“Contempt” and “neocolonial paternalism”. The controversy swells after the remarks made on Monday by Emmanuel Macron. The President of the Republic declared that African leaders had “forgotten to say thank you” to Paris for its intervention in the Sahel and this assertion continued to cause controversy on Tuesday, in Africa but also in France.
“I would like to express my indignation at the comments recently made by President Macron which border on contempt towards Africa and Africans. I think he is in the wrong era,” said Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, the Chadian president in a speech delivered during a greeting ceremony at the presidential palace and published on the presidency's Facebook page. “We proposed to African heads of state to reorganize our presence. As we are very polite, we gave them the primacy of the announcement,” Emmanuel Macron declared on Monday, referring to the French military withdrawal, generally forced, from a certain number of African countries in recent years. “As far as Chad is concerned, the decision to terminate the military cooperation agreement with France is entirely a sovereign decision of Chad. There is no ambiguity in this,” retorted President Déby.
“We all have it bad”
The French president's statements were also condemned on Monday in Senegal by Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko who also disputed that the announced withdrawal of French soldiers from his country would have given rise to negotiations between Paris and Dakar.
In France, La France insoumise (LFI) denounced in a press release comments which “reflect a blindness that borders on madness” and “a simply intolerable neocolonial paternalism”.
A diplomatic source tried on Tuesday to temper Emmanuel Macron's comments. “Chad and Senegal were absolutely not targeted by these remarks since what was announced by Dakar and N'Djamena was already recorded, we agreed on the purpose – it is just the timing of these announcements which surprised,” she told AFP. “It’s a sentence taken out of context but if you look at his speech just before he talks about French human losses in the Sahel (58 deaths in less than a decade): he was clearly targeting the AES countries [l’Alliance des États du Sahel] and in particular Mali”, she underlined, adding: “We all have it bad with Mali when we see the system, the human and financial investment that this represented for years at the request of the authorities Malians, and when we thought we were doing well.”
“So yes the president expressed something disappointing for us but also for the populations concerned, it is so disappointing; the lesson is that we need a transactional approach like the others (non-African partners) and stop being the jokers,” she concluded.
“Shameless and unacceptable interference”
Last month, Senegal and Chad announced the departure of French soldiers from their soil. Chad was France's last anchor point in the Sahel, where France had up to more than 5,000 soldiers as part of the anti-jihadist operation Barkhane, stopped at the end of November 2022.
Between 2022 and 2023, four other former French colonies, Niger, Mali, the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso, have ordered Paris to withdraw its army from their territories, where it was historically established, and have moved closer to Moscow.
The Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced in a press release “the French president's remarks which dishonor, above all, the one who believed he had to make them in such a casual and light manner.”
