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At the "Villa des Hotes", the government mansion where the president took shelter on Friday from the storm rocking his country, the clipped lawns are flawless and the wrought-iron gates firmly locked. Compaore, his wife Chantal and their entourage were spotted rolling towards the flat-roofed villa in a 27-car convoy - one for each of the 27 years he held onto power until popular anger forced him out last week.

Their convoy was seen heading for the southern Burkinabe garrison town of Po, home to a key army training centre.But the residents of Po had other plans - announcing they would barricade the streets rather than welcome the loathed ex-leader.

The Ivorian government later confirmed it had taken in the couple, housed in the guest villa dubbed the "Giscardium" after it was inaugurated by France's onetime president Valery Giscard d'Estaing.Barring a few local journalists scouting for news, few Ivorians have ventured close to the mansion, set among the vast, quiet avenues of the administrative capital.

Diplomats had few illusions about the man sometimes dubbed “handsome Blaise”. Compaoré was a repressive ruler who ruthlessly eliminated his opposition. Two ministers were executed in 1989 after denouncing the government’s “right-wing drift” and the country became a virtual one-party state. In 2011, he brutally crushed protests by students and the military.

As a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) put it: “For 25 years, he has ensured he did not fall out with anybody.” The result was a reliable flow of foreign aid, averaging $400m a year – which accounted for 80 per cent of public expenditure. Compaoré cultivated his image as a man who could do deals with almost anyone. The ICG described how Burkina Faso “developed a kind of ‘mediation industry’, which has brought it political and economic dividends”.

For all their early promise, the Arab Spring revolutions have destabilised North Africa and allowed militant Islamist groups to flourish. The threat to western interests is evident. From the west’s perspective, the arrival of men such as the Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is by far preferable to the chaos now reigning in Libya.

By early evening, Compaoré had announced he was dissolving the parliament and declared a state of emergency. Contradicting him, Burkina Faso's army chief made his own later announcement that the government had been dissolved: The country's military appears to have sided against Compaoré. On Friday, Compaoré announced his resignation.

Notably, he was an important ally for America: A U.S. base in Ouagadougou, operating since 2007, operates as a hub for a U.S spying network in the region, with spy planes departing from the base to fly over Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara, tracking fighters from the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

"In Burkina Faso now it looks like citizens are making forceful demands for respect of democratic rules," Pierre Englebert, a Professor of African Politics and Development at Pomona College explained in an e-mail. "That would be an unusual degree of political ownership. And it might well give hope to movements elsewhere, first of all in the Democratic Republic of Congo where things have also been coming to a boil."

President Obama’s second term has been particularly marked by an intensification of warnings against African rulers tempted to modify their country’s constitutions for their personal ambitions. Such warnings have been delivered, either in person or in writing, by Secretary of State John Kerry, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and US Special Envoy for the DRC and the African Great Lakes Region, Russ Feingold. French president Francois Hollande, on the other hand, publicly spoke about the need for African rulers to uphold their countries’ constitutions on several occasions, including the fifteenth Francophonie Summit, a major event that gathered the leaders of 57 French-speaking countries in Dakar, Senegal in late November 2014. “Where constitutional rules are abused, where freedom is violated, where the alternation of power is prevented, I affirm here that the citizens of these countries will always find, in the Francophone sphere, the necessary support to uphold justice, law and democracy” said President Hollande, whose speech was very similar in message to the one Francois Mitterrand, France’s longest-serving president, made in 1990 at the sixteenth Franco-African Summit. President Mitterrand’s speech, delivered in the coastal resort of La Baule, France, set the tone for fresh relations between France and its former colonies, by conditioning aid on the adoption of democratic reforms.

Regardless of how the West decides to persuade African rulers to change their ways, a new wave of democracy is making its way throughout the continent. This is the same wave that swept away a stubborn Blaise Compaoré. The same wave that recently pushed large groups of youth to the streets of Kinshasa to protest a controversial electoral bill. And finally, the same wave that gave the people of Burundi the courage to publicly denounce their president’s decision to run for a third term.

