“Everything in excess is insignificant.” Sonko was once again excessive in his attacks on judges and journalists. The excesses of Mr. Ousmane Sonko’s opponent make Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko’s quest for respectability and prestige meaningless.
The country is prestige, and there is no prestige without distance, and it is obviously impossible for Mr. Sonko to rise to the height required by the role of prime minister. He almost became president by accident, and he became prime minister unintentionally. How can the prime minister accuse judges of corruption because they made decisions that were not in his favor when he was an opponent?
So, good judges are those who made decisions that were in his favor. This is not the position of the head of the government, but the leader of the clan. We now understand the initial idea of organizing “judicial meetings to restore the tarnished image of justice” in the President’s April 3 speech. Fortunately, the president put a lot of water in the bisap.
We don’t have a head of government but a clan leader, a war lord who will be more concerned with political, judicial and media revenges, reckoning than solving the concerns of Senegalese people. Given the scale of the emergency in the country, it is still worrying that our prime minister has time to attend to the details of taxing the press, which should at best be the responsibility of the tax inspector.
We do not ask our prime minister to hold public conferences, but to make decisions, in short to govern instead of doing a “one man show”. The government acts. Mr. Prime Minister, the electoral bracket is closed. You are no longer in the opposition.
Your crusade against the press is already lost. Despite the excesses and abuses that must be corrected, Senegal owes much to its press. The press enabled us to reach the “thresholds of democratization” by contributing to the expansion of the foundations of democracy with the opening of the media in the 90s and electoral transparency that enabled our country to break the cycle of post-election violence.
The Macky Sall regime takes responsibility for the help it has always given to the press because there is no democracy without the press. Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, said: “Our governments being the opinion of the people, the first object should be to preserve this right; and if I were to decide whether we would have a government without a newspaper or a newspaper without a government, I would not hesitate for a moment to choose the latter hypothesis.
The tax “amnesty” we assume is a way to help the press rise to the level of our great democracy, on the other hand your policy of fiscal strangulation is a way to kill the press in order to have a government without a press like with the Nazis and Fascists in the 1930’s.
Mr. Prime Minister, the Senegalese have opened their eyes and it is your excesses and arrogance that will be the brake on your “resistant ascent” to the supreme position. Fortunately for our Republic, which will not have at its head someone who threatened generals, insulted judges and asked young people to transform our president into Samuel Doe.
So many excesses that the VARs remind us of every day and that make your quest for statesmanlike prestige insignificant. The statesman takes the height, does not exaggerate the details and does not reduce the state to his person or to crypto-personal reckoning, which is the quality of a clan leader or a war. Emergencies are elsewhere. This public lecture is a diversion, another weapon of mass distraction.
Dr. Yoro Dia, political scientist.