Third and last part of our three-part interview with Mr. Candide Azannaï. We address issues relating to national cohesion, the relaxation of the socio-political climate, and above all "the sibylline, even incestuous relations that certain politicians have with the power to the point of entering into compromises". What plunges them according to Azannaï, well at the bottom, "in the sauce", maintaining them from now on in a sidereal silence... A possible invitation of the Head of State to the palace of the Presidency? Response from Candide Azannaï "...we will only talk about State problems and not about any personal claim. Because it is indecent to go and settle your personal problems in barter for the general interest and questions of values and principle". Read the interview...
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Candide Azannaï, you are president of a party, a regularly recognized political formation. In view of the realities imposed by the electoral law, you have undoubtedly observed for a few months, this ballet of certain personalities received by President Talon, this, surely in the perspective of the elections which are looming on the horizon. We had not yet seen you at the Presidency of the Republic, perhaps it will come. What comments do you have on this approach by the Head of State which, according to some observers, is part of an appeasement or normalization of the social climate? What is your assessment? And when, in your turn, you are invited, how will it happen?
Candide Azannaï: I'm going to tell you today that it's a total fraud. And it's a political scam that mocks our ability to read the facts. Who are those who grimaced this ballet said of the former Presidents of the National Assembly at the Palace of the Presidency to which you refer? Is it AMOUSSOU Bruno, NAGO Mathurin and IDJI Kolawolé? Then VLAVONOU?
They are the caciques political acolytes of TALON distributed in the two sections UP and BR of a ghostly single party of sad reputations at the end of practices incompatible with democracy and the rule of law. All of these people have been actively contributing and all benefit from the ongoing political crisis and impasse. Then it is also HOUNGBEDJI Adrien? This is mockery! All these people are members of the so-called rupture power. All including Me HOUNGBEDJI.
I do not find it serious that we want to hide them under the title of former Presidents of the National Assembly; they are all gravediggers of the image of a Benin that was once a pioneer of democracy. We are in a new manipulation which will have the effects of a certificate of conformity of a new type. Problems in politics are solved or remain.
When you turn your back on the problems in politics, you aggravate them and their consequences pursue you, pursue you until your fall according to their natures and their metamorphoses.
Has TALON solved the problem of exclusion that he created with the help of the Constitutional Court chaired by his former lawyer DJOGBENOU?
Has TALON settled the calamity of the confiscation of legislative power in 2019 through the use of force and the use of firearms?
TALON since he came to power, from you to me has organized successfully and without deadly violence which election? The deadly exclusive legislative elections of 2019? The comedy in 2020 of designation instead of the election of mayors?
The bloody hold-up of sectarian extension of the presidential mandate beyond the term fixed when he took the oath of Article 53 in April 2016 which plunges from Benin under the excesses of the exercise of personal power has been settled where , how and by whom?
The killings that tainted all these three deadly electoral parodies are settled where, by whom and how?
It is for these reasons that I speak of a deception which only aims at amnesia of the political and human crimes of the so-called power of rupture.
TALON cannot and does not want to solve any of the problems that are created by it for democracy and the rule of law. He is looking for legitimization.
Only, the strategy of problem translation is the worst strategy in politics when there are human crimes and especially in any situation that is similar to the exercise of personal power, to a bloody coup. Unfortunately, this is the case with us in the Republic of Benin.
If all that is taught in schools and universities is not bluff, then we are in the presence of a coup and since 2019 it is factual that we are in a coup regime permanent.
La Dépêche-Afric Infos: And what do you recommend, Mr Azannaï?
Candide Azannaï: It is a principle that when faced with a dictatorship, one should never put personal and private problems in competition with grievances in the general interest. Because everyone will tell you that in a quarter of a turn, a dictator can satisfy most of the personal administrative grievances, the stomach problems of X or Y and other advantages or positions of political rent in barter for his legitimation... The exposure of the problems of the kind causes the compromises by the fact that the dictator seizes some with heart joy to take a psychological influence on inconsistent leaders who lose in this way, of their superb of yesteryear.
La Dépêche-Afric Infos: Is this the case now? Are we living?
Candide Azannaï: But we live that. Take the TAWES Pascal case.
