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Company · Revelation
Episode #6
Reminder of the dilemma
A —You go back to Dakar, you take your place again, even if you rebuild everything from scratch.
B —You stay in France, you double transfers, you fly remotely at all costs.
If you chose A
Choosing A means recognizing that money never replaces presence. It is also willing to sacrifice a stability conquered at the price of exile, with the risk of being without income in a Dakar that has become priceless. This choice honors the bond, but bets on a local market that makes no promises.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B means believing that the diaspora serves its people better from afar, in constant financial manna. But it's also admitting that we're turning into an ATM — useful, but absent. This choice preserves the flow of money, while digging the emotional fracture that slowly dislocates the family.
This dilemma is that of hundreds of thousands of Senegalese in the diaspora. It reveals a cruel economic architecture: whole families rest on the shoulders of a single expatriate, and the country itself has been structured around these transfers — over 1,500 billion CFA francs per year — without ever creating the conditions for productive return. You are not faced with a personal choice; You're caught in a systemic flaw.
If you go home, Dakar welcomes you with its expensive life, its housing boom, its rents that devour the wages before they even arrive. You're back with your family, yes, but you're also finding a capital that smothers your own children. The cost of daily dignity — shelter, feed, care — has exploded as a result of speculation and import dependence. Your presence is a balm; but without stable employment, it can quickly become an extra weight.
If you stay, you keep the financial infusion. But who educates your brother? Who negotiates with the owner? Who's holding your father's hand in the hospital? The violence of this situation is deaf, too: it is often your sister, your mother, who absorbs the shock of your absence, carrying the domestic and emotional burden while you are carrying the economic burden. Once again, women silence the breaches of a failing system.
The truth is, neither choice is enough as long as Senegal does not invest its diaspora otherwise. — Not like a currency tap, but like a pool of skills, entrepreneurship, organized return. The real scandal is not your hesitation; It is that we were in front of this impossible choice.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and branches. It grows in both directions, because the soil that feeds it and the sky that calls it are one and the same breath. As long as our states treat the diaspora as a cut branch that we press for its sap, the whole tree will continue to bend.
To go further
The Senegalese diaspora: between consumed manna and unexploited capital
Every year, the Senegalese diaspora transfers more than 1,500 billion CFA francs to the country — equivalent ...
Fractured humanity: what violence against women says about our societies
Everywhere on the planet, women are killed, mutilated, raped, silenced or confined in roles and...
Dakar, expensive city: how the Senegalese capital stifles its inhabitants
Between rising real estate, import pressure and rampant speculation, Dakar has become one of the most c...
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