May 1, 2025 could well enter the symbolic archives of Senegal as a pivotal moment, not only for its union scope, but for what it reveals: a paradigmatic change in the way in which the political thinks of the social, the work and the economy.
By signing this national social stability pact with union and employer forces, the government of Ousmane Sonko has made more than a gesture of appeasement. He activated the levers of a new type of governance which mobilizes, structures and gives a systemic meaning to national interactions. This apparently administrative pact is actually an organizing matrix of a profound change of CAP: it is the formal recognition that in a world in polycris, only a control by connective intelligence can activate the springs of sustainable socio-economic sovereignty.
Far from being a simple juxtaposition of corporatist interests, this pact is the manifestation of a whole. And this whole is not satisfied with a social compromise; It redefines the very parameters of what could be called a national reliance strategy. By reliance, we do not hear here an affected synonym of “collaboration”, but a real process of recodifying the links between institutions, social actors, productive dynamics and collective imagination. This government seems to be inspired, perhaps empirically, of the gestalist theory which affirms that everything precedes, contains and transcends the sum of its parts. The state, in this sense, becomes an integration interface, not an overhanging technocratic superstructure.
What is played out here is much more than stabilization of tensions: it is a mutation of the managerial software of public power. A transmutation that leaves the paradigm of the linear management of social emergencies to enter that of controlled complexity. The systemic vision carried by the Senegal Horizon 2050 program finds its concrete incarnation here: Building a competitive economic and social space by relying on logics of pooling knowledge, wills and capacities for action. This logic of structural convergence reveals a fine understanding of living systems and social ecosystems. It is no longer a question of decreeing social peace as an end in itself, but of co-producing it as an emerging condition of an intelligent arrangement of reality.
The narrative of development is often monopolized by vertical matrices, imported models, frozen diagnoses. What this pact inaugurates is the emergence of a horizontal, co-elaborated story, where conflict itself becomes a resource of innovation, and not an obstacle to order. Conflictuality management is here raised to a higher rank: that of dialogic regulation. It implements social diplomacy where the actors are not domesticated but empowered, not marginalized but integrated into a dynamic of co-piloting. The true managerial efficiency, in this context, lies in the ability to make a co-secret field exist, a shared cognitive space where reality is perceived as collectively transformable.
This approach, which could be described as cognitive-system, joins the foundations of the Community: the capacity of a human group to generate shared meaning, adjusted standards, and an operating intelligence resulting from the density of its interactions. In a country historically crossed by multiple – geographic, social, generational fragments – the desire to build a common base of social stability is not simply pragmatic. It is fundamentally epistemological. It reflects a vision of the world in which the economy is not detached from the social, neither the effectiveness of justice, nor the innovation of solidarity.
This pact, in its form as in its mind, constitutes a socio -political artifact of great value. It inaugurates an unprecedented way of institutionalizing collective intelligence, in an almost organic way. It is not a question of imposing a descending political will, but of orchestrating an ascending movement of social co-construction. In this, he marries a dialogical logic, close to living ecosystems: each part is both autonomous and interdependent, each actor retains his subjectivity while being inserted into a larger dynamic. The pact becomes a cooperation biome, a resonant structure, where stabilization of the social climate is no longer the fruit of constraint but that of structural adhesion to a common vision.
Where other regimes have often tried to pacify the social by control or by the momentary purchase of union silence, the current government seems to understand that only strategic recognition of the other can base social peace. A peace that is no longer silence, but harmony. However, in the theories of complexity, harmony is always an emerging phenomenon, never a starting data. What this initiative demonstrates is the ability to generate meaning by the densification of interactions, by the symbolic arrangement of a collective horizon. This pact is a machine to produce confidence. However, without confidence, no development is possible.
This is why this moment of May 1, 2025 can be read as a founding scene, a republican kairos. Through him, a new type of governance seems to be deploying: governance by reliance. This reliance exceeds the simple fact of connecting institutions. She touches imaginary. It manufactures a scenography of collaboration. It inscribes the managerial act in a cultural framework where each citizen is summoned to become a co-author of national destiny. Indeed, the act of signing a pact, when included in its anthropological scope, amounts to instituting a symbolic framework of unification of stories. This gives politics its primary dimension: that of making world.
