Governance, Law & Institutions

In a rule of law, justice fulfils a paradoxical but essential function: it exercises part of the coercive power of the State while protecting citizens from abuses of that same power. It may arrest, judge, condemn and imprison; but it remains legitimate only if it acts according to pre-emptive, precise, impersonal and applicable rules to all, including those who govern.

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Senegalese democracy demonstrated in 2024 a remarkable political maturity: a peaceful alternation of elections in a context of real institutional tensions. This is a valuable achievement. But the first democratic generation — pluralism, free elections, alternation — We must now give way to a second generation: control democracy. A democracy where not only the rulers are appointed by the people, but where they are held accountable — concretely, documentaryly, institutionally.

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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 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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I am not writing to flatter you or to beg you. I do not write to remind you of your duties, for you know them when they serve your communication. I don't write to you to ignore outside crimes, already too many. I am writing to tell you the other truth: that of our inner betrayals. I write to you because a continent can be looted by the stranger, but it is really on its knees only when its own sons learn to speak the language of looting with a local accent.

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I am not writing to understand you or to absolve you. I'm not writing to you to get reparation: some losses are not repairing. I'm writing you to establish the facts. I'm writing to file a brief. I am writing to you so that the silence does not come to complete what you have begun.

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Often presented as a democratic exception in Africa, Senegal has a rare image of political stability on the continent. Civil alternations, lack of military coups d'état, intellectual and religious vitality: the picture seems flattering. Yet, behind this reassuring institutional facade, the country gives the feeling of a deep stalemate. Stability without transformation, democracy without refounding, social peace without collective projection.

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For more than thirty years, international investment arbitration has been a discrete but decisive pillar of legal globalization. Presented as a technical dispute settlement mechanism, ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) is in fact a global legal power relationship in which African States occupy a position of structural vulnerability.

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Democracy, victim of slow and administered death Contemporary democracies no longer collapse as in the past. They do not necessarily fall under the blows of an insidious general, nor on the brutal night of a military coup. They gradually weaken, by wear and tear, by slipping, by diverting their own mechanisms. They continue to organize elections, to make ...

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The argument that « power drives mad and absolute power drives absolutely mad » is often mobilized as a moral formula, almost lazy, to disqualify leaders who deviate from their promises or harden their governance once installed. Yet behind this sentence is a mechanism that is otherwise more complex, deeper, and above all more...

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