This piece is a deliberate inversion. For decades, Western capitals and commentators have felt entitled to diagnose African crises, prescribe solutions, and lecture African leaders on democracy and good governance. What follows is the reverse: a view from the Global South looking at the recent unrest in France with the same diagnostic confidence the North has long reserved for itself.
Earlier this week, President Emmanuel Macron condemned “unbridled violence” after days of rioting that left public buildings burned, shops looted, and more than 2,400 people arrested. The language of order and the state’s monopoly on legitimate force has returned with urgency. From Accra, Bamako, Abuja and Dakar, many of us recognise the selective application of that language. Western governments, often supported by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, have spent years instructing others on how to manage popular discontent, sometimes while actively supporting or celebrating regime change elsewhere.
Perhaps it is time African leaders expressed their “grave concern” about the deteriorating situation in France, demanded that President Macron address the root causes of the anger, and offered to send a technical delegation to Paris to help restore democratic stability? The irony is intentional. The double standard is not.
The anger now visible on French streets shares more DNA with the disillusionment that toppled civilian governments in parts of the Sahel than polite analysis usually admits. In both cases, large numbers of people have lost faith in political establishments that speak fluently of prosperity and dignity while concentrating wealth and opportunity among a narrow elite.
Europe’s democratic self-image and material comfort (till recently also encompassing the middle class and most workers) cannot be cleanly separated from centuries of extraction—colonial and post-colonial—that shaped the global economic system from which France continues to benefit. When Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger moved to renegotiate or end long-standing security and resource arrangements that had long favoured Paris, the reaction was rarely calm acceptance of African agency. Economic pressure and narratives that reduced African decisions to “external interference” followed. The friction now felt inside France is partly the sound of that older subsidy structure coming under strain.
None of this is to romanticise the current leadership in the Sahel or to pretend that rejecting one set of unequal relationships automatically produces better governance. It does not. Just like many Europeans, exhausted by their own political class, drift toward radical-right alternatives that risk making their problems worse, some societies in the Global South have reached for more authoritarian or militarised responses. History is clear on this point: the alternative to a failed status quo is not automatically progress. It can turn out even harsher. Those of us who care about development must hold both truths at once—the right of African peoples to reject arrangements they experience as continued dependency, and the obligation to demand competent, accountable governance from whoever holds power.
Two things can be true simultaneously. The colonial and neo-colonial history matters. So do the domestic policy choices of recent French governments. Indeed, it is not as if post-colonialism is the only cause of the problems on the streets of France. Under the current administration, tax and regulatory policies have allowed the very wealthy—let’s call them the “LVMH class”—to do exceptionally well. At the same time, also due to rising defense expenditure, austerity and underinvestment have hit many public services. The contrast between record luxury-brand profits and struggling ordinary households is not an optical illusion. When the symbols of that inequality become targets (even if for more ‘bread & butter’ purposes), it should not surprise anyone. This is an “and-and” story: long historical extraction combined with more recent domestic decisions that widened the gap between the protected and the unprotected.
It is right to condemn the burning of public buildings and the destruction of small businesses. No society advances when livelihoods are ransacked. Order matters. But order without delivery and a credible social contract is brittle. The same gap between elite insulation and popular frustration that has fuelled unrest in French cities has also driven people into the streets, and sometimes into the arms of soldiers, across parts of Africa. The deeper lesson is about consistency. Every society, North or South, must ultimately be judged by whether its political and economic arrangements deliver security, opportunity and dignity for the majority of its citizens. When they stop doing so, pressure builds. Sometimes that pressure is expressed at the ballot box. Sometimes it spills onto the streets.
France will probably manage this crisis with the residual capacity of a developed state. The human consequences will not resemble the daily reality in many African health centres where basic medicines run out. That disparity is not accidental; it is the compound result of successive generations of policy and historical extraction.
The productive response is not Schadenfreude. It is clarity. I hope French leaders, and their counterparts elsewhere, treat this moment as a serious signal rather than just a public-order problem to be managed until the next election cycle. The same hope applies to leaders across Africa: that the rejection of old arrangements is matched by the construction of new ones that actually work for citizens. Decolonisation without development is incomplete. Development without accountability is fragile.
The streets of France are sending a message. The question is whether those in power, in Paris or elsewhere, are prepared to listen with honesty rather than with selective concern.
Acknowledgement: with some input from Willem van de Put.