Our country will celebrate, this Tuesday, April 4, its sixty-three years of independence. For six decades, this country has offered itself to the international community as a laboratory for living together, a cradle of unity in diversity, a strong symbol of harmonious development with the available means. Senegal Bashing is a game that can never be understood, because our country has so much promise, potential to fulfill and a path to show on a continent that has for so long been considered the outcast of the big human family.
This country knew, by the rigor of its founding fathers, to build a rigorous Administration and a service devoted to a secular Republic, guarantor of the rights of all. The political leadership knew at all times, in the face of all challenges and crises, to take decisions embracing the general interest, saving the interests of future generations and keeping the national pact intact. Senegal knew how to offer freedom of worship to all its children, allowing all the ways in which men could find a path to bliss to be heard. A public school has always been able to grant similar starting chances to children from all regions and all social backgrounds. All the generations of great executives in this country have taken pride in our model of public education, although all the demons of self-destruction present themselves to it today.
This country has been able to rely on defense and security forces loyal to the Republic, aware of their role as watchdogs of a common order, protectors of the total integrity of an entire national territory. They have instilled in themselves a cult of sincere service that nothing can deceive. They are the lucid beacon combining the sovereign mission and the patriotic sense to serve an ideal. They are a solid base of stability and a bulwark that deters any fatal adventure to make chaos a path to any throne.
I had the chance to be supervised at university by the historian and sociologist Gérard Bouchard in studies of nations and nationalism. Professor Bouchard, who had chaired, with the philosopher Charles Taylor, the Commission of Canada on accommodation practices related to cultural differences commonly referred to as reasonable accommodation, had a particularly original, indulgent and conciliatory approach to the evolution of country and the construction of national sentiment. He said that time and constructive conciliation are the best allies of a Nation. I kept seeing in the readings and works he gave us, the image of Senegal as a young Nation which succeeded, despite its frail age in the experience of a Nation, in making its living together coherent. Cohabiting, organizing living together and keeping order between national communities are very complex things that our country knows how to do, perhaps by providence. To see how Senegal has been evolving for so many years in consolidating its progress as a national entity, able to offer the best of social contracts to its populations, we can say that the supporters of the country who passed the baton, have had the ideal of always jealously protecting what makes the essence of this land: unity in diversity.
The sixty-three years that Senegal is about to celebrate must be seen as a strong reminder of the path traveled and the immensity of the challenge there is to protect the Republic, to preserve our living together, to guarantee the ways and means of an inclusion of all, of respecting as much as possible all the rules of our social pact. A patient era of nation building has been built in six decades. A new era of promises of shared prosperity and the fulfillment of full potential is upon us.
The resources of our subsoil in hydrocarbons, which will eventually make us a country that will count for its natural wealth, after having amazed the world with its human wealth and the talent of its children, are the beginning of a new dawn. Senegalese expertise is hailed all over the world, with executives who have carried our flag high. The latest orientations in public policies in recent years, to advocate territorial equity and greater inclusiveness, are also reassuring pledges on the social and human agenda of our country, which is binding on all of us. It is up to us to show ourselves worthy of being the sons of this land to bequeath to future generations a beautiful El Dorado.
To the best of countries. For all its joys and sorrows. To its beauty and its charms. For its heroes, its contradictions, its inconstancy, its knowledge. To its Army, to the glory of its arms. For its people, their diversity, their mix, their humanity. Happy birthday dear compatriots. This national history is ours, and, we will cry out our pride in belonging to this great People, everywhere.
By Serigne Saliou DIAGNE / saliou.diagne@lequotidien.sn
- Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH
