By Adama Gaye
AFRICA IS NOT ABANDONED, Mr VINCENT BOLLORÉ. IT IS A CERTAIN AFRICA, WITH ITS DIRTY AND COACHOTERIES, WHICH DIES, REVEALING THEM, AS PURULENT EFFLUENTS, TO THE HAPPINESS OF ITS PEOPLE AND ALL WHO KNOW THAT THE 21ST CENTURY WILL BE JUST OR WILL NOT BE.
Suddenly, the Breton, accustomed to the sea, aboard a resplendent yacht, feels a sea sickness from a … earth chiselled by harmattan and desert sand, glowing sun and dry winds, while it is, him, in the distance, in his sweet France. In a nascent summer.
Brutal shock. Which triggers in him a strong desire to degurgitate. “Should Africa be abandoned?”, He says, disgusted yesterday in the columns of a large newspaper in his country. Eighteen years after the infamous sentence making her the “continent without hope”, on the front page of the bible of the neoliberal economy, The Economist, in a projection entered into posterity, here is the turn of a captain of industry, buccaneer at large, reserving the theory, finally unmasked, of the damnation of our continent. Poor Africa!
Coming from the mouth of Vincent Bolloré, a man who makes fun of having invested 4 billion euros on the continent, there is enough to invoke the heavens to try to understand what could have happened for this proud- Armed, haughty, arrogant, imbued with certainties, commander, eternally sure of his fact, dark, abruptly, like a Titanic on the high seas, in the middle of an unstable swell, with arms and baggage.
The winds are definitely turning. A few days ago, the one who, shortly before, terrorized his world, despised the press, stood out from the crowd, was brutally caught in the limelight. Or rather in the antechamber of a dungeon to be cooked by harder than him, a judge, Serge Tournaire, the same who, a few weeks earlier, had seen stars in broad daylight at another deus ex machina, Nicolas Sarkozy, not to name him.
In truth, Mr. Bolloré’s troubles have not stopped growing in recent times. A few days before his humiliating custody, potentially deprived of liberty, he had received a heavy financial penalty of 8 million euros, inflicted by exotic judges Burkinabe -who had the gall to strengthen, multiplying by more than two , an initial charge that the litigant Breton wanted to cancel.
On the 28th of March, in front of the 17th chamber of the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris, it was your servant, myself, who faced him after he found my words abusive accusing him of being a predator in Africa. the same lot as a certain Franck Timis, plunderer of the natural resources, petro-gas, of Senegal, with the help of a corrupt power at its head.
Las, the complaint sent, in his name, by his Parisian lawyer, results in a fool for who knows how to read the verdict of the judges. Captain Bolloré wanted his honor to be washed with a soap of 32,500,000 francs CFA, or 50,000 euros. The judges, in their togas, only granted him 655 francs CFA.
The priest did not stop there. In Benin too, verbally, the local Supreme Court removed a railway market he wanted to have against all odds, and in particular to frustrate a local businessman …
The seasickness of the Breton, his subsequent jeremiads, his complaints and complaints on this African terra nullius, are, therefore, only to analyze under the prism of a violent return of stick for the one who knew only that the palaces, centers of power, leaders he helped to gain power, even crowned heads. He was moving like a fish in the water. He was the lord of the waters. To the point of having made the target of his nets.
Everyone wondered what magic he was able to achieve, without striking a blow, in capturing heads of state, ministers, and heads of public corporations. By having them sign the best contracts for his benefit. In particular to take control of ports and railways, farms, tropical latifundias, while influencing trade through its means of communication and the power of its logistical strength. It was said a proconsul trans-territories. That it was beautiful for him this democracy at auction, so much the return on (meager) investment he was collecting did not stop to impress the whole world …
Everything was sailing slowly. Noiseless. Like a yacht on the high seas. Everything worked for her. Nothing could lead him to realize, especially not to think, like others, that he was on a land of non-governance, being reincarnated as a rescuer, come on these hot and arid banks, to bear the burden of the white man, taking over the heritage of one of his ancestors, Rudyard Kipling.
Did he think, condescendingly obliged, that he was only there to save her from his dark night?
The shocks of recent days must have been particularly boring. For it to finally realize that far from the shadow deals between Lomé, Cotonou and Dakar, there is the brilliance, the light, the demand for transparency, these new eternal norms that all peoples and … more and more capacities by this dynamic, this tecHtonique of the plates, born of the surge of this new revolution of the information-technological, swept in its heart by a popular requirement of ethics, transparency and equity. Sovereignty!
Hard alarm clock. Useful. Africa is not abandoned, Mr Vincent Bolloré. It is a certain Africa, with its filth and dungeons, which is dying, revealing them, like purulent emanations, to the happiness of its people and of all those who know that the 21st century will be right or will not be.
Welcome, on the other hand, in the rising Africa, the new Africa: new border of the development, hospitable and welcoming, but beware the ticket of entry and the rules of the game are at the antipodes of the micmacs of the recent past. Find your minds, do your mea-culpa, put away your toolbox of liabilities and past, try the healthy relationship, and then you can still be with us. In a relationship based on respect and win-win where people will no longer be short-circuited by public or private profit.
Come back, if you are able to no longer play the lords at home. Otherwise, in addition to seasickness, we would give you the one, even more dizzying, of land. We are standing!
* Adama Gaye, journalist, author of Tomorrow The New Africa, faced Vincent Bollore before the French justice, the last 28mara, and welcomes the verdict delivered that day.
