| Summary: | The area of the Sahel and Sahara embodies all the contradictions and contrasts that can suppress a space’s potentialities preventing it to release its energies and raise its voice. It is the cynical face of poverty described as structural and endemic, while its ground abounds in wealth and resources fuel the attentions everywhere. She holds certain assets, but does little to translate them into arguments of Power, restraining as well its chances to impose its interests. One of its major handicaps was the depopulation which constituted a great concern of the colonizer with a view of facilitating the occupation of vast territory that still insensitive and indifferent to control borders. Today, population growth is the main problem, before which in short term no strategy stimulating growth can prove to be conclusive. Its elites and intellectuals have always looked askance at the interference and foreign intervention, calling it a major cause of underdevelopment of this region. But facing the first signs of conspiracy of the government taxed with enslavement, this elite paradoxically look for courting these interventionists for help and advice on the way to legitimize their claims. The colonial knowledge on his part was supposed to improve the living of the population, served primarily to the consecration of poverty first. Butinstead of discrediting and rejecting the colonial knowledge, the new knowledge built at the dawn independence has only dealt with its contradictions. Also, public help for development which supposedly encourages growth effort contributes instead in the built of an economic model based on help. Furthermore, given the persistence of terrorist threat that effectively contributes to the process the decline of States and increasing the role of non-state actors. Salvation then can only come from the proclamation of the area as a strategic zone for the great powers. This situation, however, can only wake up those old bad memories of exploitation fraught with serious consequences. A good governing based on democracy and national sovereignty, would constitute merely a simple solution which remains unconvincing in facing such a complex environment.
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