Hard to believe, but after the hot battles peppered with inflammatory remarks against the IBK regime which weakened him to the point of leading him to resign, without firing a shot, at the first warning from a quintet of officers, today today, silence is the thing best shared at the top of the state. Who would like to impose it on the rest of the Malians. And yet, when the Assimi Goïta / Choguel Kokalla Maïga team was set in motion in May 2021, many people quickly noticed the sharing of roles between the President of the Transition and his Prime Minister.
The first seemed “silent” for having chosen silence as a mode of communication, no doubt to give reason to Alfred de Vigny’s maxim: “Only silence is great, all the rest is weakness”. Unless it is to hide certain insufficiencies inherent in the learning of power or a tempered character of someone who assumes without a word.
As for the Prime Minister, he cheerfully took the option of speaking to the point of letting people believe that “silence is a confession [d’impuissance] “. In any case, everything suggested that forums and commentaries provided man with the opportunity to display and magnify his omnipotence. Allowing him to finally express with fullness his great knowledge acquired during an extraordinary course, if one believes his thurifers. This approach does not fit with the deleterious atmosphere that surrounded his arrival in business, CKM has made many adversaries and enemies, who frustrated by his unkind revelations about the first Malian President, Modibo Keïta, who hit by its denials of the heroic struggle of the entire people in March 1991 at the cost of several hundred dead and wounded to establish freedom, including freedom of expression. Added to this is the full-time exercise of his score within a transition that rocked before his arrival and even lacked rudder and glibness at times. There was also his propensity to play service sappers and Assimi’s shield / fuse in difficult times.
This period, roughly speaking, faded, for lack of energy, but also, because of his too full of activism and the man collapsed. Exhausted according to his doctors, sick according to many other sources. And to make matters worse, a man, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, acting in the interim, proved capable of assuming and even gathering beyond what his predecessor had achieved.
The new Choguel came back more distant, less talkative and less talkative than the first one who was moved away by illness. This observation is unanimously shared. His rare speeches only rarely concern the AIGE, the draft Constitution and even insecurity or the rise in power of the FAMa. We see it more on charitable grounds where all its promises are not yet visible.
But sheltering in graveyard silence can be a choice; contribute to the decline of freedom of expression, another. A negative attitude that seems to be current.
Yes ! Let’s say it loud and clear, in Mali, freedom of expression no longer seems to be the best shared thing. The arrests/incarcerations over the past two years and those, even recently, of two activists (Mohamed Youssouf Bathily and “Rose vie chere”) in a few hours are there to remind us of this.
To the point that a politician, father of the first, it is true and doubled as a lawyer, made it the cornerstone of his latest pamphlet against the Transition on social networks and in Jeune Afrique. Mohamed Ali Bathily, not to name him, in an outing targeted against the decline in freedoms, is illustrated, in fact, as one of the rare Malian politicians still capable of saying aloud what is whispered in the cottages in Bamako: “the Transition after having used the round does indeed get rid of the ax”, than it would do otherwise.
Dicko Seïdina Oumar-DSO
JOURNALIST – WRITER – HISTORIAN