A recent look at the work of Robert Badinter, who has just left us, strengthened my convictions about what a state should be and how statesmen should be. When, in 1981, in the fervour of the arrival of the Left in power, he brought about the abolition of the death penalty, it was a conviction that became a man. Reading his speech to the National Assembly with eloquence and conviction, he knew that 62% of his compatriots were in favour of capital punishment. But humanism and values rise above the contingencies of time. Politics is about transformative action, sometimes despite the noise of commentators and crowds of petitioners. To save one’s country from a fatal leap into the abyss is to ignore the rantings of those who have never dirtied their hands, camped on a factitious purity and dubious neutrality. A State has no business echoing the desires of the masses. In the name of State Reasoning, and because this reason, however unjust it may seem, is the guarantee of our collective security and our survival as a nation, we must always act to preserve the sacred: the Republic.

Read the column: In My Country, Humanity Has Disappeared

In a complex time when swells rock the ship, when not everything can be said because not everything can be said, once again in the name of the State Reasoning, power is exercised in great solitude. It is this solitude that sometimes endows statesmen with a tenderness, in the sense that they have to decide in the face of contradictory injunctions and interests, and in the face of threats that the ordinary citizen is unaware of.

Power is a place that attracts the curious, the courtiers, the ambitious and the intriguing. It brings together all the fantasies of the outside world. It is also an invaluable vantage point from which to observe the vanities of the world and the passage of time, the reversals and ingratitude of human beings, and the ultimate inanity of politics in the face of the unforeseen and the dissatisfactions of the people. My close encounters with statesmen have also taught me something else, perhaps more touching than anything else: power is a place of solitude. Palaces are not places of splendour, or only a few of them; they are coffins in which a man faces his people and his responsibilities. At night, when the staff have returned to their daily lives, when the courtiers have gone off to dream up words of flattery for the next day, you are alone with the ghosts of the world of those whose job it is to make decisions. And who know that lives depend on their decisions. They are alone, strangely alone, except when it comes to sharing privileges. Governing is a fatal responsibility: deciding without being able to say what is hardly possible to say anyway, and then facing the din of some and the posturing of others.

Read the column: My Republic Is Uncompromising

Hard as it may be, this precious responsibility, the fruit of universal suffrage, must be borne to the end. It is then up to history to acquit those in power. It will know whether we have risen to the challenges of our time. The act of governing cannot be separated from the serious responsibility of taking decisions that are unpopular but essential to preserve what is sacred: the Republic.

To govern in this way is to give in neither to political jabber, nor to the fury of the masses, nor to the injunction of the crowds, even under the easy blackmail of the word democracy, overused by all mouths. « The Constitution, nothing but the Constitution and the whole Constitution.”

Politicians and crowds alike have no memory. The former because they protect specific interests, the latter because they too often give in to changing fantasies. The President of the French Constitutional Council recently told the Head of the Executive, face to face, that the Constitutional Council was not « an echo chamber for trends in opinion ». I have always distrusted opinion, as I have distrusted opportunistic academics who brandish grand principles, using and abusing them to hide the intellectual poverty that has spread to the faculties, a lack of backbone and an attraction to the glitter of power.

Read the column: In the Land of the Diallobé

The convergence of crowds, politicians, opportunists and members of a vile civil society is always dangerous for the Republic. Because at the heart of it all lie business dealings and dubious arrangements at the expense of Senegal’s vital interests. For example, whenever Pierre Goudiaby Atepa and Alioune Tine are in a room, it’s time to flee, because all that will be discussed there are the instructions for intrigue and dirty work. All they are doing is conspiring against Senegal.

This is why it is so painful to be a republican in our country. You are on your own, a target for snipers on both sides and for those who have no qualms about compromising. I’m not even going to mention the foolish judgements of the social networking court and the whims of people who would kill their mother for five minutes of attention and fleeting digital glory.

Our country is fractured. We need to rebuild the nation around a new collective narrative. The dead, the injured and the young people imprisoned, sometimes for the flimsiest of reasons, cannot be a foregone conclusion. The religion of my time has long been established: all discussion must be restricted to within the republican arc. The members of a dissolved party whose project was insurrectionary cannot be interlocutors.

Read the column: Pastef Didn’t Have Its Place in Our Democracy

Ousmane Sonko, whom I have refrained from talking about since he was taken into custody, is a fascist. And you don’t argue with a fascist, you fight him with all the vigour that our attachment to the Republic inspires in us.

To erase his crimes is to authorise anyone with national ambitions to burn, pillage, ransack, defame, insult and multiply outrages against judges, generals and representatives of the State. This would cause a backlash against the State and erase that which spiritually unites us: the Republic.

Now, I thought, and I still think, that to be worthy of Senegal is to follow in the footsteps of existing laws in order to obtain the votes of our fellow citizens. Insurrection in the name of personal ambition dishonours its perpetrators and should be cloaked in national indignity.
To normalise the presence of fascists in the public arena is to drain the Republic of its credibility and rob it of that imminent mystique that moves us when the anthem sounds and that moves us when we see the coat of arms of the Nation.

Read the column: The Excesses of “Political Correctness”

Personally, I was not opposing the populist, separatist, Islamist and insurrectionist project of Mr Sonko’s friends either to please or to displease. I oppose them out of duty and in the name of the anti-fascism that is my life’s struggle.

For others, on the other hand, even those with government responsibilities, the fight against the members of an insurrectionary party was a matter of strict political logic, but not of fundamental differences or even conflicts of values. In fact, some of the founding leaders of a fascist, and therefore anti-republican, party, which was fortunately dissolved, quickly migrated to another party, which called itself an alliance, in other words a melting pot, to welcome the country’s different republican streams.

« If there are only a thousand of us left, well, I’m in! If even

There’s only a hundred left, I’ll still brave Sylla;

If there are ten left, I’ll be the tenth;

And if there’s only one left, I’ll be that one! »

I fight them neither for the titles nor for the honours of this life whose finitude is its inevitability. I fight them only for that silent glory which, after my death, is to leave the memory of having loved my country.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

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