What Macron heralds for Africa
May 26, 2017
A former banker and economy minister, French President Emmanuel Macron is now at the head of En Marche, a manifesto turned into a political start-up that is barely a year old.
En Marche promotes a technocratic perspective and is marketed by a handful of French brains of African descent moulded in the country’s elite universities.
For many, Macron’s recurring contradictory statements suggest a desire to appeal to everyone, while hiding his true colours and concealing the obvious – that he has no policy for Africa.
Beyond the spellbinding eloquence that coined slogans such as “France needs Africa to build its future,” or “I will act with transparency in Africa, away from conniving networks”, Macron’s vision for Africa is reduced to the thinness of “supporting local small and medium entrepreneurship”.
Macron must have missed the memo, for “African SMEs need an integrated banking system rather than a French president who has not secured the Senate control”, argued Mamadou Diallo, political analyst and member of the West African think-tank Wathi.
For Diallo, “the Macron campaign’s loudest feat was in using the colonial question and the crime against humanity committed in Algeria”, only for it to be reduced to a storm in a teacup.
