation marks and is not attached to a device or situations. It is inherited from the writings of the great socialist republicans and is nourished by the visceral attachment to equality and merit.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH