Africa

il existe une violence sociale qui ne fait pas toujours de bruit. Elle ne renverse pas les gouvernements. Elle ne provoque pas nécessairement des manifestations. Elle ne laisse pas toujours de traces écrites. Elle se glisse dans les salons, les bureaux, les voitures de fonction, les maisons bourgeoises, les administrations, les entreprises, les cérémonies, les écoles — et dans les rapports ordinaires entre ceux qui ont et ceux qui n’ont pas.

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Elections can be held, ballots can be printed, transparent ballot boxes can be installed, observers can be called, results can be proclaimed and democracy can be spoken of. But one question remains: what is the real value of voting when the citizen who exercises it depends materially on the person whom he must judge?

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They are societies where one first respects the rule, then the one who incarnates. There are others where man is first respected, then only the rules he agrees to let exist. In much of contemporary Africa, the relationship to power is still trapped in this second logic. The head precedes the institution. The person absorbs the function. Authority is confused with rank.

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The World Cup is much more than a sporting competition. It is a world ritual in which societies give themselves to see, project their identities, express their tensions and transform collective emotion into economic and political value.

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Senegal has a major political and legal tradition in Africa. This tradition, however, does not exempt a lucid examination of the institutional frailties revealed by recent history: concentration of powers, real or perceived dependence on certain institutions, weakness of parliamentary control, electoral tensions, extensive recourse to exceptional procedures and difficulties in accessing prompt and impartial justice.

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For the first time, technology is not just replacing human physical strength. It is beginning to compete with certain intellectual capabilities that have so far been the core of many skilled trades. This border was supposed to protect the educated middle classes. Today, it is becoming increasingly blurred.

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Imagine a country capable of sending probes to the limits of the solar system, mapping the human genome and developing vaccines in record time — But where an ordinary citizen may hesitate to call an ambulance for fear of the bill. This country exists. Its name is the United States of America.

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Senegal has entered an area of economic turbulence whose consequences could shape its future for the coming decade. Behind the technical terms of « government debt », « budget deficit », « IMF programme » or « structural adjustment »It is a simple reality: the ability of a state to build schools, hospitals, roads, pay its officials and protect the most vulnerable populations.

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For more than half a century, Africa has sought its path between two aspirations often presented as complementary but which in practice sometimes seem to be in tension: political democracy and economic development. The issue deserves to be discussed without taboo, but also without simplification.

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There are paradoxes that resist euphemism. The nation that has proclaimed itself a universal beacon of freedom now holds more prisoners than any other country on Earth. — More than China, more than Russia, more than any authoritarian regime Washington likes to point fingers. This figure is not a statistical anomaly: it is a revelation.

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