The opposition is splintered and state institutions are weak. By contrast, the military has been gobbling up resources for two decades and is likely to remain involved in running the country in one way or another. If anything, its motivation to do so has increased recently. New mineral finds mean that whoever is in charge will control growing mining revenues.

The American and French armed forces have used it to keep an eye on Mali and Nigeria as well as the wider Sahel and Sahara regions. Mr Zida, the interim leader, received training from the American army, as did the leader of the most recent coup in Mali.

MPs who backed Mr Compaore's unconstitutional bid last year to extend his 27-year rule would be barred from office, the law states.

Three former ministers are among the eight allies of Mr Compaore whose arrests have been confirmed by the authorities. They include the former ministers of interior, mining and infrastructure - Jerome Bougouma, Salif Kabore and Jean-Bertin Ouedraogo respectively.

It didn’t take long for the noble ideals of Burkina Faso’s people-powered revolution to succumb to the harsh, nasty realities of the world in which we live. Just three days, in fact. (In this excellent piece on Africa is a Country, Siddhartha Mitter argues that it was actually as little as six hours.)

Rushing into the power vacuum, as they always seem to do, were the men with guns (who may or may not have precipitated the unrest in the first place – popular protests are rarely as popular, or spontaneous, as they seem). One faction of the army declared themselves to be the new government, and then another, competing factions followed suit.

The African Union has a strict policy of refusing to recognise coups and unconstitutional changes of government. This policy makes no exception for popular revolutions. There is a strong element of self-interest in this, of course – Africa’s many authoritarian governments are hardly likely to incentivise radical change – but it’s also a recognition that sudden, dramatic change is more often than not counter-productive.

He won five elections, of course with the usual tricks, but he won them nevertheless. But he instituted few reforms, skirted the nation’s real problems, and was mainly preoccupied with schemes to keep himself in perpetual office, while at the same time making himself useful to France and the United States, both of which have bases in the country.

The army coup is an old idea that no longer works, because African populations are wiser than they were, and less starry-eyed about the capacities and virtues of soldiers. So the second direction, toward a new democratic start, is more likely. Violence could derail it, and there were worrying clashes on Sunday. But, short of such a disaster, that should mean that Burkina Faso will soon have a civilian transitional government, and elections will be held as planned next year

Violent protests erupted in 2011 throughout the country. On Thursday, demonstrators set Burkina Faso's parliament on fire First out were the students, following the death of one of their number in police custody.Shopkeepers, traders, magistrates, lawyers, peasants and finally the rank-and-file soldiers followed. But they didn't form a mass movement and this is what "saved Blaise Compaore", according to Mr Depagne, who lived in Burkina Faso for a number of years. The opposition parties were not able to build a political platform to offer an alternative based on the people's discontent at high prices, low wages and Mr Compaore's undivided rule. Yet, these upheavals lasted several months in the first half of 2011.

Hours before Mr Compaore resigned, a letter he had received earlier this month from French President Francois Hollande - who has now welcomed his resignation - emerged in the media to reveal that France was ready to support him in finding a job within the international community at the end of his mandate, if he withdrew his proposed bill on presidential term limits.

But he did have the law on his side in his showdown with the street demonstrators who ultimately pushed him from office — and that fact reveals flaws in African democracy that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the continent.

The larger issue in Burkina Faso, as elsewhere in Africa, is that formally democratic rules can easily be applied to perpetuate the authoritarian domination of a ruling clique. People might vote and parliament might convene, follow procedure and pass laws, but it is a largely hidden network of patronage alliances and security agencies that actually rules.

I was in Burkina Faso in July, meeting with young people as part of my research on the country’s politics. I was stunned by their despair and simmering anger. Some spend eight years in school to obtain a B.A., simply because of the lack of classes, instructors or facilities. And at the end there are no jobs.

Michel Kafando, the head of the current interim government, has agreed, seeing a resolution of Sankara's death as necessary for national reconciliation - and as a way to smooth the country's transition to democracy. National elections are planned for October 2015.

