The good guys are coming… They’re coming, they’re coming. Niger experienced its first putsch in 1974. It was organized by a quartet of officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché who justified his seizure of power with the social difficulties highlighted by the famine… ‘After 15 years of reign marked by injustice, corruption , selfishness and indifference towards the people to whom it claimed to ensure well-being, we can no longer tolerate the permanence of this oligarchy’. We find ourselves in the same year in which Edoardo Bennato launched a song whose lyrics begin as stated above and continue as follows…
They finally understood that something is wrong here, the good guys arrive and say enough is enough. To all the injustices that have afflicted humanity so far.
The last (for now?) of the series of putsch was justified by the speech of the president of the transition, General Abdourahamane Tiani, on the occasion of greetings for the independence day in the past month of August…’ This is the place for reiterate with extreme clarity that the only reason for the CNSP’s action is and remains the protection of our homeland, Niger… Simply, the lives of the Nigerian people and the very existence of Niger as a State are at stake… there are problems now endemic of widespread corruption and impunity, mismanagement, misappropriation of public funds, partisan clanism, radicalization of opinions and political positions, violation of democratic rights and freedoms, deviation of the state framework for the benefit of private and foreign interests, of the impoverishment of our hard-working populations’… Same things, fifty years later.
How many mistakes, how many errors, how many wars and destruction. But finally a new era will begin.
Human history is a mixture of sand. Empires, exceptional regimes, republics, monarchies, dictatorships and revolutions chase each other there. Some more well-known and others less but all with the unconfessed hope of a different, new or simply better world than the previous one. Except that in history it happens as in life because nothing is created and nothing is destroyed in the experience. You turn the pages of the book whose pages are written in sand, erasable and, just like life, fragile. Too often the promises of the supporters of revolutions were nothing but guilty mirages. Other times the legitimate aspirations of the people are then betrayed by the reality of everyday life. In fact, experience teaches that good and evil, wisdom and madness, truth and lies mix and confuse depending on the seasons and the balance of power. Then we move from a state of exception to normality. if we want, it is the banality of evil that yearns for a further putsch with other righteous people who, finally, will enable the ‘bad guys’ to do no harm.
The good ones arrive and have clear ideas and have already made a list. Of all the bad guys to eliminate.
The lists are flexible and elusive because they too are made of sand and therefore changeable. It is no coincidence that summary trials of notorious criminals are held. Committees of public health and protection of the revolution are often established and only those who give assurances of transparent honesty, people with ‘clean hands’, will be saved from repudiation. They are the ones chosen to govern or at least guide and preserve the spirit of the revolution. Justice clearly shows what is expected of it and therefore voluntary subservience to the powerful of the moment. Citizens, activists, corrupt people and those who corrupt the system disappear. Lists that are continually updated under the guidance of people ‘enlightened’ by the spirit of the times and by the winners’ sense of history. Naturally this process of identifying the ‘bad guys’ is similar to a permanent construction site by vocation and above all requires time, years and is what is defined as a ‘permanent revolution’. All this will last until the new masters are, sooner or later, themselves victims of their time of transition. More good ones will arrive, better than the previous ones to complete the job. So now the good guys have waged a war against the bad guys, but they have insurance. Which is the last war that will be fought, a new era will finally begin.
It is difficult to say whether what we have so far designated with the pompous name of ‘revolutions’ really were. Or they were the chronicles of betrayals announced right from their inception knowing that between the means used and the end pursued there is complicity and inseparable continuity. Perhaps the only authentic revolution that deserves this name is the one that does not know it is one, aware of its intrinsic and human fragility. The only one that comes close to this utopia is the one that the sand jealously hides from the eyes of the ‘good’ people.
