The lecturer said that the best period of political consensus that Mauritania experienced was following independence, at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies of the last century. And that tribalism declined a lot until the military came to power. His speech was mentioned in the framework of a symposium on “The relationship between political consensus and stability in MauritaniaOrganized it yesterday evening Maghreb Center for Strategic Studies.
As a participant, I commented on his words, saying:
The numbers reinforce what you said regarding political consensus to an astounding degree: the candidates of the ruling power in the elections had no competitors and always obtained a result equal to 99.99%, whether in presidential elections or in parliamentary elections. Ten individuals might vote on behalf of more than two thousand voters. .”
Had it not been for the lack of time, I would have recounted the facts of an electoral process of which I was one of the heroes, and they confirm the aforementioned numbers (press here)
As for what is meant by the decline of tribalism in that period, I mentioned that it was the desert war that brought the phenomenon back to the fore with force before the military came to power, as at that time the descendants of the tribes became “people of the coast” The subject of the charge of collusion “with the enemy.” And if I remember correctly, I believe that the word “tribe” was added at that time to the formality of the identification card as a field of individual identity that should be filled out by the authority concerned with issuing the card. Was it to modify the formality of the relationship between war and tribal identity? Maybe… God Almighty knows.
But I am sure it would be useful to add: May God forgive the foregoing.
Al-Bukhari Muhammad Mo’mal Follow Favorite
