The demonstrations that followed the conviction of the Pastef party leader Ousmane Sonko for corrupting young people in the Sweet Beauty affair between him and Adji Sarr have, like any mad exorcism in this country, done their share of damage to our economic fabric. After the fury, tongues are starting to wag about the financial losses, the impact on various sectors of the national economy, the damaging effect on Senegal’s attractiveness as an investment destination and the preservation of jobs in very precarious markets. One after another, the heads of the main employers’ organisations have taken to the rostrum to protest against acts that defy all logic, with the deliberate intention of bringing an economy to its knees.

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The Senegalese banking sector has paid a heavy price for the sexual misconduct of those involved in the Sweet Beauty affair. Thirty-one branches were vandalised and ransacked, affecting all banking operations at the end of the month, with the Tabaski holiday just around the corner. Automated teller machines were stoned and bank branches ransacked, forcing people to rush around the city in the days following the two days of demonstrations to stock up on cash or wait in line at bank head offices for long hours to get the money they needed for the month. Can we understand the fact that a group like Société Générale has seen five of its branches vandalised and that there are fourteen banking groups affected by the fury of demonstrators, vandals and other infiltrated agitators?

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Can a country like Senegal, which wants to consolidate its dynamic of openness to the world by seeking to attract investment from everywhere, afford to refurbish 31 bank branches, each of which would cost around 150 million CFA francs according to Bocar Sy, President of the Professional Association of Banks and Financial Establishments of Senegal (Apbefs)? Do our irresponsible professional politicians and a cowardly civil society think that a democratic struggle or social justice can be won by destroying everything that exists, however vital it may be?

Alongside the queues at bank counters, no Dakar resident could be indifferent to the sight of queues of cars outside the city’s service stations. Fuel was in short supply for motorists at a time when around a hundred service stations were burnt down or ransacked across the country. It was in March 2021, however, that around twenty service stations were looted and burnt down, with damage estimated by oil distributors at 3.5 billion CFA francs.

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Nothing serious will have been done, with the exception of a dissuasive presence of the security forces at these service points since 2021. The arsonists have tasted the power of chaos, but their wings were not been broken in time. The same thing will happen again in June 2023. Will our economy be able to continue to withstand the recurrent breakage of service outlets, like a sacrifice made to ward off some dictatorial fate, appeal to a democratic wish or cure an « injustice »?

The retail sector was not left out. The pack of barbarians who joined the demonstrators took great pleasure in smashing up supermarkets, holding stalls to ransom and attacking money service outlets. At both Auchan Sénégal and Orange Money, most of the staff operating at the sites that were attacked or ransacked have been laid off. Nothing is certain about the preservation of their jobs. It’s cynical to say that we want decent jobs for everyone, while destroying everything in place to provide them.

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The promoters of Supeco supermarkets are currently estimating losses in two shops in the Dakar suburbs at just over a billion francs. There is a real risk that this chain will close shop, just like other fine entrepreneurial initiatives such as Vdn Tech, whose bus shelters and billboards have taken all the abuse of the demonstrators. Projects by the sons of Senegal will again be sunk by the sons of this same land, in a blind hatred and a torrent of malicious irresponsibility.

The French Institute of International Relations (Ifri) has just published an interesting study this week on the themes, actors and functions of anti-French discourse in French-speaking Africa, helping to deconstruct the whole agenda in the degagiste discourse that is making its bed in our country, after having conquered our sub-region at exponential speed.  The spread of this discourse into a more popular dynamic by the force of social networks and foreign agents is chilling, especially as all the seeds of « liberating chaos » against a foreign oppressor only burn in the first and last resort the countries that the jokers of a just society and other boasters of an emancipated African-style democracy are trying to liberate. If the hateful rhetoric of « France Dégage » and the stigmatisation of foreign interests stifling our country were combated from the outset, there would not be so many fires burning our economies and bringing our countries to their knees.

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

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH