[Analysis] Baobab Choices #1 — The Colonel or the Constitution: who will save the country?

Reminder of the dilemma

A — You defend the coup d'état as a legitimate start from a betrayed people.

B — You condemn the putsch and demand a return to constitutional order.

If you chose A

This choice reveals your fidelity to the immediate reality: the people suffer and the institutions have failed. You're valid for the idea that legitimacy can come from weapons when the ballot boxes have been confiscated. But you know you're offering a white-seing to any future man in mesh.

If you have chosen B

This choice reveals your faith in principles, even imperfect ones, as dykes against arbitrary. You're defending a Constitution that many think is complicit in looting. You may appear disconnected from a deeply legitimate popular anger.

This dilemma is the one that has broken the Sahel for a decade. Behind Option A, there is a raw truth: constitutions have been tailored, elections rigged, parliaments domesticated. By betraying formal democracy, civil elites paved the way for barracks. Journalist supporting the coup does not celebrate violence — He acts a consummated divorce between the people and their institutions. But he opens a box of Pandora. For if armed force becomes the ultimate recourse, who will arbitrate tomorrow between the good colonel and the bad general? The street, heated to white by social networks, that same street where rumors replace investigation and vindiction replaces the trial?

Behind Option B is another, more austere truth: law is the only common language in a plural society. To condemn the blow is to deny that the end justifies the means, even when the legal means have been corrupted. It is to bet that the Constitution, however imperfect it may be, remains the only ground where a people can argue without destroying itself. But this bet assumes that the guardians of the constitutional temple finally agree to renovate it — Otherwise, the sacred text is more than just a screen for kleptocrats.

The real trap for you journalist is speed. Social networks demand a camp, right now, without nuance. Now the shade is your weapon, your only weapon in front of guns and algorithms. Publish too fast, it's hot legislation — exactly what tired democracies do when fear dictates the law.

Baobab knows this dilemma. Its roots dive into the ancient land of unwritten constitutions, palabres and pacts. But his trunk was dug by so many crises that he could collapse. Yet he holds, not because he chooses between his roots and his canopy, but because he refuses to sacrifice one to another. True courage may not be to choose a camp — It is to maintain the tension between urgent justice and patient law, like a tree that carries both the weight of the sky and the memory of the ground.

To go further

Next dilemma Next Monday

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