‘Contempt and neocolonial paternalism’: President Macron’s remarks, notably believing that African leaders had “forgotten to say thank you” to Paris for its intervention in the Sahel, continued on Tuesday January 7, 2025 to cause controversy, 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’s got the wrong era,’ commented Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno in a speech delivered during a greeting ceremony at the Presidential Palace and published on the Presidency’s Facebook page.
Also on Tuesday, in France, the radical left party LFI (La France insoumise) denounced in a press release comments which ‘reflect a blindness that borders on madness and reveal a neocolonial paternalism that is simply intolerable’. France was ‘right to intervene militarily in the Sahel against terrorism since 2013’, but African leaders ‘forgot to say thank you’, Emmanuel Macron insisted on Monday January 6, 2025 in Paris during the conference of ambassadors . Believing that ‘none of them’ would manage a sovereign country without this intervention (from 2013).
‘We proposed to the African Heads of State to reorganize our presence. As we are very polite, we gave them the primacy of the announcement,’ declared Mr. Macron, still this Monday January 6, 2025, referring to the French military withdrawal, generally forced, from a certain number of African countries these recent years.
‘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, whose Government reacted to Mr. Macron’s remarks on Monday evening, denouncing ‘a contemptuous attitude towards Africa and Africans’.
– ‘We have it bad’ –
These statements were also condemned on Monday by Senegal. ‘France has neither the capacity nor the legitimacy to ensure Africa’s security and sovereignty. On the contrary, it has often contributed to destabilizing certain African countries such as Libya with disastrous consequences noted on the stability and security of the Sahel, strongly criticized Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, also denying that the French military withdrawal from his country ‘was negotiated between Paris and Dakar’.
The subject was on the front page of several local newspapers on Tuesday, such as the private daily L’Observateur which believes that Mr. Sonko has ‘reframed Macron’. ‘We have had enough of this paternalistic discourse. France and the West in general must learn to see Africa in a different light,” commented Mandoumbé Mbaye, a Senegalese teacher, on January 7, 2025. For Alioune Tine, a figure in West African civil society, ‘we must reinvent together healthy relations with France through dialogue, mutual respect and respect for the sovereignty of States, and rethink security sovereignty’, which is ‘ the weakness of African states.
‘Chad and Senegal were absolutely not targeted by these comments (by Mr. Macron) since what was announced by Dakar and N’Djamena had already been implemented’, even if the timing of these announcements ‘surprised us’ , tempered a diplomatic source in Paris on January 7, 2025. ‘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 of Sahel States, editor’s note) and in particular Mali’, she underlined. Adding: ‘We all have it bad with Mali’ given the significant human, logistical and financial resources put in by France to fight the jihadists there ‘at the request of the Malian authorities, and when we thought we were doing the right thing’ .
‘So, yes, the President expressed something disappointing for us (…) The lesson is that we need a transactional approach like the others (non-African partners) and stop being the turkeys of the joke’, she concluded. 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 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 or even to other emerging powers like Turkey.
© Afriquinfos & Agence France-Presse
