by FAISAL ALI
France’s president can’t stop talking, but his condescending remarks on Africa are only accelerating the collapse of French influence on the continent.
In early January, the beleaguered president of France, Emmanuel Macron, told French ambassadors at a conference that none of the countries in the Sahel region would be sovereign today “if the French army had not deployed in the region” to support their fight against jihadists. “I think someone forgot to say thank you. It does not matter, it will come with time,” he added. “Ingratitude, I am well placed to know, is a disease not transmissible to man.”
Macron’s remark was blasted by several African officials, including Chad’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, who said he thought Macron was in the “wrong era.” Senegal’s outspoken prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, also objected in a post on social media. He said that France didn’t have the legitimacy or capacity to ensure the sovereignty of African states, and added that France had often “contributed to destabilizing certain African countries such as Libya, with disastrous consequences noted for the stability and security of the Sahel.” Burkina Faso’s military leader, Ibrahim Traore, said France should pray for his country’s ancestors, as without having plundered them during the colonial era it wouldn’t enjoy the global standing that it does today. Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, a German-Malian former MEP for the Green party, asked whether France should be thanking Africans “who gave their blood for Europe” in WWII.
Eric Orlander, host of the popular China-Global South Project podcast, gasped when he played the soundbite in a recent installment of his program. “Oh my goodness,” Orlander reacted as he put Macron’s comments to his guests. Ovigwe Eguegu, an analyst at the Development Reimagined think tank who participated in the conversation, fact-checked the president. He explained that Malians, for example, were very positive about France’s intervention in 2013 and gave a warm welcome to then-president Francois Hollande, waving French flags and shouting “Vive la France”. Eguegu also added that from each French-led regional military initiative to the next, whether Operation Serval, Barkhane, or G5 Sahel, “what you’d find is a consistent decline in the security situation.” Macron said thanks would “come with time,” but time has joined his adversaries. Every year that passes only adds fuel to the fire of growing disdain for his administration.
Orlander’s guests asked the simple question: what caused the instability in the Sahel? Did the Libyan government overthrow itself and then allow arms and newly redundant militants to flow into the Sahel? France was a key contributor to a problem it claimed to be solving with its post-2013 interventions, and as the ledger of French sins grows longer, more voices across the continent are joining in calling out Macron, either for tone-deafness or for deliberate or mistaken attempts to gerrymander the historical record.
Africa is a country for more