An African dilemma every Monday.
Analysis 48 hours later.
The Baobab of choices is an editorial series of moral, political, social and existential reflection. Every week, BAOBIZZ publishes an African dilemma without a perfect solution : a limited situation, a difficult arbitration, a fracture of consciousness. Then, forty-eight hours later, comes the analysis.
Here, it is not a question of choosing between good and evil, but of facing situations or each option has a lossmoral cost, renunciation or betrayal.
Monday: A new dilemma.
Wednesday: the corresponding analysis.
The current dilemma
— Care or regulation: Amina's fight
When defending the health of your people requires you to choose between the scalpel and the gallery.
Archives (50 episodes)
— Your skin or career: no choice
When your natural color becomes an obstacle, resisting is a luxury you may not be able to afford.
— Grandma's algorithm or attic
When artificial intelligence knocks on your door, your legacy trembles.
— Staying in Dakar or returning to build in the village
When the money you send feeds without ever building, does your exile still make sense?
— Care or regulation: the impossible oath
When saving lives today prevents you from protecting millions tomorrow, what do you choose?
— Your skin or your place: the price of power
When climbing the social ladder you have to erase the color of your own story.
— Code for them or grow without them
The algorithm promises abundance, but who really reaps the fruits of your intelligence?
— Stay in Dakar or go back to build in the village
You left your village for Dakar, but Dakar crushes you without freeing yourself.
— Treating or arming: the impossible budget
When protecting your people forces you to choose between their bodies and borders.
— Your skin or career: no choice
When your own color becomes the obstacle between you and your professional dream.
— cobalt or school: choose your future
When the wealth of the basement finances the misery of those who extract it.
— Stay or return: the tearing of the diaspora
You send money every month, but your mother dies without recognizing your face.
— Develop quickly or democratize first?
What if the modernization of your country required temporarily to sacrifice the voice of your people?
— Cream or mirror
Your skin is a battlefield, and nobody asked you for your opinion.
– Aid or autonomy
You're the finance minister of a small Sahelian state. Your country is going through a food crisis. The European Union offers emergency aid of EUR 200 million — of foodstuffs imported from Europe. Enough to feed your population for six months. But the economists of your ministry warn: these massive imports will destroy the market ...
– Tontine or bank
You've been running a neighborhood tontine for six years in Lomé. Thirty members. CFAF 50,000 a month each. A healthy caisse, an acquired confidence. A regional bank offers you « formalize » tontine: open an account, benefit from bank credit, access guarantees. In return: management fees, audits ...
– The journalist and the power
You're an investigative journalist. You have solid evidence in your hand that the Minister of Health has diverted 2 billion CFA francs from VOCID funds to hospitals. Patients died for lack of equipment that these funds should have purchased. But the minister is also your son's godfather. He got out of...
– Studying or staying building
You're admitted to Sciences Po Paris with a full scholarship. It's a dream. But you're also co-founding with two friends a citizen media in Conakry that's starting to have a real audience. Your reports on local corruption made a noise. You need your help — You're...
– Forest or jobs
You're the mayor of a forest commune in Cameroon. A Chinese logging company proposes an agreement: controlled logging of 3,000 hectares of primary forest over ten years. In return, 200 direct jobs, one school, one clinic, and 5% of the income for the municipality. The forest is home to endemic species, water sources, and ...
– Care or prayer
Your mother has advanced type 2 diabetes. Physicians prescribe insulin, a strict diet, regular controls. But your mother won't. She says God will cure her. Your marabout supports his position and advised him of herbal teas and the breaking of fasting with sweet dates — exactly the opposite...
– Family secret
You're 35. By searching your hospitalized mother's papers, you discover a letter from 1989. You learn that the man you called father your whole life isn't your biological father. Your mother brought up this lie. The man who raised you has died for ten years, without ever saying anything. ...
– Forgive or prosecute
Fifteen years ago, a man killed your father in the post-election violence. He's never been tried. Today, he became a notable respected in your village — He made the pilgrimage, he finances wells, his children are at school with yours. The village elders ask you to...
– Investor or autonomy
You've been running an agricultural cooperative in Mali for three years. 80 farmers. Correct results. A solid reputation. A foreign investor — impact funds based in Paris — It offers CFAF 500 million. In return: 60% of the shares, strategic decisions come back to him, and a total redemption clause in five years if the ...
– Refund or rebuild
Two years ago, when you went up to your little restaurant in Cotonou, your childhood friend Kofi t The pandemic swept it all away. You're closed. You lost everything except your family and dignity. Today you're doing it again. You found a partner, a local less...
– Vote against his conscience
The parliamentary elections are approaching in your country. Two leading candidates are competing in your riding. The first one is from your ethnic group and your region. He supported your community during the floods, helped families in need, funded the neighborhood mosque. But everyone knows he's incompetent, corrupt, and...