Here is someone who was among those who said they were in the fight for the restoration of democracy. He was TALON slayer. He has even been credited with fomenting a coup. Then wham! This TAWES is seen on the screens of the ORTB, the national television under control, clicking his heels, tight buttocks in military reflex in front of TALON, declaring that it was for the settlement of his administrative problems!
But his name meanwhile was cited as the mastermind of a coup. All smiles, he and the TALON he was fighting shook hands. After this show, did you still hear this TAWES speak? Does the resolution of the administrative problems of TAWES mean the resolution of problems of values, principles offended and transgressed by Patrice TALON?
That from now on we will have to pass by loss and profit the killings, the massacres of populations, the persecutions and the destruction of democracy? That we will all have to sink into resignation and go to Canossa? It's this stupid mistake, I was going to say this serious mistake that many irresolute people make who are on the way to drowning in it.
Remember this: As long as you are in front of a dictator for your particular, personal and private problems, you will have answers to your particular, personal and private problems. You will, however, have no satisfactory, worthy solution for the problems and damage caused to values and principles by the dictator. You enter into what are called compromises. You are at this stage, well at the bottom, "in the sauce", from now on you will no longer speak...
You suddenly become mute or a propagandist for peace as dictated by the executioner.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Mr. Azannaï, if the President invited you to the Palace to meet with you in the days to come, what would your reaction be?
Candide Azannaï: I don't know if you are his messenger. Let's make a clarification right away. A consistent political leader, that is to say, serious and respectful of himself and of the cause he defends, does not respond to the personal invitation of a dictator like excuse me, diarrhea pushes to respond to the throne. You need a prerequisite because everything counts and everything is played on the form as well as on the substance.
I need to know the object and the setting. It is according to the object, the frame that I will decide not to serve as an argument or circus object for the rides of bad faith. In the form of an invitation, we sense the fallout. I have no private and personal litigation issues with TALON. I don't know if he has any with me. Me, none.
The problem is between TALON and the People. Between TALON and democracy. between him and the rule of law. Not with me. Let that be clear.
If you are by chance his messenger, know that in case I have accepted to respond to his possible invitation, we will only talk about state problems and not about any personal claim. Because it is indecent to go and settle your personal problems by bartering the general interest and questions of values and principle.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: You Azannaï, wouldn't you have any particular problems?
Candide Azannaï: Life is the moment of problems. Everyone has it. Only those who do not put them in speculation against virtue, apparently, can say that they have none.
Allow me to laugh… Do you see me as I am, physically? I am a very dry man, very very dry. I'm a pure stoic when it comes to values and principles and then I'm very sober. If it's not proud or even boastful, I'll tell you I don't have one. And if I had any, as it is not abnormal to have, I will not in all conscience ask TALON to solve it for me in exchange for some compromise against my conviction and against my loyalty to values and principles.
Me, if he invites me I will go but there is no particular problem to discuss with him. It is with the people of Benin that he has serious disputes; he has none with me and vice versa. We have to talk about the people who were killed, who killed them, how some people were promoted to higher ranks, some even are rewarded general officers… We will talk about the state of democracy, the state of law, freedoms, things that affect the country, the management of heritage and in the context of the general interest. The interview must be full-bodied on his crimes and on the imperative of reconnecting with values and principles. My objective is clear: values and principles or the struggle continues.
When you look at me, remember that I resigned from his Government for questions of ethics of life and differences on the values and principles affecting strict respect for the Constitution of the Republic and the future of the Nation. No more. I will never defile my conscience.
Take a look at the former Presidents who go there? Was only one of them able to push TALON back?
On which points or on which of the crimes and other crimes of the imposture of the power said of the rupture? Open your eyes and question each other's postures on the visual accounts of their encounters with TALON.
Decipher their postures before during each segment of the ballets you refer to and their postures after. No comment, the other would say! A show of resignation for the visitors and jubilation for the player "of the Master of the place" who does not hide at all to have succeeded in his trick!
I would never want to suspect that on the occasion of these meetings, the baskets of grievances delivered to Patrice TALON with a very wise air also contained the problems of the retirement pensions of the former Presidents of the Republic, their cars and other benefits from which the latter would have been unduly weaned before or since 2016…
I am not saying and I would not like to believe that someone would have mentioned the balance of the dividends from the old businesses, the scabrous businesses whose names I prefer to conceal and which were indeed pretexts for the businesses known as attempts at poisoning and attempts to coups, other political privileges, advantages or expectations…
I am not saying and I would not like to believe that the other would also have listed his personal problems, personal and private concerns. Such stagings do not bode well for the benefit of the general interest.
