MADRID Jan. 6 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The pan-Africanist and anti-colonial activist Stellio Gilles Robert Capo-Chichi, known as Kémi Séba, announced this Sunday his candidacy for the presidential elections in Benin, which will be held in April 2026, while he has made a critical assessment of the situation in the country African and its current Government, led by Patrice Talon.
“If I speak to you today, in this very serious moment, in this very turbulent moment, it is because our people live in conditions that go beyond the framework of irrationality. Benin is experiencing an unprecedented social crisis, a social crisis that favors the richest of a minority of the population, while almost the entire population lives in incomprehensible conditions,” he said in an almost ten-minute video shared on his social networks.
Kémi Séba has mentioned both inflation and the increase in layoffs and the conditions of teachers, “to which is added this passion for the persecution that” the president “has when it comes to attacking national economic operators, pushed to the exile, to economic, political and psychological depression”.
“Because Talon does not like to share the loot that Benin constitutes in his eyes with his people. No. He wants to monopolize everything and, if he has to share with some, it will always be with the predatory Western economic operators. French companies massively control the economy It goes without saying that most of them are exempt from many taxes, luxuries that Beninese companies cannot enjoy,” he criticized.
Furthermore, he has also denounced “the restriction of freedom of expression”, the lack of confidence in the judicial system or the increase in arrests: “We can no longer talk about democracy in the country. We no longer have freedom,” he noted.
OPTIONS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE ELECTIONS
Faced with this situation, he has proposed three options that would allow him to participate in the elections, since the electoral code does not allow independent candidacies: that he be nominated by the opposition party Les Démocrates, because it is the only one in the opposition that meets the eligibility requirements; create a large coalition to demand the revision of the electoral code; or the “triangulation of forces.”
“The last option, perhaps some would say the most important, is a triangulation of forces called Operation Géricault, which is based on a tripartite basis, a logic of revolution in the information field, of mobilization, popular protest and assuming responsibilities, empowering in the country, to change things so that the people regain power,” he said.
Municipal, legislative and presidential elections will be held in Benin in 2026. For his part, Talon is in his second and last constitutional term and has assured that he has no intention of modifying the law to run again.
The French Government withdrew Kémi Séba’s French nationality in July 2024 after criticizing his “continuous and firm” “anti-French” positions. Séba settled in Senegal in 2011 after leaving France and finally moved to Benin in 2017. Paris considers him a foreign agent and has even accused him of being “anti-Semitic.”
In addition, he was sentenced to six months in prison in 2008 for comments made regarding the actions of the World Bank in Africa, an organization that he accused of “suffocating African peoples,” and went so far as to state that Auschwitz “could be considered a paradise.” ” in comparison.
It should be noted that an investigation published in March 2023 by the magazine Jeune Afrique revealed that Séba had received more than 400,000 dollars (about 370,000 euros) from the Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group, which operates in numerous countries on the continent at a time when The Kremlin is gaining some influence to the detriment of the Elysée.
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