Postscript: ‘Rest in Peace, Democracy’?

Summary

As I brought this book manuscript to completion, the seismic reverberations of the coronavirus pandemic started to hit Africa's already seriously strained domestic economies. Within months, in August 2020, Mali was to experience another upheaval, with a coup forcing the resignation of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. The implications of this latest turn of events are too early to predict, even if one could clearly see it coming during the preceding months.

The social, economic, and political crisis surrounding the coronavirus only accentuated long-standing fissions and tensions within the Malian body politic, with regard to people's apprehensions about the political system's brittle legitimacy, and also in the precarious power balance both between Keita's government and religious opinion leaders and within the highly divided field of Muslim activism. When the government imposed curfew measures in late March and multiplied its efforts to stage, discursively and materially, the state's capacity to provide the infrastructure necessary for the containment of Covid-19, responses oscillated between evasion, disapproval, verbal humour, and open resistance. As people's resentment of governmental efforts to contain the spread of the virus grew over the weeks, their responses put into relief a seething general discontent with President Keita's government. The tense political and economic situation was compounded by the uproar following the highly contested ruling of Mali's Constitutional Court on 30 April that reversed the results of the second turn of legislative elections held on19 April. The Court ruling increased the forty-three seats in the National Assembly won by the ruling RPM party in several urban areas according to the results published by the Ministry of Interior, to fifty-four seats. The report in the newspaper Le Guindo in response to the court decision, whose title translates as ‘Constitutional Court: Rest in peace, democracy’, mirrored the exasperation felt by many observers. Yet national media response was divided, with a majority of voices expressing indig-nation, cynicism, and undiluted fury, and a few isolated voices defending the court ruling. In the streets of Bamako and towns where electoral results had also been affected by the court ruling, violent protests erupted, with angry youth playing a leading role in venting frustration about both the court ruling and the Covid-19-related lockdown measures. Banners reading ‘die of coronavirus or die of hunger?’ reflected the dilemma felt by many, a dilemma that fuelled the rising protest against the stay-at-home orders and the call for ending them.