What this gesture reveals is a pragmatic and deep understanding of connective intelligence. In a country in the grip of precariousness, where social tensions can easily degenerate into distributing movements, manage to create a movement of centripetia-that is to say an appeal to the center-falls under managerial innovation. It is not a rhetorical detail: it is a question of mastering the invisible laws of social dynamics. Where divergent interests risk centrifugal, the government’s vision targets centripetia, that is to say the attraction towards a common household in meaning. This home is none other than the idea of a sovereign, fair, productive Senegal bearers of a transformative economy.
The novelty lies in engineering itself of meaning. Using the signing of the pact as a performative act, the government creates a precedent: it makes anticipation a governance method. No longer to wait for the explosion of anger or the cries of the street to react, but to install a culture of preventive regulation, upstream, thanks to an unprecedented conceptual and relational tools. This is part of the major theories of the management of complexity: the important thing is not to extinguish the fires, but from building social architectures which prevent inflammation. It is a question of making systemic robustness, cognitive resilience. And in this logic, the pact becomes a medium. It is not a simple administrative document, but a reliance artifact. It manufactures an ecosystem of meaning in which trade unionists, employers, workers and citizens can recognize themselves. It is a shared compass. It acts as a meta-recit. And any meta-recit, in modern societies, is what gives consistency to collective imaginations. It is not enough to have a strategy; It is still necessary that this strategy speaks to the hearts of people, to their dignity, to their feeling of belonging. This pact speaks this language: that of the shared future, the responsibility distributed, of the pride found.
The managerial approach here at work does not correspond to any classic public management manual. It is much closer to convergence engineering, as proposed by the theories of collective intelligence. To converge desires, fears, ambitions and contradictions is one of the most complex challenges of contemporary leadership. However, the government seems to have understood that it is not necessary to unify by force, but by vision. This vision, carried by Senegal Horizon 2050, gives a structuring horizon to the company. It is a symbolic framework in which the differences are not denied but oriented towards a higher goal.
Here we touch the cognitive dimension of modern management. The manager is no longer a simple conductor. It is an energy modulator, a coherence designer. This role, in a state, returns to the highest spheres of power. And this is precisely what we observe in this political sequence: a desire to transform the relationship to reality by establishing a collective cognitive architecture. This architecture is based on the co-interpretation of the present and the co-construction of the future. It allows the emergence of an ecology of ideas, that is to say a healthy, durable and synergic way of producing meaning together.
In Community and collective intelligence, I have shown that what founds the robustness of a community is not its homogeneity, but its ability to make diversity a force. Here, this hypothesis finds a political verification. The pact does not erase divergences, but inscribes them in a dialogical process which transforms them into resources. It is the logic of the living: adaptation is always born from the meeting between chaos and intention. The 2025 Senegal seems ready to cross this milestone: transforming energies dissipated into synchronized energies, making the crisis a systemic opportunity.
You shouldn’t be mistaken: nothing is won in advance. This pact is a start, not an end. Its success will depend on the ability to maintain the dynamics initiated alive. This supposes continuous listening mechanisms, open dialogue bodies, agile regulation protocols. But the most important thing is already acquired: the symbolic act, the affirmation of the willingly vivre-together, the recognition of the other as a legitimate actor of the transformation. As such, this May 1, 2025 can be read as an act of republican faith, a bet on collective intelligence as a driving force in history.
This reading of the new social dynamic wanted to be diachronic and educational. It is also prophetic. Because through this pact, it is a renaissance Senegal that we see. A Senegal which finally understands that stability cannot be decreed, it is cultivated. It is the fruit of a shared commitment, of an ability to think of great together, of a desire to co-construct a fair future. What we saw that day is not a signature. It is the emergence of a style. A managerial style made of reliance, vision, dignity. And that, for a country, is worth all the reforms.
Dr. Moussa Sarr (Moise Sarr)
