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Company · Revelation
Episode #34
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You leave Dakar, you go home to build in the village, even if you erase.
B — You stay in town, you hold your teeth, you keep sending the money.
If you chose A
Choosing A is admitting that the capital has betrayed its promise. This is to recognize that dignity is worth more than address. But it is also risking becoming invisible in a country that only looks at Dakar.
If you have chosen B
Choose B, bet on a system that crushes you slowly. It's accepting that your mother gets tickets but never your presence. This is to believe that the money transferred replaces the arms that build.
This dilemma is that of millions of Senegalese caught between the call of the terroir and urban magnet. Dakar concentrates most of the country's economic opportunities, but at a cost that has become delusional: rents that consume half of the wages, imported food that burns, saturated transport. The city promises everything and gives almost nothing to those who make it run — Small employees, artisans, vendors. Starting is choosing emotional coherence. Your mother coughs, the house collapses, and you finance from a distance a survival you never see. To go back to Kédougou is to reject the extractive logic that wants the provinces to feed Dakar with arms and that Dakar returns crumbs in transfers. It is also the crazy bet to create value where the state has stopped investing. But let us be lucid: without infrastructure, without access to credit, without public services, the return to the village can turn into a tomb of ambitions. You're building a house, yes, but your kids will walk ten miles to a mediocre school. To stay in Dakar, however, is to perpetuate the cycle of the internal diaspora — These uprooted people who feed distant families while themselves being impoverished. It is the exact mirror of the international diaspora: we send money, we consume its energy, and the system that benefits from these transfers never changes. Your rent enriches a speculator. Your Western Union mandates keep your mother just above the threshold of misery. Nobody really wins. The real scandal is that this choice exists. What a country forces its sons to cut
To go further
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