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Economy · Revelation
Episode #3
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You transmit the report: accounting truth above all, no matter what.
B — You certify the accounts: four thousand families eat tomorrow, the rest will wait.
If you chose A
This choice reveals a deep conviction: without fiscal transparency, no economic sovereignty is possible. You refuse to be the docile link of a value chain that robs your own country. But you accept that thousands of people immediately pay the price of your probity.
If you have chosen B
This choice reveals the painful lucidity of those who experience the precariousness closely. You know that abstract justice does not feed anyone and that the balance of power is overwhelming. But by certifying the lie, you consolidate the very mechanism that keeps your country dependent.
This dilemma has nothing to do with school. It is played daily in the offices of Lubumbashi, Ouagadougou, Conakry — wherever the richness of the African subsoil feeds value chains whose profits evaporate to other continents. Accounting, far from being a neutral technical exercise, is a political act here. Certifying accounts, that is to say to the world: this is the truth of our exchanges. Or, this is the lie we accept to live.
Choice A is in line with the fight for African economic transparency. He claims that sovereignty begins with control of his own figures, that traceability of financial flows is the first condition for any fair redistribution. But he doesn't know. — or accepts — the immediate social cost. Four thousand families are out-of-school children, out-of-patient clinics, a province that is falling into oblivion. The moral courage here comes up against the brutality of economic blackmail inherited from the colonial architecture of trafficking: yesterday the bodies, today the minerals, always the same lever — the threat of withdrawal.
The choice B, on the other hand, is the one made in silence by thousands of African cadres who are caught in motion between their conscience and their reality. He is neither coward nor cynical: he translates a hierarchy of urgency where survival precedes justice. But it reproduces the pattern denounced by the three articles: Africa continues to finance the prosperity of others with its own substance, and its educated elites become, despite them, the guarantors of the system.
The truth is, no individual choice solves a structural injustice. The real scandal is not your dilemma. — It's because we've been locked up.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and its canopy. He knows that it is the invisible roots, deep, obstinate, which one day allow the crown to overcome the storm. Transparency is this root: it does not feed today, but without it, no tree stands tomorrow.
To go further
Black Atlantic: Tragedy of the crossing, triangular economy and European architecture of the slave trade
History of a total system: violence, logistics, profits and inheritances. For three centuries, the Atlantic was the heart of...
Globalized Value Chain: When Africa Pays the Hidden Price of Others' Wealth
From the African basement to electronic landfills, backwards of a global economy Behind every product we co...
Accounting at the heart of economic transparency in Africa
The forgotten but central role of accounting In an African context marked by a growing need for transparency ...
Next dilemma Next Monday
