Fortunately, not all our soldiers are called Assimi Goïta, Mamadi Doumbouya, Ibrahim Traoré or Abdourahamane Tchiani. Not everyone is a putschist. Not everyone is the feared leader of a transition that never ends. There are some that are normal. There are still some that the kepi has not quite brainless. There are some that the Kalashnikov has not completely dumbed down.
This is the case of General Mokoko of the Congo. This brilliant senior officer followed the clear path of the great African of today, the one which leads from the school of virtue to the worm-eaten benches of the dungeon. It perfectly illustrates the apt statement of my compatriot, Étienne Soropogui, the president of the Our Common Values movement: “In Africa, the place of a dignified man is prison. »
The good will of the leader being what it is under the gentle skies of our beautiful Africa, this exemplary man – in the army as in life – is languishing today in a cell in the Brazzaville Remand Prison, and no one knows if he will come out alive.
Graduated from the General-Leclerc preparatory military school in Brazzaville, then from Saint-Cyr, this son of a teacher, educated with a taste for studies and discipline, quickly rose through the ranks. He is in turn the commander of the Autonomous Zone of Brazzaville, commander of the Land Forces and chief of general staff of the Congolese army. From 2005 to 2013, he was head of the Peace and Security department of the African Union, where he dealt in particular with the crises in Mali and the Central African Republic.
Then, in 2016, he committed the irreparable by running for the presidential election (I know some who would have chosen the more direct and more effective path of pronunciamiento). He was immediately arrested for “endangering state security, illegal carrying of weapons and ammunition, disturbing public order, etc. » (our leaders have never lacked arguments to crush the bad apples). He is tried in a speedy trial (in our countries, it is a pleonasm to say so) and sentenced to 20 years of criminal imprisonment. Since then, there has been no shortage of voices denouncing the arbitrary nature of his detention and demanding his release. Besides his family and the Congolese democrats, Amnesty International and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention have moved heaven and earth, in vain! The Mokoko case is so worrying that even France, which tends to turn a blind eye to the actions of its African protégés, has taken action. This is what Jean-Yves Le Drian said during Sassou-Nguesso’s official visit in 2015: “I spoke to him about Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and other people, telling him that we expected actions from him … I told him firmly and I am sure that the President of the Republic will tell him the same thing. »
It’s already been seven years since General Mokoko has been lying in a deathbed in Brazzaville! His fate is in the hands of all human rights defenders. Hurry up. Democracy would lose a little of its meaning if this great Congolese died in prison.