“Sansalonnade” Failed by Nekkaz in Marrakech

In mid-Ramadan 2025, Moroccans who were not yet familiar with him have just discovered a peculiar character. He is none other than the clownish Rachid Nekkaz, the former fake-real candidate for the Algerian presidency in 2014 and 2019, who became famous in the 2010s for his staged payment of fines on behalf of women penalized in France for wearing the burqa, and later for his fake-real five-year prison sentence, a punishment he unfortunately did not serve to the end. Had he done so, we would have at least been spared a petty and absurd controversy, as well as these lines prompted by it. But the controversy did indeed take place.

Armed with all the insolence and bad faith characteristic of his current handlers—none other than his former jailers from the Algerian generals’ regime, with whom he now seems to have allied—Nekkaz, the eternal wannabe provocateur, deemed it appropriate to show up in the heart of the Kingdom of Morocco to insult its past, present, and future. Weighing barely fifty kilos soaking wet, equipped with his smartphone and his high-pitched, nasal voice that grates both souls and eardrums, Nekkaz attempted the feat of simultaneously claiming cultural and political appropriation—areas in which his compatriots have become experts—by asserting the historical ownership of the Koutoubia and shared sovereignty over the Sahara.

Nekkaz’s assertions, which carry no more weight than a spray of spit, naturally deserve neither response nor indignation. Proof of this is that they only earned him a simple and wise escort to the border—far from the beating he dreamed of and deserved from some outraged citizens, and even further from imprisonment in one of our jails for the crime of attacking national sovereignty, a punishment he hoped our authorities would impose on him. For that was the ultimate goal of the maneuver devised by his handlers: to provoke an impulsive reaction from our citizens and especially from our authorities, in order to trap them in a situation similar to that in which the Algerian regime is entangled following the imprisonment of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal for his statements about the Moroccan identity of the Sahara and western Algeria.

A maneuver that fell flat. But a maneuver that will certainly not be the last, as we get closer to the organization of the next African Cup of Nations.

Majd El Atouabi – In L’Opinion