A conversation that I happened to hear particularly shocked me last Tuesday, during the first presentation before the judges of the Criminal Chambers of the various protagonists in the Sweet Beauty case. The scene takes place in the commercial space of the Total station of the toll motorway, located at the level of Dalifort. A security guard, more glued to his phone than to his job of monitoring the premises, is immersed in the live broadcasts to cover the trial. He exclaims to two agents, attendants on the shelves: “Young people are not breaking enough today and letting the police take over.”

His interlocutor, supplying the shelves with products, replies that it is the house of Mame Mbaye Niang that the young people were to burn down at night, it would have more effects than the house of Serigne Mbaye Thiam. The malignant joy that fed their exchange shows the evil that can eat away at souls, when they are plunged into a dark night by dint of being fed with a fallacious, hateful and falsely warlike speech.

I listen to this conversation in shock, but, I avoid slipping in a word to avoid any bloodletting with agents who fantasize about break ins when their livelihood was ransacked in March 2021, resulting in the unemployment of around twenty people. This brief exchange between people who, for who knows what frustration, would like to see public property ransacked and private property destroyed in order to avoid a trial or to put the country in instability because their champion would have legal disputes, says a lot about the hellish hole into which this whole country has fallen.

By the force of social networks, the game of tension renters, a certain irresponsible press, Senegal, as a whole, has plunged into a spiral of escalation of violence, a blind outpouring of hatred, a lack of culture, barbaric with insult in the mouth and an absolute reign of outrage. Civility, courtesy, order and discipline are extremely disturbed.

Levelled to a bed of dung, made of distrust, glorification of anti-republican acts, promotion of hatred, creates a climate that puts a ball in the stomach to many people who have never seen Senegal so disorganized. I circulate with great regret in the semi-deserted streets of Dakar each time a supposedly “complicated” trial is announced.

Do you think it human that the body of a young person in Keur Mbaye Fall, lying in his own blood and releasing his last breath, is exposed to all on social networks, without any form of compassion, with the sole objective of making a charge against law enforcement? Is it normal that the accidental death of a police officer in Ziguinchor is celebrated with the most despicable comments to see the demise of this noble servant of the Republic, a form of revenge of fate against the security forces?

What can we think of all the calls for murder and rampage launched by dark swellings thousands of miles away, who see themselves as more patriotic than all or more concerned about the future of Senegal? Is it logical that with all that the Bar of Senegal has produced as tenors that we get excited over the diatribes of a poor foreign lawyer, in search of sensations and seeking to exist by the exposure that Africa gives him with dissenting opinions, the fact of wanting to get under the skin of the Senegalese state?

The crazy sequence that Senegal has been going through since political entrepreneurs of a poor level and with violent methods, defying all orthodoxy and logic, burst into public life will have given birth to visceral violence. The blinders of hatred and irreverence are the good that is shared the most with people willing to burn everything around them, even if it ends up reigning over ruins and ashes. Humanity, which has always characterized Senegal and its children, has been lost, giving way to the bestiality of hyenas, ready to attack anything in packs, ready to mock anything that does not cooperate. to their logic.

Everything is vile in our actions, everything is cowardly in our postures. Bad faith triumphs, indignity will never again reach such heights. It is easy to call yourself wheel breakers or fighters for any cause by joining the ballet of hyenas and vultures. In their blind hatred, all the carrion of this country will have killed the last entrenchments of humanity that remained in us. It is therefore not surprising to see people proudly sawing off the branch of unity on which we are sitting, at the risk of leading the country towards chaos while destroying their workplace.

One of the perpetrators of the fire at the Dakar Dem Dikk bus depot in Keur Massar, Mr. Faly Sané, was arrested yesterday while celebrating the baptism of his newborn. To baptize a child without flinching, promising him the best of futures after burning down a fleet of public transport vehicles, this country is really walking on its head.

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

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH