[Analysis] Baobab Choices #9 — The tweet or the silence: talking under the storm

Reminder of the dilemma

A — You publish everything now, even if you burn a street already on fire.

B — You're holding back the investigation to avoid chaos and protect lives.

If you chose A

Choosing A is believing that truth is an imprescriptible right, even when it burns. It's betting that the darkness does more damage than the raw light. But it's also accepting that your journalistic act becomes the spark of violence that you don't control.

If you have chosen B

Choosing B is assuming that responsibility takes precedence over transparency in an emergency. It is to recognize that information is a weapon, and that a weapon is handled with caution. But it's also giving the powerful the luxury of time — that time, in Africa as elsewhere, always benefits those who have the means to erase.

This dilemma crystallises three deep fractures that cross contemporary African democracies. First, the tension between truth and stability. Senegal, often praised for its democratic maturity, is experiencing these moments when formal institutions — justice, press, parliament — are short-circuited by the street and social networks. To publish is to honor the democratic pact. But to publish in the tumult is sometimes to entrust a match to the crowd hoping that it will illuminate rather than fire.

This scenario then questions the journalist's role in a sick information ecosystem. When the rumor has already built its own story, when the popular vindiction has designated its culprit before any investigation, the verified information becomes paradoxically suspicious. It's too late to calm down, too early to digest. The temptation to legislate hot — so many countries on the continent — This vertigo is precisely the result: the impression that free speech has become ungovernable.

Finally, this dilemma reveals the fundamental asymmetry of power. The minister does not hesitate. He has lawyers, relays, offshore accounts. Time is playing for him. The innocent wrongly accused on the networks, he only has your pen to hope. And women in rural health-care clinics don't even have an internet connection to know that they've been stolen from them. Holding the information in the name of prudence is to marry, despite yourself, the logic of the jungle of international relations described in our columns: that where the powerful set the rules of time.

There's no good choice. There are only choices assumed. Baobab does not choose between its roots and its branches. He knows some of them don't fit without others. Truth without responsibility uprooted. Caution without courage stifles. True African journalism, like Baobab, must hold both — anchored in the burning ground of the real, but high enough for his word to exceed the dust of the moment.

To go further

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