Look at this picture! People who say they are fighting a dictatorship and who go there and come back to say something like this: we have submitted grievances, claims, which the dictator will examine with kindness...
The very idea of saying that someone is "a dictator" and coming to insinuate to detect benevolence in this person seems to me very incongruous and inappropriate.
The very near future, not to say the days to come, will edify each other... Provided that next August 1st is not sullied by the hypocritical embraces which will try to pass by loss and profit the crisis and the deadly political impasse in progress… You know, in June 2019 during several conferences and public political declarations, I had insisted that it will be necessary to avoid superimposing the YAYI / TALON conflict on the subject of the National Resistance. What opposes YAYI and TALON is different from what opposes TALON to the people of Benin.
People did not want to perceive the danger that there is for the People to let believe that a balance of the conflict YAYI / TALON would constitute the outcome of the forfeiture and the imposture of TALON and of the power known as of the rupture. What opposes YAYI and TALON is business, on the other hand what opposes the Beninese people to TALON is the transgression of democracy and the trampling of the rule of law by TALON. People will eventually understand, the time is not far for ... Let's move on.
La Dépêche-Afric Infos: But is there the situation of people in prison?
Candide Azannaï: Yes, precisely they are not political prisoners, even less for the most part, they are not common law prisoners. Most of them are political hostages.
By retaining them, including by force and by the political instrumentalization of the administration, justice and the military forces and the police, the so-called power of the break was in a cynical premeditation to barter them for an amnesia of its forfeiture, of its excesses and blood crimes, of exchanging it for its legitimation. See how synchronized the exploitation of rumors about the release of some people rounded up in the so-called TAWES coup case is? A pure deception!
A deception that feeds on people's inability to understand that one should never accept out of desperation. It was Bertrand RUSSELL who warned, because if you acquiesce out of desperation, he said, you will allow the conditions for desperate solutions to come true.
The hopeless solution is to go there and say to him as is ignominiously the case, "I came with demands, release me such and such. If you release them, there will be relaxation". Listen dear friend, you have to have your knees instead of your neck to do the reasoning that some will do at TALON...
Now is the time to reorganize and tell all those who go to Patrice TALON with particular personal problems that they are unworthy of representing the people, that they are degrading their status.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Good, but. We are still going to make a getaway beyond our borders while being here in Benin. This is precisely to address the situation in France. France has just experienced the elections with this partial failure suffered by President Macron. We have seen how the boat of the presidential movement almost capsized in the face of other French political forces. You had seen this news and what do you remember, as a political observer?
Candide Azannaï: You know, if we take the whole world as a whole, democracy is not the majority in the world, neither in terms of countries nor in terms of populations. Western democracy of the liberal type in the world is in the minority. But there is something magnetic about it and it is this magnetism that I have seen once again in the process that has been going on in France since.
How the election of the President of the French Republic was, and how the two legislative rounds took place and then the behavior of the authors. This is the magnetic character of democracy. France will pull through. The politician must read the message sent by the people and must operate on the basis of the messages sent by the people.
Democracy excludes that whoever is elected leader behaves like an absolute monarch because democracy is both division and diffusion of power. And you will see by following the sequence of events in France. I followed the speeches, I saw the agreements. There is the reality that cannot leave any French actor indifferent. And it is around this reality that the debates turn and will turn from now on.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Mr Macron said that no political force alone can legislate today.
Candide Azannaï: That's what I was saying referring to the structure of the 5th Republic. there is a book called La Nomenklatura Française and subtitled, powers and privileges of the elites. It is an old publication from 1986. We had the chance of these readings. It is indicative to understand the French Republic, how it is structured. It's a wonderful book. Nothing has changed, political France remains political France.
What is the message today? The message is summed up in, these are our problems that we submit to our representatives in Parliament. It is parliamentarism. There is necessarily that now and MACRON and no French political actor can ignore this message sent by the French people. It is true that I listened to a dictator of an African country who would have hastened to write to MACRON what seems to me like the hospital that does not care about charity. How can someone who has not organized any election without having killed and massacred citizens, arrested or exiled political figures for terrorism speak of the virtues of a democratic election?
