Lolo Chidiac: The lion of the north has bowed out

Twice imprisoned by President Soglo in power between 1991 and 1996, Michel Lolo Chidiac passed away this Friday, October 1 2021 in Parakou. If his personality and his role on the local and national political scene are most controversial, he will still remain an important pillar of this city to which he has devoted all his energy and his fortune.

Lolo, as everyone calls him in this city, he has been accused on several occasions of being the financier of the violent protest movements that have punctuated the presidential elections. So, the day after the election of President Nicéphore Soglo in 1991 during which he had supported Mathieu Kérékou, he was arrested and accused of having been one of the main actors in the ethnic unrest which led to the mass flight of populations from the south. Imprisoned, he was pardoned two years later, before being sentenced to prison again, in 1996 under the same president Soglo in another case. This time, it was about a dossier relating to the importation of weapons-rockets- intended for use in a putsch. The candidate Mathieu Kérékou, which he claimed to finance, having won the ballot, he hoped for his release which was only done at the end of the two-year sentence he received.

Son of a Lebanese transporter and a mother from Parakou, he lived in Niger where his mother remarried after his father left Dahomey when he only had 10 years. In his adopted country, young Lolo was active in a political party where he learned about guerrilla warfare and the use of Russian firearms.

Returned to Benin in 1960, he integrated the RDD of Hubert Maga, the country's first president, also from Parakou. According to several sources, using his charisma, he then mobilized the youth of Parak, especially in the Yarakinin district. He was then greatly feared by nationals from the south of the country. Suspected of having participated in an attempted coup, he was imprisoned in 1963 by President Justin Tomètin Ahomadégbé. More, even in jails, Michel Lolo Chidiac had the art of transforming his cell into a political cell from which he could direct operations. He allegedly claimed to be "aware of all the coups d'état organized in Dahomey".

These last years, the Lion of the North is entrenched in his home in Parakou, weakened by the weight of age. He bowed out at the departmental university hospital of Borgou.

Pierre MATCHOUDO