– The school or the Koran
Your son Ibrahima is twelve years old. He's first in his class. His teacher says he has the potential to integrate the region's high school of excellence. But your father — his grandfather, patriarch of the family — demands that Ibrahima join the Touba daara for three years of exclusive Koranic teaching. It's a tradition in ...
– The sea or factory
You're a fisherman in Mbour. For three generations, your family has lived from the sea. But for the past five years, industrial trawlers — flying foreign flags, operating under opaque licences — emptied the seabed. Catches fell by 70%. Your canoe often returns empty. Your kids eat less. A congressman is contacting you. ...
– Organ donation
Your only 19-year-old son was the victim of a road accident. Doctors call you, he's in a state of brain death. He's not coming back. But his organs — kidney, liver, cornea — are healthy and can save four lives, including two children who have been waiting for years. Doctors...
– Confiscation
You have a nine-year-old son, brilliant, curious, full of life. Your older brother — Without children, after years of marriage — Ask you, according to tradition, to entrust your son to him to raise him. It is an ancestral practice in your family: the first nephew returns to the eldest without descendants. You...
– Start-up or functionalization
You're 28, a graduate in computer science from Dakar's ESP. You spent three years developing a mobile rental payment and property management app adapted to the African market. The product is ready. You already have ten donors interested. A tech accelerator in Abidjan offers a six month accompaniment. But...
– Staff member integrates
You've been working at the Treasury for eight years. You're known for your integrity. One day, when you cross payment files, you discover something irrefungible: your director general diverts the equivalent of twenty million CFA francs each month for school canteens in three regions. Thousands of children eat less, or don't...
– The scholarship or family
You're 27. After years of hard work, you get a doctoral scholarship from the University of Montreal, in your preferred discipline — development economy. It's the opportunity of your life. A full four-year scholarship with an international employment perspective on return. But the day before you left, your mother is hospitalized. ...
– The dam or villages
You are a traditional leader of a territory of three thousand souls in Guinea. The state, supported by an international consortium, wants to build a hydroelectric dam that will electrify four regions and supply two million people with drinking water. But the project involves the submersion of four ancestral villages — of which yours — and the displacement of ...
– The healer or doctor
Your seven-year-old son is seriously ill. Regional hospital doctors diagnosed acute appendicitis with the risk of peritonitis. They recommend surgery within 12 hours. The operating risk is real, the anesthesia is uncertain, and the hospital lacks equipment. But your wife — and all his family — I don't think so. Your...
– The cursed legacy
Your father just died. He was respected in the neighborhood, generous with neighbours, pillar of the mosque. But by settling his estate, you discover the real origin of his fortune: the embezzlement of public funds carried out over twenty years within a national government. Millions stolen from the state. To hospitals without...
– The embarrassing witness
You're a taxi driver in Dakar. One night in December, around midnight, you see a scene that ices your blood: the son of the Minister of the Interior fatally strikes a travelling salesman in an alley of the Medina. You're the only witness. The victim died instantly. The police...
— Numbers or earth, you have to choose
When financial transparency threatens those it should protect, the truth becomes a slow poison.
— Staying in Dakar or returning to build in the village
Your salary feeds your family, but your absence slowly devours it from within.
— The post that can save or destroy
When your truth can trigger a fire that no one can extinguish.
— Your skin or career: no choice
When successful professionally demands betraying the skin in which you were born.
— Numbers or silence: accountant in grey zone
When your own accounting records become the weapon that can free or destroy your country.
— Staying in Dakar or returning to build in the village
Your salary feeds your family, but your absence slowly devours it from within.
The Baobab of Choice #9 — The tweet or the silence: talking under the storm
When truth threatens order and silence protects injustice, who are you really?
The Baobab of Choice #8 — Your skin or career: no choice
When successful professionally demands betraying the color you've always worn.
The Baobab of Choices #7 — Ore or memory
When the richness of the basement threatens to engulf the truth of the ancestors.
The Baobab of Choices #6 — Stay in Dakar or go back to save yours
You left Senegal to survive, but it's your absence that kills slowly.
The Baobab of Choice #5 — Tweet or silence: talking kills too
When denouncing a regime on networks can save or condemn an entire movement.
The Baobab of Choices #4 — Cream or mirror: choose your face
When protecting your daughter makes you betray your own skin.
The Baobab of Choices #3 — Accounting records or open mine
When transparency threatens employment, does truth still have a bearable price?
Baobab des Choix #2 — Your sister or your city: who are you saving?
When to protect your own people, you're forced to abandon those who look like you.
The Baobab of Choice #1 — The Colonel or the Constitution: who will save the country?
When the street applauds the boots, democracy asks you to choose your side.
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