Admittedly, it's pleasant. Dakar is clean. You can finally walk on the sidewalks without tripping over a belt stall or going around a rickshaw table.

It's airy and you could almost believe you were in Europe… except for the dust. The least one can say is that the State has succeeded in its aesthetic gamble, but there's a silence. The silence of the gorgorlou. Where exactly has he gone? The young man who sold tissues at the traffic lights? The woman who prepared breakfast for the workers? They weren't there just for decoration.

They were there to survive. And that's the crux of the problem. We treated an economic issue like a road maintenance problem. What is the impact of driving out these thousands of vendors without offering them the slightest alternative? We haven't formalized the informal sector; we've crippled it. This doesn't solve unemployment; it has simply rendered it invisible. Nature abhors a vacuum. And the stomach of the gorgorlou even more so. This vendor has no plan B, no relocation site, no promises kept. His only asset is this square meter of asphalt. By driving him out, we haven't made him richer; we've just made him more desperate. It's an immense risk.

Do you really think these people are going to politely starve to death in their own homes, just so the city stays beautiful? They should have been offered an alternative before being forced to get up. Because this emptiness, so pristine today, will soon be filled.

Either by the same thugs, playing hide-and-seek with the police because their children need to eat. Or by anger. Cleanliness without a social solution is just decoration. And decoration isn't edible.