Remember this: France is a Democracy and MACRON is a Democrat, on the other hand, this is not the case with TALON who, by means of deadly blows, destroyed and assassinated the first democracy in the South of the Sahara resulting from the first Conference National in Africa.
It is true that in recent years, there has been an unfortunate setback in relation to France the day after François MITTERAND's Speech at La Baule. Between the France of business, that of major commercial and financial interests, the France of geostrategy, that of the challenges of influences and positioning and the France of universal values and principles. It is the collapse of this France of universal values and principles which is disturbing and which raises the question of what universalist humanism is worth, carried by freedom, human rights, democracy and the State of right.
We note that there is like a choreography of dictatorial discord that undermines and denigrates the Democratic Renewal in many countries. The pretexts take as reference certain heads of state apparently holders of power for life but who nevertheless remain frequentable by this same France. This is a phenomenon that may well explain the message addressed to MACRON and attributed to Patrice TALON while the outcome of the French legislative elections was below expectations on the side of the French President.
I did not know that the document which circulated on certain social networks was authentic. The subsequent excitement and about the Minister in charge of Foreign Affairs trying to play devil's advocate is a blunder that adds to the blunder of the document which could well be done without unless the recipient will have to rejoice. Everything about this in my humble opinion was useless. My reaction to what is happening in France is that today, no French actor, ordinary citizens or French public actor can say, the people have not spoken to us now. They will be able to respond to the aspirations, questions and concerns of the French people.
French politicians are not indifferent to the messages of their people, contrary to what we observe in many countries in Africa and particularly in the Republic of Benin since Patrice TALON has been in power.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: is there another country that commands your admiration in terms of governance and democracy?
Candide Azannaï: You know there are many countries. I don't want to quote them. Lately there has been a collapse, a democratic retreat which is due to the upheavals of international geopolitics and to the influence of the great powers which are however officially promoters of the universalist values of democracy.
In our country at the height of the crisis of exclusion, of the assassination of democracy, the Head of the Delegation of the European Union, the excellent Ambassador Olivier NETE (originally from Germany) was expelled from Benin by the Government on the instructions of Patrice TALON; simply because for him, it will be necessary to preserve Beninese democracy. Can you explain by what alchemy he was expelled? It was on the basis of these clues that I told my collaborators that it was over for our democracy and in our sub-region and even in the African zone... Do you see that, if it is enough for business to supplant democratic values, the rule of law has many bad days.
The cursor on business and the geostrategic positioning that can be observed in certain great powers to the detriment of democratic values contribute to the collapse of these values and democratic principles. Because more and more the great nations called promoters of democracy paradoxically send us the image of favoring the gains of business, the business advantages generated by their commercial and military influences to the detriment of the values yet inscribed on their pediments.
The risk in this game will be for these powers their discredit then the loss of their positions. It is for this very reason that if it is difficult, we must not despair of democracy. I continue to believe in democracy despite the fact that it is currently in difficulty almost everywhere. I don't think we should let anyone ransack ours with impunity...
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Thank you, Mr. President, we are at the end of this interview which we invite you to conclude and why not, wink at your audience, because you are a leader of a political party and you have people who find themselves through your ideals.
Candide Azannaï: First of all, thank you for your availability and your interest in listening to me from time to time. You are one of the few people I trust and for whom I do not hesitate to answer.
The Government is solely responsible for the social suicide of the poorest and most destitute. The responsibility of Patrice TALON is entirely in the high cost of living which will worsen further if no solution comes to obstruct the tracks that I mentioned above, insofar as the consequences of the political, health, commercial, economic, financial and international security… those called the upheaval of geopolitics will soon catch up with us.
With regard to political governance, Patrice TALON is a de facto President, illegitimate from all points of view and illegal under African international law, the political provisions of ECOWAS, standards at the level of the international community; we are under a permanent coup regime.
The comings and goings of certain personalities that Patrice TALON orchestrates to put themselves in the spotlight, are artificial pieces of a deception which ultimately aims only to legitimize a sham which excludes, persecutes and kills.
The only way out of the current crisis and political stalemate is political dialogue, not to be confused with attempts at compromise, a headlong rush from power called rupture. Thank you.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Thank you, Candide Azannaï.
Interview by "La Dépêche-Afric Info"
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
