We will try to initiate answers to a certain number of fundamental questions: How to govern away from the eyes of Mali? For some time we have only been talking about Mali kura, the fight against corruption, how can we speak of a Buwatun kura where corruption and bad governance would only be a distant and bad memory? Why in our country, do politicians continue to govern as if we were still in a colony?
The decentralization that we have applauded over time has endowed our country with nearly 711 municipalities and which are now the space from which the administration of the land is organized at the local level. This communalization could have been a gain if by chance the choice of men (in this case the mayors and those who assist them) had been judicious. The political parties are the main providers of our municipalities in town halls and municipal councillors, unfortunately, we have the sad impression that the ratio of very good and virtuous mayors compared to “small provincial offenders” is really poor in our rural (and sometimes unfortunately urban) localities. This multiplication of notorious delinquent mayors and “uneducated” mayors, not to say “uneducated” stems from the stranglehold of political parties on our populations. behind these “delinquents” and these “bottom of the class” usually activate the apparatuses that support, absolve, and legitimize through these elections “can” of which we have the exclusivity.
The sun of the little bush potentates?
In the Bo country, as a columnist said a few years ago, speaking of our local elected officials, the mayors, he said that ” many of these new masters have simply put on the old rags of coloniality, living politics and more specifically decentralization as a right of “cuissage” over rural populations. It is therefore not surprising that these rural populations, with very shrewd “local knowledge”, have sometimes preferred to cast their voices on “local” people, illiterate people like them, farmers or breeders with no other basis than “the identity rural »! But unfortunately, we will realize that this is not the panacea, an “illiterate” can be as dangerous as an elected official with many diplomas. In fact everything depends on the intrinsic value of the man or the woman. And it is perhaps this quality that is sometimes lacking in the local elected representative in our provinces.
For many, instead of working for the well-being of their commune (repair of rural roads, schools and other health centers, etc.), they take advantage of taxes to extort people, divert donations from above and sometimes improperly appropriate bags of millet, corn or even milk that some donor was kind enough to send to these underprivileged populations. By talking with some village chiefs, now sometimes educated, that there are still some semi-literate among our local elected officials who experience their election as direct access to prebends, direct access to behavior worthy of the administration colonial. Be serious !
Good governance and buwatun kura
Enough is enough ! We ask the political parties that have elected members in our Municipal Councils to have the courage to educate them, even to control them and if necessary to reprimand them. Indeed, the world is now too connected for party headquarters to be unaware of what their constituents are doing in our rural communities. We need to know that until we have dried up the hideous “rural” corruption of our elected officials and other sub-prefects and prefects, the mali kura will not happen. This concept is now fashionable, both among opportunists of all stripes and among people of good faith: Mali kura, fight against corruption will only be operational if, and only if, we start with the base, the local.
Good governance begins with the proper management of funds, credits, donations that the State or a third legal person (NGO, charity, etc.) has entrusted to us for the collective good of the municipality. It came back to us in the contacts we had with various people in my home town, for example, that donations were sometimes shamelessly misappropriated by local elected officials.
Faced with terrorism, what alternative?
Faced with the terrorist threat, while the land chiefs, village chiefs and other local leaders remained with their populations, some mayors and sub-prefects had no alternative but to flee. Are they targeted more than others? A village chief answered me that it depends on how the situation is handled. Indeed, those who speak indiscriminately and who beat their breasts as if they were the messiahs of the Buwatun are likely to be kicked out of their seats, while those who are moderate in dress have no major problem with our bulky hosts. Understood that, without being accused of intelligence with the enemy, certain legitimacies have been able to protect and protect themselves by transforming vulnerability into opportunity.
By taking possession of the entire national territory, the terrorists inform us that they intend to administer it in place of the Malian State, quite simply because, since independence in 1960, our occupation of space boiled down to predatory practices and simple extortion of people’s property. From 1960 to the present day, the administration of our lands has not changed compared to colonial administrative practices: physical and symbolic violence, abusive levies, increased social control, divisions for better reign, etc. These practices opened avenues for those who fought against the deleterious democratic order that had been imposed on us by a dominating West. All the predators who have tampered with democracy during the democratic transitions of our countries, those who have made their money on poorly conducted and rigged elections, in short, those who have misguided the democratic proposal are partly responsible for the security crises that we live today.
Coming back to Buwatun, this little piece of land abandoned to the whim of the terrorists, we suspect that its occupation is likely to be long, very long. Indeed, beyond the terrorists on the ground, their accomplices and relays in our villages are all working to perpetuate the situation. They dream of a kind dis-administration of the country” which would offer them as an inheritance the Buwatun as a war trophy
September 11 to 17, 2022
To be continued
The Gallican
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Source: Maliweb
