Sénégal recovers the bases

Fifty years after the apparent restoration of its independence from over a century of French conquest and occupation, Sénégal is about to take over a stretch of military bases in the country that France has, until now, continued to control and operate. Congratulations to Sénégal! It is never too late to secure one’s freedom – even if it is 50 years or more down the line... The quest for freedom is an ever-ongoing human endeavour. Provided people remain resolute and focused, no setbacks are enduring and no hurdles insurmountable.

France has used these bases, during the period, as essentially its eyes and ears to keep tabs on its vast and entrenched interests across Africa. The bases are France’s pivotal intelligence tracking station to oversee and coordinate its uninterrupted exercise of hegemony over the political and socioeconomic affairs of those 22 so-called francophone African countries that it (and Belgium, and Germany until 1918) had conquered and occupied hitherto. Immanent in the worldview of the French political establishment since Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, i.e. irrespective of ideological/political colouration, none of these states is considered really independent or sovereign by any breadth or shade of either of these definitions. Instead, according to this conception, they are “francophonie” backwoods, which, at best, have some measure of local administrative autonomy (hence, “francophone Africa”!), with ultimate sovereign power supposedly lodged at Paris.

Each of these states “hosts” a French military base of varying capabilities and configuration as part of this overarching network in which Dakar is at the epicentre, in turn linked to requisite interventionist brigades positioned back home in Corsica. Thanks to this network, the French military has invaded this continental “francophonie” enclave 50 times since 1960 – from Chad to Congo Democratic Republic (CDR), Côte d’Ivoire to the Comoros. Such invasions provide the French the opportunity to directly manipulate local political trends in line with their strategic objectives, install new client regimes, if need be, and expand the parameters of expropriation of critical resources even further. On this score, the CDR (or Zaïre or Congo-Kinshasa as it was variously called), the jewel in the crown of “francophonie”, is aptly illustrative. Between 1961 and 1996, France intervened militarily in the country 17 times to prop up the notorious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko which ravaged one of Africa’s richest economies. For France, therefore, its hegemonic control of “francophone Africa” in the past 50 years has been a lucrative and prestigious enterprise to maintain a stranglehold of influence in the Southern World. Jacques Godfrain, a one time French government official with special responsibility for “francophonie”, is perfectly right to observe: “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] ... relations... with 15 or 20 African countries.”

It is extraordinary that despite its lived status of “limited sovereignty” for one-half of a century, Sénégal has emerged as arguably Africa’s most successful “nation-state”. This has occurred as a result of the amicable relationship nurtured, shared and displayed by the country’s constituent nations and faiths – a far cry from the genocidal turbulence that maps the sociology of a polity located just a few hundreds of miles away in the region. The exception of course to Sénégal’s highly laudable tale is Casamance, its south region. This is clearly a restoration-of-independence subject that the Sénégalese peoples can and should resolve peacefully.

With the imminent return of the bases, Sénégal should strike off new vistas of “firsts” in its exemplary Africa journey. The excellent housing units in the bases should be converted to affordable social housing for the people rather than being “taken over” by the Sénégalese military. Sénégal should indeed think of disbanding its military. It does not need it. As I have argued severally for nearly a decade, there should be a mandatory global ban on all arms sales and transfers to Africa and the dismantling of the military on the continent. No African state needs the presence or the use of the military and arms on its soil except, as the world has witnessed in anguish since May 1966, to murder targeted peoples of its population. Sénégal, as usual, can show the way in this stride for the new Africa by cancelling all existing arms procurements and abolishing its military.