Open letter to Mr. Bacary Sarr, Minister of Communication and Relations with Institutions, Government Spokesperson (By Adama SOW)

Mr. Minister,

As you take office, allow me to address these few words to you, not only as a media professional, but as a citizen committed to the role that a free, pluralistic and economically viable press plays in our democracy.

You arrive at this position with a unique profile. You are a man of letters, an academic, a mind trained in the patient reading of texts and situations. You therefore know better than anyone that a society is judged in part by the way it treats those who tell its story. This letter is addressed to the intellectual as much as to the minister.

You are inheriting a strategic department at a particular moment in our media history. Let's put it simply: you are inheriting a field of relational ruins.

Since 2024, relations between the state and a large part of the private press have deteriorated significantly. What should have been a legitimate debate on the regulation, professionalization, and modernization of the sector has turned into a crisis of confidence, the human, economic, and democratic consequences of which are now visible.

Over the past two years, the vast majority of the private media sector has been forced into survival mode. Some of the country's oldest and most established press companies are now bankrupt, insolvent, or undergoing forced restructuring—cutting staff salaries by 10 to 25 percent, or even laying them off en masse. Many attribute this decimation less to the economic climate than to the "political sanctions" that have struck the sector: advertising contracts canceled overnight, state receivables frozen, support funds blocked, and tax audits brandished like weapons. Even the profession's self-regulatory body, CORED, has been forced to close its offices, its staff accumulating fourteen months of back pay for not having received the funding that the law guarantees.

But Mr. Minister, allow me to shift the focus from statistics to lives. Because behind every financial report filed, there are families whose lives have been shattered. And that is what truly motivates my letter.

There's the reporter who, after fifteen years in the business, no longer dares to go home on rent day. There's the technician who withdrew her children from private school mid-year because she couldn't afford the third term. There's the cameraman who sold his personal equipment to pay for a relative's medical care because his company's health insurance now existed only on paper. There are the fathers and mothers who, at the time of Tabaski or the start of the school year, had to lower their eyes in front of their children, they whose job it is precisely to confront society. Respected heads of households in their neighborhoods, reduced to borrowing money to make ends meet, delaying prescriptions, and relying on the solidarity of relatives who are themselves at their wits' end.

And then there's what the profession's union, Synpics, euphemistically calls the "silent exodus": a generation of experienced journalists leaving the profession for communications, for work abroad, for anything that pays, while young graduates now hesitate to enter it. A country that lets its trained journalists leave doesn't just lose jobs. It loses memory, discernment, and years of democratic vigilance that no amount of funding can replace.

This reality cannot be ignored. It must never again be minimized. We can debate everything—the texts, the funds, the criteria. But we cannot debate the dignity of a worker.

Let me be clear. The State has the right, and even the duty, to regulate the media sector. Press companies must meet requirements of transparency, professionalism, and tax compliance. The Senegalese press is not above the law, and it does not seek to be.

But regulation does not thrive in constant confrontation. Cancellations of advertising agreements, blockages of the Press Support and Development Fund, controversies surrounding media recognition, tax disputes brandished as weapons, the feeling of exclusion among some private media outlets from public communication mechanisms: all of this has created a climate of mutual suspicion from which no one emerges victorious. Regulating is not punishing. Demanding is not stifling.

A strong democracy doesn't need a docile press. It needs a free press. And a free press cannot survive in a precarious economic situation, because a journalist who fears for their salary ends up fearing for their questions.

Minister, I have read your opening remarks carefully. You have listed among your priorities "the promotion of a free, professional, and responsible media landscape." You have called for dialogue among all stakeholders. These are the right words. They are exactly what the sector has been hoping to hear for the past two years.

But you know, as a cultured man, that words only become binding when they translate into action. Allow me, therefore, to take yours seriously, that is to say, at your word.

The consultation you are calling for needs a framework, a timetable, and content.

Professional organizations, media companies, unions, regulators, and the government must come together around the same table—quickly, and for good. The tasks ahead are well-known:

–the economic sustainability of press companies;

–the methods of public funding for the sector;

– the settlement of debts owed to media companies;

– the taxation applicable to the press;

–the criteria for recognition and support of media;

–equitable access to public communication;

–the challenges posed by digital platforms and artificial intelligence, in conjunction with your colleague in charge of Telecommunications and Digital.

These issues deserve better than standoffs. They deserve genuine dialogue, and a minister's first hundred days in office are when this gesture has the most impact. After that, old habits die hard.

You also occupy a unique position: you are both the Minister of Communication and the Government Spokesperson. You represent the State, and you are responsible for guaranteeing a space for those whose job it is to question it. Some will see this as a contradiction. I see it rather as a test and an opportunity: no one is better placed than you to demonstrate that public discourse and a free press are not adversaries, but rather the two vital components of the same democratic space.

The Senegalese press is not perfect. It has its weaknesses, its contradictions, its responsibilities, and it too must examine its own shortcomings. But it remains one of the pillars of our democracy. To weaken it permanently is to weaken the public sphere itself.

Your predecessor will be remembered for a period of tension that deeply divided the sector. History offers you the opportunity to embody something different: a time of reconciliation, fairness, and rebuilding. History rarely remembers conflicts; it remembers those who have overcome them.

May your leadership therefore be marked by dialogue rather than confrontation, inclusion rather than exclusion, consultation rather than distrust.

Because in the end, when the press and the state stop talking to each other, it is always democracy that ends up losing.

With my respectful greetings,

Adama Sow

Journalist, communicator and citizen