L’Hélicoptère de Tamba : Entre génie solitaire et méchanceté collective
In Senegal, innovation is a word people love to pin on the doors of government ministries, but it's rarely put into practice in real life. The Sow helicopter case in Tambacounda illustrates something simple: here, people prefer to follow rather than try.
Look around you. As soon as one soap vendor—not to mention Mame Ndiaye—struggles, ten more open on the same sidewalk the next day. One multi-service business takes off? The whole neighborhood suddenly becomes an expert in money transfer. They wait for someone else to take the risks, test things out, adjust, and then they arrive. Same recipe, same idea.
Tek tek.
We have become world champions of mimicry, a nation of cloners who wait for the neighbor to turn on the light to see where the switch is.
And that's where Sow's case becomes interesting. Here's a man who, with scrap metal and a fertile imagination, is trying something. Will it fly? Will it hold up? Nothing is certain. But at least he's not copying. He's trying. He's breaking the cycle of intellectual laziness that paralyzes us. Scroll, scroll, scroll.
Innovation in our country is for conferences in five-star hotels in Dakar, not for dusty workshops in the interior of the country.
We prefer to doubt rather than test. If Sow were elsewhere, he'd land an internship to learn the skills of aircraft design, since the passion is already there. Here, we're mostly just waiting to see if it will fail so we can smugly say, "I told you so!" Xamone naako! That's the height of laziness. Doing nothing and scornfully criticizing those who dare to lay a brick, or a propeller, crookedly.
The real break would not just be about changing the people, but about changing this national reflex of always copying.
Put engineers to work for boldness. Because if we continue to copy what others invent, we'll end up as a country in permanent "teleworking" mode, a passive spectator of our own stagnation. It's time to move from copy-pasting to original creation. Even if it causes a bit of a stir and a lot of dust.
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