Chad: a distressing routine

Audio 04:21

Jean-Baptiste Placca, editorial writer at RFI, in 2020 © RFI / Pierre René-Worms

By: Jean-Baptiste Placca

9 min

To undermine without consequences and trample on the rule of law and democracy, it is better to have something precious to sell to "the international community" ...

Publicity

For many supporters of the Chadian head of state, the last G5 Sahel summit, this week, in Ndjamena, was for President Idriss Déby Itno, a consecration, useful, in the perspective of the presidential election next April.

Is the Chadian opposition wrong to blame the international community for its relative indifference to this sixth term, which a segment of the population depicts as simply indecent?

In Africa more than elsewhere, the life of an opponent is often made up of frequent phases of very great loneliness, and even of distress.

In view of the realities they are experiencing these days, Chadian opponents can, in fact, at times experience a feeling of abandonment on the part of an international community which feigns deafness (and a certain blindness), in relation to to the practices of the Chadian regime, in the name of the effectiveness of President Déby Itno in the fight against terrorism in the countries of the Sahel.

Chadian opponents, knowing what they know, should they still be surprised at the leniency enjoyed by the Deby regime outside of Chad?

Of course, in its demands for the rule of law and democracy in Africa, the international community has not always been very clear.

It so often accommodates despotism and corruption, since certain regimes know how to be useful to geopolitical interests more or less distant, more or less avowed.

It even happens that the said community is conciliatory with a repressive regime, on the basis of only the wealth of the subsoil of the country, while it shows itself without concession with others, less endowed by nature. 

This is how the world we live in goes: to mistreat your opponents as you please, harm your people without consequences and trample on the rule of law and democracy, you had better have something precious to sell ...

The Déby regime being, in short, sheltered from all pressure, what perspective does the Chadian people have?

If indecent, this sixth term is no more surprising than the fifth.

Or the seventh, which remains possible, if the sky gives life to the marshal, and that the opponents themselves do not oppose any thought out strategy, capable of stopping what seems to be a presidency for life, and that 'they are content to feign unity as each presidential term approaches.

It was in 2013 that the Chadian regime began to establish itself as the saving nation of an Africa then totally helpless in the face of terrorism.

But previously, the rule of law and democracy were already in bad shape in Chad, and the life presidency seemed to be, in fact, the norm.

To be unacceptable, the sixth term, like the persecutions inflicted on many opponents, is therefore only part of a sorry routine.

But then, must the opponents give up fighting?

Especially not !

And if the sixth term seems inevitable, recent news on the continent proves that people who know how to reconquer their destiny can always turn the tide of history.

Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was re-elected with nearly 90% of the vote, barely two years before his people vomited him out and chased him away, in January 2011. Where democracy is optional, the ends of reigns arise out of the blue.

But none of this arises from spontaneous generation.

It is up to the opponents to learn to think rigorously about the developments they dream of for their people, rather than settling into perpetual improvisations.

The future belongs to the oppositions which have a real capacity for anticipation, know how to create, within their country, a balance of power which obliges the outside to comply with their demands, to adapt to their realities, to keep up with their pace.

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

• Chad

• Idriss Deby Itno