2023-08-01 19:47:51
During the second Russia-Africa summit, a parochial quarrel arose, of which this meeting was neither the place nor the moment. A pass of arms which is worth registering in the register of the conflict of generations publicly opposed President Macky Sall (the old) to Captain Ibrahima Traoré (the young) during the speeches, at the opening of the Russia Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, Friday 28 July.
It was the young captain who was the first to draw his hand in front of the twenty or so heads of state and government gathered around Vladimir Poutine. In a corny, old-fashioned, completely offbeat speech, half a century old, the President of Burkina Faso castigates imperialism and its lackeys, then accuses his African peers of yesterday and today of going over the hills and worth tendering the begging bowl: I’m going to apologize to the elders that I could upset in my future remarks. The questions that our generations are asking are the following: it is a question of understanding how, with so much wealth on our soil, Africa is today the poorest continent. And how is it that our heads of state cross the world begging? We, African heads of state, must stop behaving like puppets who dance every time the imperialists pull the strings “, claimed Ibrahima Traoré. All shame drunk and all dignity buried in the pocket.
After decolonization, the extinction of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, do the terms “imperialism and neocolonialism” still have any meaning? Isn’t the Russian Special Operation of “denazification and demilitarization” of Ukraine which got bogged down an imperialist war? So the Russian-Africa summit now to create the conditions for marketing Ukrainian and Russian wheat, doesn’t it look like a begging bowl? The poor President of the Burkinabé Transition, does not even know that the host of Russia and his country practice the worst imperialism. Like what, one can be young physically and old in the head. Instead of evoking a distant past that has faded for a long time, he should have built his dialectic around promising, innovative themes that are successful such as the demographic dividend, artificial intelligence, the digital economy, everything emphasizing their impact on the dynamics of economic, cultural and social development and, consequently, on the well-being of populations. These are the themes of the future that should have preoccupied the young president of Faso. Alas! He wanted to emulate Thomas Sankara and preferred to mime him clumsily. Stung to the quick, Macky Sall, who is not yet old, vigorously reframed his young peer, in these terms: “To answer our younger brother, our younger brother: the heads of state did not come here to beg. We don’t go anywhere else to reach out. We work for a partnership of equal dignity between peoples. It’s the same speech that we hold in Dakar, here in Saint Petersburg, or in Washington. And this fight transcends generations.»
To protest against this unfriendly attitude towards them, Presidents Sassou N’Guesso, Paul Biya and Umaro Sissoco Embaló shunned the family photo. Shouldn’t Captain Ibrahima Traoré have had patience to do the dirty laundry at an AU summit?
Abraham Kayoko Dore
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