Jacques Cheminade

Paris, August 15, 2023 – Let’s say it from the outset: the wars of Paris and ECOWAS must immediately cease their neo-colonial conduct and France must no less immediately demand the dissolution of NATO. It is only on this double condition that the countries of the Sahel and France can succeed in establishing winning/winning relations, all exercising their full sovereignty.

I write this text without waiting for an immediate miracle, but absolutely committed to persevere. I am convinced that we will succeed. For I know that our world is moving towards the planetary East and South on this eve of the BRICS meeting, which will be a decisive step towards a new, fairer world order.

In this context, while Africans intend to appropriate their destiny, the French government parades like a zombie of the Francafrique. Undergoing the occupation of the financial oligarchy himself, he can only behave in turn by occupying.

During my 2017 presidential campaign, I called on France to drive out its financial occupants and break the CFA-free tourniquet. This is what gives me the right to speak today in the name of our common future of peoples to be liberated.

The ways forward are simple, if we have the political will to free ourselves from the grip of the dominant ideologies:

1. Bury Françafrique definitively, not in vain words but in concrete acts that dismantle it. No military or economic domination, but cooperation and co-development.

2. At the international level, act for this in accordance with peace and security through mutual development, following the road mapped out by cooperation between BRICS member countries and the Chinese initiative A Belt, a Road. It is no longer a colonial/colonized face-to-face but multilateral cooperation, including France, including China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and India, in a whole defined by this new name of peace that is the mutual economic development. More franc-CFA, which has become de facto Euro-CFA, but national currencies issued by national banks, supported by public credits for human development.

3. “We should have had development brigades for school, water, food. Not just France robocops circulating with armored vehicles,” the French senators said. Let’s take them at their word, here and now. Let us offer African countries (free of their own or not) real projects decided by and with them, with the participation of their peoples. We must be clear on this point: I am convinced that the captains, lieutenant colonels and colonels of the African armies, with their soldiers, represent much better the interests of their peoples than the “elites” elected under various influences very little democratic.

4. Africa must no longer be a chessboard of financial speculation, effectively handed over to armed terrorist groups. We must help armies, officials and police to combat drug trafficking that disintegrates states and destroys people. The main war must be waged in the major “Western” financial institutions that practice bleaching all odds. It must first target the corrupting mafias that are at the top, in the Western metropolises.

5) It is no longer sustainable, humanly and economically, for the Francophone countries of West Africa to be among the poorest in the world and the most deprived in terms of public health, education, access to drinking water and electricity. It is no longer bearable that more than 80% of Nigeriens do not have access to electricity while this country has some of the richest uranium deposits in the world. Those who understand the importance of civil nuclear energy to the coming world cannot continue to act as if Niger is a colonial source of low-cost looting and embezzlement.

Utopian? No, I am optimistic and with good reason to be. First of all, let’s repeat it, the world shifts to a more just order of mutual development. For a long time, Lyndon LaRouche, his friends and collaborators at the Schiller Institute have laid the foundation for an Africa development policy against the IMF and the Washington consensus. Yes, we have been rejected, just like African leaders fighting for their peoples, but today the light shines in this world that is changing. African youth, the youngest in the world, have huge expectations. This is a huge chance. Provided we provide him with a future. Helping to train engineers, researchers and skilled workers in all fields, from space to management and medicine in the rural world.

At the end of July, our head of Sébastien Périmony was one of the few Western guests at the Russia-Africa Forum in St. Petersburg. He participated in the enthusiasm for a new approach, beyond colonialism and neocolonialism. Not against France, but on the contrary to ensure its place in this world that is coming, provided that our movement of peace and the reason of the leaders of the world manage to prevent war. I have studied the conceptions of Sheikh Anta Diop for a long time. Today I hope that in the awakening of Senegal and France, the University that bears its name will really become the living expression of everything it hoped for. The time seems to me to come, in a dialogue of civilizations and cultures.

I see from here the question: is it reasonable, and possible, to believe you, with the current French government and the presidency of Emmanuel Macron? The answer is no if we think of a frozen world. In the dynamic towards the coming world, the fight of Solidarity & Progress and the Schiller Institute plays its score. One as a political party in France, the other as a source of inspiration and action in the world. The sound of the war drums is heard in the distance. Those who do not want to hear them cannot prevent them from getting closer.