The power lines of the world are shifting at unprecedented speed. Geopolitical tensions, resource scarcity, and ecological urgency are exposing the fragility of systems built on borrowing and dependency.

For many societies shaped by colonization, a reflex has taken root: import the tools, the concepts, the models — wait for the solution to come from elsewhere.

Once, after the trauma of conquest, this reflex could be justified by the need to rebuild. Today, it is a dangerous brake. Breaking free from this posture of waiting is no longer optional — it is a condition for survival.

For too long, we have learned to hold out our hand: importing machines we cannot repair, buying seeds that die without the fertilizers sold alongside them, building cities from blueprints that do not breathe our air.

We live in clothes tailored for someone else — and in the process, we have forgotten how to cut and stitch our own.

Independence on Paper, Dependence in Reality

We were told: You are free.

But what kind of freedom is it when our seeds, medicines, machinery, meat, and technologies come from elsewhere?
When even our dreams are built from other people’s words?

Dependency is not only material — it is mental. It teaches us to believe a foreign idea is worth more than one born here, that imitation is the price of existence.

Three Roots for a Tree That Stands

To withstand the storms ahead, we need three deep roots:

• Cultural: reclaim our languages, stories, and know-how — not to freeze them in a museum, but to turn them into levers for invention.
• Economic: produce first to feed our communities, strengthen our infrastructures, and weave living networks. Move from the shop window of consumption to the workshop of transformation.
• Ecological: for everything begins with soil and water. Restore the land, protect every drop, bring biodiversity back. Sovereignty built on a desert is a house on sand.

Water: The Mirror of Our Alienation

In Algeria, 90% of rainwater is lost every year to the sea or to the desert. In the heart of the Sahara, brand-new petrol stations channel rain away as if it were waste. In mosques, where we pray for rain, water from roofs and courtyards is sent straight to the drains.

This is the legacy of colonial infrastructure, designed to drain, not to nourish. The foggaras, storage basins, and other traditional oasis techniques — the fruit of millennia of hydraulic genius — have been abandoned for costly mega-dams, underused and unsuited to our needs.

No water, no agriculture.

No agriculture, no food sovereignty.

And without food sovereignty, no true independence.

The Trap of Mimicry

Our cities, too, betray this inner colonization. Glass façades, imported as a symbol of modernity, turn into energy traps under 3,000+ hours of annual sun. The result: 62% of summer electricity consumption in public buildings goes to air conditioning. These glass walls, unfit for our climate and our sense of privacy, reflect an identity crisis.

Choosing Our Battles

Breaking dependence means setting our own priorities:

• Water: rehabilitate foggaras, capture every drop from roofs, create rain gardens and infiltration basins.
• Food: shift from imported wheat to sorghum, millet, and locally adapted seeds.
• Energy: solar, wind, low-carbon — designed for our realities.
• Knowledge: train our own builders, engineers, and artisans of the future, protect our data as we protect our land.

An Economy That Heals Instead of Wounds

We need a model that regenerates: crops that enrich the soil, workshops that repair and transform, ideas that mobilize, and enterprises that cultivate autonomy instead of feeding on imports.

The Promise of Rain

Sovereignty is not a gift of history — it is an ongoing construction site. It begins with a simple pact: not a single drop of water must die in vain. Rain that falls on our soil must feed our roots, not escape into abandonment, to the sea or the desert.

Reclaim the water. Restore the land. Free the mind.

These are the three keys to a sovereign Algeria. Without control over our resources, without care for our soils, and without independence of thought, there can be neither lasting prosperity nor real autonomy. Sovereignty is not decreed — it is built every day, in our fields, our workshops, and our schools.