The question now is whether the Burkinabe judiciary will go beyond exhuming Sankara's remains, and start calling high-ranking officials to testify in court over what happened in October 1987.

It remains to be seen if the interim government has the capacity - and international support - to do so. The next step for the activists is to connect with sympathisers and champions of Sankara beyond Burkina Faso's borders.

While the military has certainly played a crucial role in the overthrow of his own government, it was mass popular mobilisation that sowed the seeds of Compaoré’s downfall. Reflecting this, perhaps one of the most provoking images to emerge from the crisis was that of ten young civilians posing in jubilatory fashion in the main state TV broadcasting room where normally one would expect to see a stony-faced junta issuing its message to the nation.

acking a vibrant middle class or robust civilian institutions capable of managing a truly popular revolution, the army has proven to be the final arbiter in forcing Compaoré from office. It also appears increasingly likely to step into the void left by his departure. But the army’s rule is likely to be short-lived. International pressure to restore civilian rule will be considerable, even if it means a transitional arrangement. The age of the military seizing power in West Africa and declaring indefinite rule is receding as accountability pressures grow, driven both by increased popular activism and international responsiveness.

But domestic and international stakeholders are likely to fudge a solution that sees an eventual transition within a year back to fully elected rule. Businesses in Burkina Faso, and indeed the wider West African region, will be watching with unease. The crisis highlights the volatility and unpredictability of many West African frontier markets.But investors can take reassurance from the fact that not all coups signal that a country has entered a state of free-fall. The risk of civil conflict in Burkina Faso is in fact limited; the country lacks pronounced ethnic and sectarian divisions, there is no precedent of civil conflict and no widespread possession of arms by non-state groups. Compaoré’s overthrow will generate considerable institutional turmoil and policy inertia in the year ahead and the political environment will certainly become more fractious with the loss of such a long-standing leader. However it will not usher in radical policy changes or fundamental changes in the way that the Burkinabé political system works. Risks will remain manageable for those prepared and equipped to play the long game and wait for the dust to settle on what has been a landmark moment in Burkinabé and indeed West African politics.

Sankara vehemently and publicly denounced odious debt and rallied African political leaders to do the same.

What distinguishes Sankara from many other revolutionary leaders was his confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of ordinary human beings. He did not see himself as a messiah or prophet, as he famously said before the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1984. It is worth quoting from Sankara at length, when before the delegation of 159 nations, he said: ‘I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is…to speak on behalf of my people…to speak on behalf of the “great disinherited people of the world”, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt’.

In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.

There are indeed ideological similarities between Sankara and Malema, with both pushing a pro-nationalisation, pro-land redistribution, anti-imperialist agenda. But particularly in personal respects, there seem stark differences also.

“Four years after Sankara came to power, Burkina Faso was practically self-sufficient in its demand for basic foodstuffs,” wrote Peter Dorrie for Think Africa Press in 2012. “Today, the government has to import much of its food, even in years with a good harvest.”

Sankara saw his most important project as “transform[ing] people’s attitudes”, releasing the Burkinabe – as he called them – from a neo-colonial mindset. For this reason he was opposed to the idea of foreign aid and the financial assistance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. “He who feeds you, controls you,”

Strange thing is that around half of the people are in poverty and around half of its exports is gold. But, the World Bank, when speaking of Burkina’s “Debt Performance”, talks of cotton, and not a word is found about gold: “May 2008, GOVERNMENT DEBT MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE REPORT – BURKINA FASO“.

Last June Reuters informed us that from 2007 to 2010, “For mineral-rich Burkina Faso, a west African gold producer, 100 percent of its exports to Switzerland over this period, accounting for 15 percent of all exports, also ‘vanished“. “AFRICA INVESTMENT-The Swiss commodities connection in African poverty,” Fri, 27 Jun 20, 2014, (Reuters)

While some of us are as happy to see Compaoré – murderer of his best friend, Thomas Sankara – step down, as we were to see Haiti’s Duvalier die, it is unlikely that either event will do anything to improve the situation of these tiny countries.