I recently met a presidential candidate in the street, hurriedly dressed, pressed step and haggard looking. I had a double pain. First for this candidate; why a man who obviously has not definitively settled any of the daily needs that life imposes on adults declares himself a candidate for the highest office in Senegal. Then my pain went to our country which has come to such a state of abnormality for a complete stranger to declare himself with all the seriousness of the world a Presidential candidate and explain how he is going to win because his ideas are in the majority.

Already, if for 17 million inhabitants, the country has around three hundred political parties, most of which have never participated in any election, there is a concern. A former prime minister said, “Not all that flies are ideas.” We are witnessing more a succession of noises that disturb our tranquility than the presentation of ideas and political programs capable of transforming the country. Anyone feels invested with a mission to create an organization and lead others, even three.  The collective project is only acceptable if it is at the head of the pack, the cult of the self, the temptation to be a leader. The unreasonable thirst for power, the ego, the desire to capture a few subsidies, the love of the airwaves, make a terrible mixture that annihilates any possibility of lucidity and conviction about the true meaning of politics.

When I observe the race for candidacies, some of which are very laughable, I wonder if their authors really know the ridicule they inspire in citizens. It is dramatic to think of dressing in the mantle of a statesman or woman prepared for the highest functions, when in reality, with our fellow citizens, you only give the image of a puppet who, in a party, would be invited to return and sink into a long sleep which often clears up one’s thoughts and calms the ardor that the night knows how to encourage.

In 1962, during a press conference, General De Gaulle said of the future of the French political landscape once he left: « What is to be feared, in my opinion, is not the void politics, it is rather the overflow! We are overflowing in Senegal, where the proliferation of candidacies on each eve of an election amuses, worries and above all legitimates from my point of view the establishment of citizen sponsorship in 2018. In the political heritage of President Sall, there will be sponsorship, which I consider to be one of his best laws, even if it can still be perfected.

Politics is too serious a business to be practiced casually. A Presidential election is, according to the consecrated expression in a regime modeled on the French Fifth Republic, the meeting between a man and a People. It’s not a fashion show or a fair, let alone a little phrase contest to amuse and create buzz.

Governance cannot be disarticulated from knowledge, mastery of the historical depth of a country and intellectual density. One can be an academic and show incompetence and lack of culture and be a worker like Lula in Brazil, and have intellectual luminosity. The chosen President of the Republic must be among the most cultured citizens of a country. To aspire to lead a country is to sharpen one’s weapons for years with aggressiveness, to have recognized political and technical credits, to guarantee a strong intellectual dimension and to prove a keen sense of the State. Soliciting the votes of the Senegalese is not a late-night valve, it is a great responsibility, a seriousness and an increased sense of duty that falls on the presidential function, each decision of which has an impact on people. It is common to observe in our country that certain political careers begin with a declaration of candidacy for the presidential election. It is thus to show lightness and to comfort any informed citizen on the applicant’s joker nature.

Less than a year before the February 2024 election, applications are swarming and this will continue. Journalists who have never run a newsroom aspire to run a country. Unemployed people make the declaration of candidacy the way to fill their empty agenda. Civil servants discover a vocation and young shoots in a hurry think that grandiloquence is a shortcut to lead to the Senghor Avenue Palace. What sad times!

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE