Question to whom it may concern: “Are our politicians today, with the exception of a few, great men?” It is not me who asks the question, but rather the Guinean writer Camara Laye, who died on February 4, 1980 in Dakar, Senegal. Asking this question in 1978 in his book Le Maître de la parole, the Guinean writer replied that "it's doubtful". Camara Laye thus doubted, in 1978 – 44 years ago now – that our politicians were great men. Because, he then explained, “they make politics a bloody business. They starve our peoples, exile our cadres, sow death!”
What has really changed today, 44 years after this shocking diagnosis? Unfortunately, politics remains, to a large extent and in various forms, a disastrous enterprise, in which those in power crush those who have served as a stepladder to climb to the top. The peoples are always starving, executives and other adversaries find themselves forced into exile, if we do not make sure that they stay far from their homeland and, sometimes, death is a sign for some, early on and unexpected, its fatal stop.
Moreover, here and there, millions of people sleep every day without having enough to boil pots and pans, whereas they must already undergo the repeated attacks of their ill-intentioned peers, experts in the dismantling of the social body and the community harmony.
ONLY SLOGANS, BAIT?
However, they made us dream so much, the politicians, whatever their plumage. Whether they are civilians or soldiers, most of those who have managed political affairs in our countries have, one after the other, mirrored El Dorado to their populations, selling, surfing on our miseries and our reality of eternal assisted, the false label of "a society where it will be good to live for each and for all". Only slogans, bait at the end of the fishing hook for votes for ballot boxes that sound the “knockout blow” of a victory without firing a shot in the aftermath of often prefabricated elections? And to make matters worse, the handful of believers is quickly drowned in decision-making circles, even defeated, by a horde of opportunists in search of show politics!
They even swore, our politicians, right hand raised to the sky, that they would defend us against all odds, that our confidence will never be taken unawares. They made so many promises to us that ultimately remained vain, meaningless, like empty words that we line up at will to weave the necklace of inaction...
How, today, can we trust politicians again, or more exactly those who govern us, when they have failed for the most part, for 62 years of independence, to boldly implement policies that bring us together, elevate us on the path of virtues, and set us up against the challenges which, from all sides, assail us? How many new beginnings, breaks with the past, statements of good intentions will we need before finally, Man is really at the heart of the development dynamics of our countries and our societies in loss of speed and values?
CHANGING PARADIGM
How many pleas will we still have to make so that our political actors, not just some, but all of them, are great men, who know how to put forward the supreme interest of nations and peoples?
On this April 4, when the trumpets of independence, in 1960, of Senegal resound, and when we commemorate the 54th anniversary of the assassination of the Black-American pastor Martin Luther King, let us all the same, like the latter, a dream: that of seeing new suns of a more promising independence rise on our countries, after 62 long years of various errors carried by inappropriate and opportunistic political choices...
What if we finally dared to really change, no longer lip service, but in daily acts, the political, social, economic paradigm to emancipate ourselves from all these habits that colonize our being and stick to our skin?
© Serge Mathias Tomondji
Ouagadougou, April 4, 2022
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
