Everywhere you turn these past few days, many are quoting the 48 laws of power. You can bet from the comments that many have read the book, maybe, but they have retained one law only - Law 1, NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER. You can also bet that they don’t know the stories Greene used to illustrate observance and transgressions of Law 1, neither do they know what he wrote in the reversal of the law, nor any other law.
Before we can examine if Sonko did break Law 1, we have to ask -between the two, who is or was the master? It’s easy to say Faye but we must consider the history.
For those who don’t know the history: Ousmane Sonko was Senegal’s leading youth opposition figure, with Bassirou Diomaye Faye as his collaborator. Sonko came third in 2019, was later jailed on charges meant to keep him off the ballot, and was released days before the 2024 vote. Sonko made and endorsed Faye as the party candidate -and no one in Senegal pretends otherwise. Faye has said it himself: “Sonko is Faye and Faye is Sonko.”
So letting Sonko lead while holding the presidency would not have been seen as weakness on the part of Faye. The people would rather see him as someone who stuck to the plan. They all knew Faye was a tool used to bypass an illegal roadblock. So the master question stays unsettled.
What Sonko did break for sure is Greene’s Law 45 - “Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.” Sonko preached rupture and tried to deliver it on every front at once from the PM’s office.
71 mining licenses revoked, debt restructuring rejected, foreign military bases questioned. Each defensible alone; together, the textbook violation. He became the single face of every threatened interest.
But step away from the book for a moment.
If staying in power is the actual goal, the 48 laws collapse into one: do not leave or hand over power. Stay singular. Trust no one with what you’ve built.
Here in Cameroon, Kamto followed that single law. After running unsuccessfully in 2018 and ending up jailed just like Sonko, he refused to let Michelle Ndoki carry the candidacy. Blocked again in 2025, he refused to endorse any of the candidates who did make the ballot, including the eventual opposition runner-up. Both times, the choice was to keep his hand on the wheel rather than trust the mission to someone else.
Sonko had every standing to make the same choice. He could have blocked Faye’s candidacy or pulled PASTEF out of the race. He didn’t. He made Faye the candidate, accepted PM, and tried to govern hard from a subordinate office. He broke the only law there is.
That sounds cynical, and it is. But using Greene’s methodology, every law has a reversal. The reversal is what one of our followers (Leslie Ngwa) shared as a comment to a previous post. He wrote “There is an anti-thesis to that book... radical collaboration and the avoidance of zero-sum logic also constitute compelling narratives on the Sonko story. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that the 48 laws of power is just a book among many.... like the Art of War by Sun Tzu etc. Not all scenarios can be scripted. The recent events signal a progression, not an end in the greater scheme of things.”
His first message after the dismissal points the same way. “Alhamdoulillah. Tonight I will sleep with a light heart at Keur Gorgui.” That’s not the language of a man who lost. Keur Gorgui isn’t a residence -it’s the address that made him, the base he was barricaded inside during the protest years.
The light heart isn’t relief from defeat; it’s release from the cage of an office he never needed to take. Three years out from 2029, with the electoral code freshly reformed in his favor, he can do the rest of the work from where he was always strongest: outside the building, with the movement, his hands clean of the compromises Faye will now have to make.
It could well be a spectacle both men are putting on to build leverage for Faye at the negotiating table while keeping Sonko strong with the radical base and clean from the transitional compromises - we wish. The next few months will tell us if both men are going to war or playing a game.
So who understands the laws of power better - Sonko or Kamto?