For several years, Mali has been going through a multidimensional crisis, one of the consequences of which is the 2011 explosion. The crisis is political with a loss of benchmarks on democratic values, it is economic with injustice in the distribution of wealth, mass unemployment, difficulties in grasping the stakes of globalization, and it is cultural with a form of the abandonment of our traditions, and what I may call a “novculture” mixture of our customs and external influences.
On the causes and consequences, many things have been written, many theses have circulated, generic solutions known to all are proposed without this having any impact on the daily life of the population.
How many writings, symposia, workshops, conferences on the corruption theme, good governance, do we need to integrate the misdeeds of bad practices? How many NGOs and associations are working on various topics today without really being able to present convincing results?
These workshops and programs, most often aimed at raising awareness, fail in their missions to the extent that mistrust has developed towards civil society, which has lost sight of the defense of the weak and the struggle for justice, Two themes that constituted the backbone of its former action.
One of the aspects of the problem is mental, since over the last twenty years the population has developed, first a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the great problems encountered by the country, the impression that everything depended on the « bourgeois and / or intellectual » elite. These two feelings have resulted in the emergence of the « community of powerlessness, of abandonment and defeat », which considers that no matter what it does, no action can change the destiny of the country. Basically, social uplift, emergence, the fight against poverty and corruption, are fights that have been abandoned by the community, left in the hands of a minority, to which it is not the priority .
The man of the hour does not exist, and it belongs exactly to this demoralized, defeatist, fatalistic group to lead the hardest struggles for the improvement of its living conditions. We have seen it recently with the multiplication of strikes in the civil service, far from the controversies these movements had the goal of changing the life of a certain category.
This abandonment of public affairs in the hands of a small number is one of the causes of the multidimensional crisis in Mali. The ordinary citizen has the obligation to get involved in economic policy, security policy, justice, electrification etc. … because it is him who gives mandate to the power. It is this relationship to the power that has been abandoned.
Mali is a great country, not only because of its size but also because of its culture, its history, its economic assets and its scholars. The country is not in the place where it should be, it has become the laughing stock of the world where it should shine, it fell where it should triumph.
If politicians have a responsibility, the big part comes back to us, we who nip in the bud any project aimed at the awakening of conscience, we who sell the future of the country and its children for 2000 francs, t-shirts and tea every 5 years, we who finally consider that our personal interests pass before those of the Community.
The role of an intellectual is to present to the population ways of thinking about his own condition and to call it to stand against injustice and the law of the strongest. Malian intellectuals have failed in this role. National education as well as parents, had an important role to play in the construction of citizenship, it must be noted that the family has abandoned its role as a trainer, that it no longer holds the hope of a better future in the city, for those to come.
Fatalism is a vicious circle but as mentioned above, Mali has remarkable assets that must be valued and put forward. We must be proud of our history, our cultures, we must finally remember that before we were among the greatest and that today we risk to step out of history.
This was the speech proposed by President Dioncounda Traoré in 2012, he was not wrong because our past constitutes a powerful social lever. To remember where one comes from to know where one goes is an important exercise, to say that we are the heirs of the songhay empire, of the Mali empire, must incite us to want to regain our greatness of yesteryear, to motivate us to work more, to regain that place which is ours, beside the great ones of this world.
Abdoulaye Diarra, Contributor