Since the President of the Republic of Senegal announced on December 31st the launch of an in-depth process of constitutional reforms, several groups presenting themselves as civil society organizations have multiplied their calls for delay and national consultation.

The collective text entitled Institutional Reforms, The Rupture is not proclaimed, it is practiced, is representative of this slogan which we will see is that of a class.

For the promoters and signatories of the text in question – among them former Socialist Party members whom we would have liked to see committed to participatory democracy when they were ministers – a presidential election largely won in the first round of voting, as well as a large parliamentary majority, would not be enough to establish the full legitimacy of the reforms that the executive is preparing to submit to the national representation.

What would satisfy the promoters of this forum, and more broadly the coalition of bourgeois bureaucrats behind it, is, they say, the adoption not simply of the conclusions, but of the methods of the national consultations. Regarding these methods, we are not told precisely how they should be applied to the urgent tasks of the day; we are simply told that they involve “broad national debate” and consultation with “the national collective intelligence.”

At this stage, we can already note that for the authors of this text, the determination of the general interest through universal suffrage elections, preceded by a decade of building and presenting a political offer to the Senegalese people which they massively adopted, does not fall under the category of "national collective intelligence." National collective intelligence would therefore not be a diffuse entity, in which we all participate, but the preserve of Sonko-phobic technocrats and academics active in so-called civil society organizations.

Texts like this require a symptomatic reading. As Wolof Njaay teaches us, we must hear what is said without being spoken. Let us understand: “You, government elected by universal suffrage at the end of a courageous struggle, make room for us, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie entrenched in the State since Maam Leopold.” All of this smacks of the “buruxlu” of consultants eager to participate in seminars to scroll through terabytes of PowerPoint.

What, concretely and not ideally, is this civil society?

The instrument of a class

Civil society, the segment well-versed in the workings of mass media, is essentially the politically mobilized fringe of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. This group has recently been struck by two calamities: the political mobilization of the Senegalese masses, culminating in the victory of PASTEF's rise to power, and the rout of its paternalistic, self-proclaimed liberal NATO allies. Caught between the hammer of the masses and the anvil of the international defeat of liberalism, our bureaucratic bourgeoisie—for the business bourgeoisie is, alas, numerically insignificant—is scrambling to infiltrate the new Senegal, clinging to as many Faidherbe-Senghorian relics as it can.

Against the participation of the masses

To wage its class struggle and defend its essentially bourgeois liberal values, this class, having long since exhausted the services it could expect from the political party system, has taken refuge in “civil society.” Universal suffrage has not been kind to it since fraud became difficult; the people only half-listen to the language it has picked up from UN capacity-building seminars and the articles in Libération that it devours. The electoral results of Thierno Alassane Sall, the politically stunted champion it had chosen, have finally demonstrated to it that universal suffrage can only be detrimental to its interests. Now unable to secure electoral victories, he has only one remaining maneuver, which, it must be admitted, is quite skillful: 1) to invent, to "theorize" a legitimacy based on his "capacity to embody moral and ethical values and commitments that transcend electoral cycles," and then 2) to form a small group of bourgeois who mutually endorse each other as "embodiments of moral and ethical values and bearers of commitments that transcend electoral cycles." Fortunately, in 2026 and in Senegal, this kind of sleight of hand and pseudo-arguments only fools those who bother to devise them.

A swan song

This bureaucratic bourgeoisie, composed of people who know paper from having encountered it at the school of the white man (Blanchot, Van Vollenhoven, etc.), constantly veils its utterly prosaic defense of its parasitic class interests under gentle humanist, democratic, and culturalist slogans of the Negritude type. This class stubbornly refuses to pass the torch and enter, through its disappearance, “into history.” It is the old gathering of those who advocate a moralization of imperialism, this subordinate integration of the country into the world to which this class owes its very existence. It wants to continue its role as mediator of imperialist domination over the masses in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. It tells itself the story that the masses are insufficiently equipped and therefore believes they must be dominated. This domination is achieved in particular through the invention and defense of the legitimacy of spaces for defining public policy that are not subject to universal suffrage. For their own sake, because they have finally become civilized and know the rules inside and out, they advocate the flexibility of imperialism and the abstract equality of races. For this class, whose actions we have had ample time to observe, the cavalcades of Faidherbe and his Spahis in the villages of our ancestors were, all things considered, a necessary evil. They were already at work during the referendum for or against French union. In power after independence, they maintained, so as not to offend their patrons, a veil of silence over the Thiaroye massacre. It is she, finally, who speaks, with her most brilliant mind, when Souleymane Bachir Diagne, inaudible during the repression of Macky's regime and so voluble since its defeat, explains to us that sovereignty is the capacity for negotiation. That, moreover, no country in the world is sovereign! His wisdom is a capitulatory wisdom, which understands politics as a shopkeeper understands commerce: everything is negotiable. This is how she has tolerated the financial swindle of the CFA system for decades and, cornered by the masses, has resolved to negotiate its relaxation rather than its abandonment.

In 2024, what was defeated in Senegal, even more than the APR (Alliance for the Republic), was this capitulationist wisdom. Politically defeated, it took refuge with its supporters in civil society, which it had made its vehicle, and from which the truthful Gassama must be excluded. Concrete civil society is, in fact, the last refuge of the party of promoters of a softened imperialism, which seems not to have yet fully grasped the extent of its defeat: its own defeat. These people are such sore losers that they don't even want to admit they played eighty minutes of the match defending the losing team. While the victors were lifting the cup, they rushed to shed their defeatist jerseys and don referee's uniforms. Since then, they have bombarded us with their whistles, admonitions, calls for time-outs, and ludicrous inventions of limits to the power conferred by universal suffrage.

As for the National Conference, the pinnacle of what the patriotism of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie has produced (with its countless meetings, pointed debates, typed texts and meticulously edited on Microsoft Word), it will always bind the current power infinitely less than the heroic struggle waged by the activists and sympathizers of PASTEF.

Finally, and as the young patriots who were persecuted at the time were already saying: Senegaal dey baax par force.