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Policy · Revelation
Episode #45
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You finance the army: without security, no hospital will stand.
B — You finance health: a people dying of disease has nothing to defend.
If you chose A
Choosing the army means accepting sovereignty over immediate care. It is a bet on stability: secure the territory first and then rebuild. But it's also about recognizing that your state exists more by guns than by clinics.
If you have chosen B
Choosing health means asserting that the state must first keep its citizens alive, here and now. It is an act of radical political dignity. But it is also a risk that the territories that are being treated today will be conquered tomorrow by those you have not fought.
This dilemma is not theoretical. It is played annually in budgetary arbitrations in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad. It reveals a brutal truth: the most fragile African States are forced to choose between regal functions that any nation normally constituted exercises simultaneously. America spends more than $800 billion on defence while leaving 27 million citizens without health coverage — proof that even the world's first power has not solved this tension. But in the Sahel, the choice is existential, not political.
Behind Option A is the security trap: decades of inflated military budgets have not prevented jihadist expansion. Worse, poorly framed armies sometimes become themselves a threat to the populations they are supposed to protect. The recent history of coups d'état in West Africa shows that the army, once overfunded, can devour the state that fed it.
Behind option B is another trap: that of angelism in the face of armed violence. No health system works in a war zone. The humanitarians know this, who evacuate as soon as the bullets whistle. Treating without securing is filling a pierced bucket.
The real question that this dilemma poses is that of complete sovereignty. As long as an African State depends on external partners for either one of these vital functions, it remains a disguised state under guardianship, condemned to arbitrate between its own members as a body that would choose between its heart and lungs.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and its branches. He knows that without deep roots, no canopy holds — But without leaves, no root feeds. The wisdom of Baobab is to grow slowly, in all directions at once. The nations that last are those that refuse the dilemma itself — and build, even modestly, on all fronts at the same time.
To go further
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