The Sahel’s real battle: Sovereignty on the ground, not salons abroad
It is with a mixture of disdain and lucidity that one must greet the birth of the Alliance of Democrats of the Sahel (ADS) the latest media baby baptised from abroad. While the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) forges sovereignty on the ground, through the blood of soldiers and the sweat of farmers, yet another salon coalition appears. This movement claims to speak for a people whose realities it has fled, lecturing from the comfort of exile.
It is disconcertingly easy to preach “democracy” from Western capitals or neighbouring client states.
The ADS, through its secretary-general, does not hesitate to call the AES a “syndicate of putschists.” What irony! For the Sahelian people, the real putschists are those elites who, for over thirty years, handed our economies, mines, and security to foreign powers under the veneer of a “constitutional order” that filled neither bellies nor rifle magazines.
The emergence of the ADS, barely four months after Mahmoud Dicko’s CFR launch, is no coincidence.
It is a desperate attempt to create an artificial counterweight to the massive popular support enjoyed by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Colonel Assimi Goïta, and General Abdourahamane Tiani.
These so-called “living forces” in exile seek above all to exist in the eyes of their international funders, while their real influence on Sahelian soil is near zero.
While the ADS harps on the “militarisation of the state,” the transformation of the AES space delivers stinging rebuttals.
What these luxury oppositionists call “militarisation,” the hinterland populations call “the return of security.”
For them, inclusion is not debated in five-star hotels; it is lived through popular shareholding in Burkina Faso or the recapture of Kidal in Mali. The only order that matters today in the Sahel is that of dignity, food sovereignty, and an end to diplomatic begging.
In the end, the ADS is just another acronym in the long list of soft destabilisation tools.
Claiming to fight for democracy by opposing leaders who are physically and economically liberating their lands is historical nonsense. The Sahel has chosen the path of radical rupture.
Let the “democrats in exile” continue their sterile press conferences. In the meantime, the AES is building Africa’s future. The caravan of sovereignty moves on—and distant barking will change nothing.
Titi KEITA
