We will not mourn the death of the Bongo dynasty, but we will wait to see before adding our voice to the delirium with which the streets welcome Brice Oligui Nguema, the new strong man of Libreville. There is no shortage of reasons that push us to be cautious these days. The avalanche of coups d’état that occurred before the fall of the man we must call President Bongo II made us the proverbial hot cat.
We have supported in these columns (by holding our noses, it’s true!), in turn, the putsches of Bamako, Conakry and Ouagadougou. We believed that Alpha Condé’s third term was a crime against the State and that Mali and Burkina Faso were in complete decline due to the boundless negligence of the regimes of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta and Marc Roch Kaboré. Born into a generation ravaged by 65 years of pseudo-independence, I mean of bluster and blows, hungry for bread and freedom, clinging to hope like a castaway to a wreck, we have an irrepressible tendency to succumb to the siren song.
Now that we’ve seen them in action, we know that none of these three colonels will get us out of the hole. In Guinea, Mali, as in Burkina, the euphoria has passed. It’s the excruciating after-party drunkenness. In Ouaga and Bamako, the insecurity in the name of which the tanks were brought out has not receded. On the contrary, everywhere, jihadists are at home like fish in water. In Conakry, state coffers are being looted and demonstrators are being mowed down with even more cynicism than in the days of Alpha Condé. Worse, the transition which is the raison d’être of these deplorable juntas is no longer on the agenda. We take the pretext here of growing terrorism, there of the misappropriation of public goods, to make us forget it.
Everything suggests that the military is trying to buy time to last as long as possible in order to manipulate the next elections if they ever take place, either for themselves or for a politician of their choice. In any case, the exultation with which they welcomed their new sidekick from Niamey says a lot about their intentions.
Africa is definitely a drunken ship! He doesn’t sail. It multiplies the dilemmas. He falls from Charybdis to Scylla, from the clutches of Foccart to the fangs of Prigozhin, from the hands of senile dictators to those of young long-toothed putschists.
We want to talk about the curse. But we do not have the right to do so: during a stay in Haiti (this large and beautiful country long subscribed to misfortune), our friend, the poet and publisher Rodney Saint-Éloi, formally forbade us to pronounce this word singularly disastrous: “There is no such thing as a cursed people, there are only bankrupt elites. »