There exists, within Madagascar's administration, a refined art of absence. Not physical absence—that of civil servants who leave for lunch at ten and return at three, though that deserves its own column. No, the absence in question here is more subtle, more elegant, and infinely more cruel: it is absence by the numbers. You are not erased. Nothing is forbidden to you. People simply forget to count you. And what is not counted, in this country as elsewhere, eventually ceases to exist.
On September 3, 2026, the Prime Minister designated members of the Technical Committee for National Dialogue, the structure tasked with supporting the FFKM in the grand project of Refoundation. Everyone is there: ministries, churches, the Muslim community, consumer associations, people with albinism. Each has two seats, one principal and one alternate, in a format as regular as a well-organized wedding seating chart. Everyone, except one. Federations and platforms representing people with disabilities have only one seat. No alternate. As if disability, which encompasses far more realities than all other categories combined, could fit in a single folding chair at the back of the room.
One might think it an oversight. We would like to believe it. But oversights in legal texts reviewed by entire law firms are less about distraction than revealing slips. Especially since the same text managed, for albinism, to demonstrate surgical precision: two seats, distinct recognition, separate treatment. Let us be clear: this vigilance is justified. Forty-five attacks between 2020 and 2022. Thirty-three abductions since 2022. Sixteen children and adolescents murdered in 2025. We know these figures because someone took the trouble to count them, with support from the UN Independent Expert. This work produced a technical committee, a proposed law, a reception center backed by the Presidency. Proof that the State knows how to act quickly, provided a suffering is named, documented, quantified, funded, and politicized.
This is not about expert disagreement over a comma. This is about a country that counts 0.6% of people with disabilities when the WHO estimates 15%, and which, by not looking, finds exactly what it wants to find: almost nothing. According to WHO ratios, autism would affect between 200,000 and 300,000 people in Madagascar. Down syndrome, approximately 32,000. Attention deficit disorder, several hundred thousand. Yet none of these categories has ever been subject to national counting. None has a special rapporteur. None has a dedicated seat. They all fit in that single chair, at the back of the room, which we had the courtesy not to remove.
In 2021, Autism Madagascar conducted a survey of 2,139 people across four regions of the country. The results are chilling to anyone who takes time to read them: 69% of authorities and doctors report beatings and injuries to autistic people. 39% of doctors report sexual violence. 71% of families cite rejection as the primary form of violence. 68% of authorities themselves acknowledge that no mechanism guarantees the safety of these people. So we have the figures. They exist. They are documented. They sleep in association reports that no one on the State's side seems to have had time to open. The excuse of ignorance no longer holds. What remains is indifference, which has the merit of being more honest.
There is, in the way Madagascar's public policies are built, a reflex that has become almost Pavlovian: we protect what the outside world designates as priority. A special rapporteur focuses on albinism, and the State mobilizes. A continental plan targets a cause, and budgets follow. This mechanism has produced real results, and it would be dishonest to deny it. But it cannot become the only filter through which we decide who deserves to be seen. Families of autistic people, people with Down syndrome, people living with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities do not wait for a UN expert's visit to experience, every day, the absence of accessible diagnosis, the absence of public structures, the absence of recognition in spaces where the country's future is decided. They do not need someone from Geneva to know they exist.
We are not asking to take anything away from anyone. That would reproduce the exact mechanism we denounce: an arbitrary hierarchy of suffering, where recognition of one is paid for by the erasure of another. We are asking for one alternate seat, in line with the format applied to all other colleges. We are asking that the same logic of attention be applied to all.