“ Senegalese,
Senegalese,
My dear compatriots,
Land of openness, tolerance and freedom, Senegal has marked all its meetings with history with an indelible imprint of progress. All the crises we have gone through have revealed the great capacity of our country to overcome challenges, to transform obstacles into opportunities to keep it on its trajectory of peace and solidarity. Each stage of our political and social history has strengthened in each of us the common desire to maintain Senegal as an authentic republic and a model of democracy.
The last presidential election is further proof of this political capacity of our people to watch over balances and to draw red lines, of which the institutions of the republic remain the guarantors of their inviolability.
In light of the painful events of March 2021 and June 2023, but also informed by the lessons of the last presidential election, our new responsibility is to declare the obsolescence of violence in the settlement of political disputes. Also, we can agree that, from now on, consultation and dialogue must be considered as the first principles and rules of forward-looking conflict management.
Our deep conviction is that now we must look resolutely towards the future with the perspective of assigning ourselves a New Responsibility. We are even condemned to it, if we do not want to give any chance to the demons of division and violence to confront us with new dangers, while we have real opportunities to achieve our political and economic emergence.
Thus, our New Responsibility is to make the political space a peaceful place, a framework for the confrontation of ideas, the definition of strategies, projects and programs with the sole aim of building a balanced society. A society capable of offering each citizen the means to live happily, by actively participating in the life of the community.
Our New Responsibility is to embody a democratic and republican opposition. An opposition backed both in its conduct and in its action by a political ethic concerned primarily with the life of each Senegalese.
Our country’s Constitution clearly states that natural resources belong to the people. Faced with this imperative prescription, our responsibility is to do everything so that what is today perceived as an ideal of the common good goes from a principle to a reality in the life of each citizen.
To achieve this, Senegal must offer the example of a quality public service in which food security, health, education, water and electricity, employment, housing and the living environment, security, mobility, culture, communication, the environment are no longer a luxury, but minimum standards backed by the inalienable rights of each citizen.
Senegal has all the assets to meet such a challenge through the entrepreneurial culture of its youth, through the dynamism and commitment of its women, through the intelligence and expertise of its sons inside and in the diaspora, by the robustness of its institutional architecture and by its credibility on the international scene.
The equality of all citizens before the law, respect for freedoms, in particular freedom of expression, freedom of organization and freedom of demonstration within republican legality, defense of the physical and moral integrity of all and of each constitute, among other things, conditions for lasting social peace in a rule of law.
Our new Responsibility requires us to make more sacrifices, so that our national history, punctuated by memorable moments of glory, is not a simple standard, an ornamental luxury, but the permanent breath of our standing nation.
We must do this as heirs of the creative audacity of the heroes of our national history who stood up against the barbarities of slavery and colonialism, as descendants of authentic spiritual authorities, bearers of the cultural resistance that is worthy of us today. universal recognition today, as repositories of genius. Without forgetting, far from it, the intellectual notorieties which have marked the excellence of our universities.
Our conviction that we must and can carry the heavy weight of this new responsibility on our shoulders lies in the fact that we feel it with happiness and enthusiasm. If we have the confidence to succeed it is because we are, in the daily work which mobilizes our energies and know that we can count on the genius of our people, on their effective participation in its achievement. Because it is from the people that politics draws its reason for being, its strength and its power.
This is why the Senegalese people are the absolute horizon of our conviction, the reason for this new responsibility, which we bear heavily but proudly, and the indestructible foundation of our hopes.
We know that the people are the main wealth of the Nation. He is its flesh and blood. It is its vital breath and creative energy. We give thanks to this sovereign Senegalese people, the sole source of all legitimacy.
It is on the basis of this republican and democratic ideal, carried by a new responsibility, that we defend the Republic, its principles and its values. Its vocation to ensure the equality of citizens has our full support in the same way that we firmly hold to its regulatory dimension which offers each citizen the opportunities to escape the vicious circle of need.
We defend democracy, its principles and its values. With respect for institutions. Democracy is the regime of healthy competition, putting forward ideas and projects whose sole arbiter is the sovereign people.
We defend peace, stability and security of citizens and the country. These are the very bases of development and the well-being of populations which are not the sole prerogative of the State but involve each of us.
We defend pan-Africanness, understood as a legacy of our predecessors and an affirmative project of an Africa which is being built step by step and imposes itself as a power at the heart of the decisions which shape the world.
Our new responsibility, to which I call on all good will, is to combine the future with the present by multiplying the spaces for consultation, discussions, debates of ideas, projects and action, where a new trajectory is woven , a new dynamic, a new way of doing politics.
It is to this fight to establish and lead this new responsibility that we invite all our compatriots here and in the diaspora, all our friends and all the executives of our country.
I commit to this, without any possible concession, and also commit to you, knowing that I can count on all of you to lead the fight.
Together, in the coming weeks, we will build a new framework that will resolutely bring a new direction and a new political dynamic.
Long live the Republic !
Long live Senegal!”
