DESPITE the French media’s fixation with the campaign stratagems of five major candidates in the presidential election that is only two months away, things changed dramatically here by an event that caught the attention of newspapers, radio networks and TV channels.
What happened was this: in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a town on the outskirts of Paris, someone named Theo was beaten up by the police on Feb 2, with injuries reportedly so serious that he had to be hospitalised.
This could have been a banal, everyday incident in a suburb heavily populated by immigrants, but things took phenomenal proportions when, for hitherto unexplained reasons, the media repeatedly identified the victim as little Theo, an appellation that brought to mind the image of a small boy ruthlessly lacerated by the men of law.
President Francois Hollande lost no time in bringing his own honourable self next to little Theo’s bedside. Press photographers and TV cameramen, you guessed it right, happened to be at the hospital, quite coincidentally as it were.
If Hollande’s aim was that Aulnay’s immigrant residents would confine their reaction essentially to voting for socialist party’s candidate, he was proven dead wrong. Riots began almost immediately afterwards and for days and days shops were looted, windows smashed and cars burnt by angry mobs not only in Aulnay but in many adjoining towns as well.
Soon afterwards a number of contrary revelations gradually raised their heads. Little Theo in fact turned out to be 22 years old with a height of 1m97. According to the statement of the four policemen involved in the case, he had violently intervened while they were in the process of arresting a drug trafficker.
Then last week daily Le Parisien brought some more facts to light. The so-called victim’s full name is Theo Luhaka and his family is already under inquisition for the past two years on charge of financial frauds that involve the embezzlement of nearly 700,000 euros of taxpayers’ money.
According to the newspaper it all began in early 2015 when, during a routine check-up of the accounts of a charitable organisation called Aulnay Events, a government investigator stumbled upon the fact that its president Mickael Luhaka, Theo’s brother, could be the prime mover behind the sizeable scam.
According to Mickael’s own claim, Aulnay Events had employed more than thirty people, including eight members of the Luhaka family (not to mention Theo himself), on fairly generous salaries as social workers. The findings of the inspector, in addition, failed to recover tangible proof of any kind of actual social work performed by the association.
The plot thickened further when the inspector also discovered that the total of the salaries of the Luhaka family alone amounted to 170,000 euros, out of which 52,000 euros went into Theo’s personal bank account.
Contacted by Le Parisien, Mickael acknowledged the fact of having his eight family members on the payroll but denied the charge of fictive jobs. “I had all these people working for Aulnay Events that used to provide free entertainment to the poor people of the town. Our association ran on government subventions.”
Apparently much to the disappointment of Hollande, the socialist candidate Benoit Hamon reacted by declaring that he would recruit five thousand additional policemen, if elected president, to put things in order in the suburbs.
As if this was not enough, rumours are spreading fast that Mickael and Theo are sons of Thomas Luhaka, currently Minister for Infrastructures in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Political analysts are now of the opinion that Hollande’s visit to the hospital could only be explained as a diplomatic reaction.
So far there appears to be no end to Little Theo controversies, but one thing is certain: he is growing bigger by the day.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, March 5th, 2017
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