Lompoul, when hope sinks and conscience sets sail

The numbers are indecent. Thirty-nine dead. But behind this macabre arithmetic, there are faces, first names, children who will wait in vain for their fathers to return, mothers who will scrutinize their phones, hoping for a call. There are also families who will never know exactly where their loved ones' lives ended. The sea doesn't always give back its dead. Sometimes it even keeps the evidence of despair.

And the most unbearable thing is elsewhere: we already know this scenario. Fass Boye, Kafountine, Joal, Saint-Louis, Mbour… The locations change, the boats change too, but the tragedy retains the same signature. That of a generation ready to entrust its life to an overcrowded pirogue rather than continue living with a bleak future.

Yet billions have been spent. More than 200 billion CFA francs were reportedly mobilized between 2005 and 2019 in various migration-related programs, according to university estimates. Plan Reva, Goana, European funds, awareness campaigns, maritime surveillance, reintegration of returning migrants: the initiatives have proliferated. Acronyms have flourished. Launch ceremonies have too. But the boats keep leaving.

This is the great Senegalese paradox: we have funded the fight against emigration without managing to convince enough young people that there is a reason to stay. We have learned to show them the dangers of the Atlantic, without always offering them a credible alternative on land.

And while institutions are rolling out their strategies, TikTok is doing the opposite. Videos of those who have successfully made the crossing, showing off their first paychecks and new living conditions, are overshadowing prevention messages. An institutional campaign carries little weight compared to the image of a fellow citizen who seems to have won the bet on Europe. Death is abstract on a screen; success, on the other hand, is staged live.

But there is another tragedy, less spectacular and almost never recorded: that of the survivors. Those who return with images of bodies thrown into the sea, sleepless nights, hallucinations, and the guilt of having survived. The tragedy of widows, parents, and brothers who live in suspense, awaiting their disappearance. Irregular migration, therefore, does not only kill at sea. It also destroys lives on land, long after the shipwrecks.

This is where our collective failure is measured. For you cannot sustainably combat despair with radar, patrols, and guilt-tripping rhetoric. You cannot lure young people away from the ocean simply by asking them to love a country that struggles to guarantee them work, dignity, and prospects.

The urgent task is to rebuild trust: protect fishing livelihoods, create decent jobs, support communities of origin, assist bereaved families, and ensure genuine psychological support for survivors. And above all, publicly assess the billions of dollars poured into anti-migration programs. Who received what? With what results? What impact on departures?

Lompoul must not become just another name in the graveyard of our collective memory. For the real scandal is not simply that Senegalese people are dying trying to reach Europe. It is that after so many tragedies, so many billions, and so many promises, setting off in a pirogue still seems, for some, like their last chance at life.

When the sea becomes a life project for young people, it is no longer just emigration that is in crisis. It is the entire country that must look in the mirror.