Last Sunday, promise made, promise delivered: Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko arrived in Colobane to heal the gaping wounds of the evictions and clearances that took place a few days before.

The affair shows badly, there is a bone, and it is not that of Mor Lam which is still softening.

On the one hand, the inhabitants of this city which is suffocating from the invasion of merchants of all kinds whose pedestrians only have the roadway to slalom between the taxis with the astonishing technical tour, the colourful express coaches and the fast-paced mopeds; and on the other, the undesirables who are there from dawn and only return home at nightfall, after having tried all day to earn their living.

There is everything in this rabble: the honest thrift dealer, the scoundrel, the trick card player, the idle onlooker, the reckless handyman, the amateur pickpocket, the optimistic cowrie thrower, the cynical usurer, the congenital desperate, the retarded thug, the exalted hero, the weed smoker, the obtuse talibé, the laughing street foodie, the indiscreet neighbour, the angry, the hungry and the pushy, arrogant.

I’m probably forgetting some… 

Read the column – A too ordinary Tabaski

It is to meet this dramatically burlesque little world that the indestructible Prime Minister goes, in shirt sleeves, wearing a grey coloured Panama hat like the ambient mood on this dominical day of rest.

First news, he doesn’t know anything.

No doubt absorbed by the casting of his twenty-one advisors, his minister’s decree must have passed under his nose without it tickling his brain.

Ousmane Sonko is clearly becoming more gentrified: during his glorious years as an exasperated and voluble opponent, he proclaimed loud and clear in front of an audience of journalists forbidden to ask questions, that he was aware of the most secret shenanigans of the Mackyavelic dictatorship.  During these fierce times, he stirred up the scandal of bad governance like a Saloum farmer with his peanut harvests…

Nothing escapes him: the sordid plots below the belt whose production chain he reveals, the distractions of public funds, organized crimes, state murders. He knows everything about everyone… Besides, Macky and his friends, he boasts, no longer care about the scandals he exposes but about the, uh, whistle-blowers who serve him in the name of Patriotic project.

Now, Mr. Prime Minister seems much less informed.

Read the column – Wet firecrackers, smoke screens: the massages of the month…

Great moment of demonstration of government solidarity: the silent President of the Republic and he, the thunderous Prime Minister, are aware of nothing. Translation: the Minister of the Interior did a bit of nonsense. But we keep it anyway…

Unholy question: would this striped minister be disloyal to the point of hiding unpopular decrees from him, just to cut corners on his electorate who should be urgently asked to clean up the National Assembly, which has become a mess since the Supreme Patriot did not attend? is there more to it?

To make up for the ministerial blunder, the inevitable Aïda Mbodj must stick to it. The formidable banker has just taken command of the General Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship for Women and Young People, the very sexy Der/Fj (it is known, money is an aphrodisiac) and intends, through this capital lever, to propel the world of unemployment into the spheres of triumphant capitalism.

She arrives immediately to cross the verb with common unemployed women who point their finger at her at the same time as the paradoxes that govern us. Rebuff from Bambey’s tigress in this high-flying exchange, which requires the impertinent girl to bend her finger.

Please keep your sarcasm to yourself.

Leaving Colobane, “Kolwezi” for those in the know, named after this town in Zairian Katanga, capital of cobalt, and symbol of the rebellion against the dictatorship of Marshal Mobutu, the Prime Minister heads towards Anse Bernard (which he spells with an “H” on the primatorial post that is distributed on social networks). He comes to poke his nose into a nebula about which questions are running through his head: how could we have delivered thousands of square meters on the maritime domain to foreigners?

It is Thierno Bocoum, formerly of Rewmi and boss of the Agir movement, who gives him the answer: “What are you going to do with the Azalaï hotel where you occupy a floor with your loved ones, which extends over seven thousand meters squares on the maritime domain?’

I’ll put it there and move on to another subject, waiting for it to get to the taxpayer’s brain.

Could the paradox be the backbone of the Senegalese exception?

We learn with horror, via the media, that the Sedima Group is looking for new money. The self-made man, Babacar Ngom, whose selfies with the powerful and the satisfied make him a poser, is not as rich as we think?

Read the column – A people, a buzz, a fair

The versions differ: wild rumours announce the sale of 50% of the shares of the poultry giant which has been losing its feathers for several years. Better, or worse, it depends, the most alarmist add a layer by specifying that it is foreigners who will, under a sovereigntist regime, buy the agro-industrial flagship of poultry. In insider circles, there is just talk of a capital increase. The house needs new money to move to the next level.

The former president of the Senegalese Investors Club is looking for… investors. Should we laugh or cry about it?

Nothing is lost, everything is transformed: the former director of the Club, after having organized many capacity building seminars but no investment, became Minister of Higher Education.

Sneering is banned.

Now, it is Pierre Goudiaby Atépa, the mentor of the Prime Minister, himself mentor of the President of the Republic, who is in charge…

At the time, when these bourgeois people sheltered from want launched this Club whose economic patriotism is as obvious as my flat nose on my slumped face, and summoned the press as well as the business elite, it was a question of reconquering the economic sovereignty of Negroes who remained in their raw state.  The prestigious Areopagus urged Macky Sall’s regime to favour businessmen of local colour, brown skin, curly hair, who speak at least Wolof of the harsh Baol. They announce a capital of twenty billion of our miserable CFA francs and hundreds of billions to be injected into the world of indigenous work.

Money doesn’t like noise, it’s a well-known fact…

In the meantime, the rednecks of Ndingler will rebel against land-hungry local capitalism, and Anta Babacar Ngom, who realizes “the dream of an entire youth” by launching the first Kfc fast-food restaurant, throws herself into the political pond by paying the luxury of being the only female candidate for the Presidential… To convince the Senegalese of her good faith and her good education, she displays her parents, as a guarantee of righteousness.

Nothing works.

These bastard voters prefer a taciturn guy who comes out of prison with his thick beard and his rare words.

If I wasn’t too well educated, I would throw out the cheeky question to the general public from a Colobane canteen: « How’s it going, my chick? »

But I don’t dare…

By Ibou FALL 

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH