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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News : Issue 651 - 0 views

  • Whether Thomas Sankara wanted the position of leader is irrelevant, and in spite of all the accusations that have been levelled against him, it appears that for the most part he sought to unite rather than to eliminate, to deepen his understanding, working unstintingly and seeking to convince rather than imposing his will by force. These assertions appear provocative in light of what has been said about him, even by sympathisers who acknowledge the positive aspects of his action but agree on his authoritarian tendencies. Where is the truth?
  • Relationships were patiently built up that enabled the political takeover in a relatively confident climate. Unfortunately, after 4 August 1983, and although the more right-wing elements of the army had been dismissed, it was necessary to reach a compromise with the army as a whole, going against the wishes of the political parties, which found themselves outnumbered by the military in the CNR [Conseil National de la Révolution, the National Revolutionary Council].
  • To foster a spirit of enterprise among the farmers, the country’s main producers of wealth, by giving them their rightful place in the political life of the country and by trying to give them a fair price for their labour. - To try to promote a planned national economy by developing local production and processing.
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  • Basically, Thomas Sankara’s only motivation was a formidable desire to make his country progress, to put it back on the map, improve the living conditions of the poor and give his people back their dignity. He and his comrades endeavoured to put in place original policies, within the political context of the time, which would enable them to attain their objectives.
  • With eyes filled with fear, the Burkinabe intellectual who offered to act as tour guide begged that his name not be mentioned in connection with Thomas Sankara. ‘It is forbidden to talk about him in this country,’ he emphasized repeatedly.
  • The infrastructural legacy he left behind pales into insignificance when compared with the fact that by the fourth and final year of his reign, Burkina Faso had risen from a net importer of food to being self-sufficient in food production.
  • ‘We are looking for the cemetery,’ the tour guide asks two elderly Burkinabe men lounging under the shade of a tree, one of the ten million planted by Thomas Sankara, which now gives Ouagadougou an earthy, relaxed and welcoming feel, despite the scorching heat and dust.
  • Standing beside the dilapidation that is Captain Thomas Sankara’s grave, eyes, heart and mind search for answers. Is this really where lies Thomas Noel Isidore Sankara? The president who insisted on riding a bicycle to work for a long time and who would not even use the air conditioner in his office because it was only a few of his countrymen who could afford it? In opposition to foreign aid, he told his country that ‘he who feeds you, controls you.’ Thomas Sankara dared the feudal landlords of his country by redistributing land to peasants and in less than two years, production of wheat jumped from 1700 kg per hectare to 3800 kg, launching Burkina Faso into food self-sufficiency.
  • After four years of being the president of a mineral-rich country, Captain Sankara, in death, had only about $400 in cash to his name, three guitars, four bikes, a fridge and a broken down freezer as his most valuable assets.
  • Thomas Sankara was one of the few French-speaking African leaders to stand up to France. Some have said that that was his undoing; a weak nobody fighting a powerful, age old establishment with full frontal force. Thomas Sankara should have fought to live, in order to keep fighting, many say. When he spoke, during the OAU summit, urging fellow African leaders to shun debt and dependency and negotiate with the West as equals, he thumb-printed his assassination declaration. Like DR Congo’s Patrice Lumumba did with the speech during Congo’s independence ceremony.
  • Sankara made no secret of his Marxist leanings, which were not shared by many of his associates. To surround himself with competent, motivated people, he built up a group of 150 carefully selected presidential aides who, with a few political ideologists, became the best-educated administrators.
  • For Sankara, the revolution meant practical improvement of living conditions. It was a break with the past in all areas: transformation of the administration; redistribution of wealth; women’s liberation; abolition of the powers of the tribal chiefs, who were held responsible for rural backwardness; the attempt to turn the peasantry into a revolutionary social class; transformation of the army, which was placed at the service of the people and assigned production tasks; decentralisation and the introduction of direct democracy via local Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR). They all combined with the fight against corruption. On 4 August 1984 Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso, ‘land of the righteous.’
  • he aim was to promote autonomous economic development that did not depend on outside aid. Sankara said: ‘Food aid... becomes embedded in our brains. Enough of reacting like beggars living on handouts. We have to produce, produce more, because he who feeds you will also impose his will on you.’
  • As a spokesman for the Third World, Sankara criticised the international order. His themes – the injustice inflicted by globalisation and the international financial system, the omnipresence of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the vicious circle of third world debt – were similar to the modern alternative world movement. Sankara argued that third world debt was caused by the ‘alluring proposals of technical assassins’ from financial institutions. Debt was the means for ‘the deliberately organised re-conquest of Africa, a way of ensuring that its growth and development conform to stages and standards entirely alien to us.’ Burkina Faso decided not to seek any loans from the IMF, which wanted to impose its own conditions.
  • The CDRs, set up so rapidly, were responsible for exercising power in the name of the people. Their work went beyond public security: political education, sanitation, development of production and participation in budget control in the ministries. They discussed and rejected several national projects. But they were also responsible for many excesses and acts of repression. They spearheaded attacks on the unions, which they considered dangerous because unions were controlled by such organisations as the PAI, which went into opposition in August 1984, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Volta. Sankara was the first to denounce the excesses and shortcomings of the CDRs, which were often due to in-fighting among organisations supporting the revolution.
  • According to Jeune Afrique (2 June 1988), which published the writing of Jacques Foccart (1), ‘number two in a revolution in which he no longer believed… Blaise met his French counterpart Jacques Chirac, then prime minister, through the offices of the president of Ivory Coast, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, and Jacques Foccart, who introduced him to the general staff of the French right, especially Charles Pasqua.’ François Xavier Verschave claims: ‘Muammar Gadafy and Françafrique (2) had more and more causes in common, cemented by anti-Americanism and enlightened self-interest. The elimination of Sankara was probably the founding rite in their alliance. In 1987 Foccart and the people round Gadafy agreed to replace the exasperatingly honest and independent leader by the infinitely more amenable Blaise Compaoré.’ (3).
  • Compaoré’s takeover as president had consequences beyond Burkina Faso’s borders. The emerging Françafrique alliance drew in politicians, military leaders and entrepreneurs from Ivory Coast, France, Libya and Burkina Faso. It supported Charles Taylor, now being tried by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Compaoré is portrayed as a man of peace who is sponsoring reconciliation between the warring factions.
  • The first Popular Development Plan (PPD), from October 1984 to December 1985 was adopted after a participatory and democratic process including the most remote villages. The financing of the plan was 100 percent Burkinabe. It must be noted that from 1985 to 1988, during Sankara’s presidency, Burkina Faso did not receive any foreign ‘aid’ from the West, including France, nor the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He had relied entirely on his own strength and the solidarity of friendly countries sharing the same vision and ideals. Popular mobilisation, mainly through the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and the spirit of relying on one’s own forces saw 85 percent of the PPD’s objectives realised. In one year, 250 reservoirs were built and 3000 wells drilled. This does not even take into account the other achievements in the fields of health, housing, education, agricultural production, etc.
  • Relying on one’s own strength also means accepting to live within one’s means and make the best use of available resources. This guarantees dignity and freedom. President Sékou Touré of Guinea had the audacity and temerity to state this in front of General de Gaulle in 1958 in his famous phrase: ‘We prefer freedom in poverty to slavery in opulence.’
  • Living free also means to avoid the pitfalls and humiliations of the supposed ‘development aid’ which has contributed to the under-development of Africa and its dependency. As Sankara states: ‘Of course, we encourage everyone to help us eliminate aid. But in general, aid policies leave us disorganised, by undermining our sense of responsibility for our own economic, political and cultural affairs. We have taken the risk of borrowing new ways to realise our own well-being.’
  • for him, the state must be central in the process of economic, social and cultural transformation. It was under the leadership of the state and its institutions that the masses were mobilised to participate in the first PPD. But, after his assassination, when Burkina Faso knelt before the World Bank and the IMF, the state was vilified and stripped of its basic functions for the benefit of foreign capital, with consequences which we well know. The decline of the state led to the deterioration of living standards, as is common in other African countries. The failures of structural adjustment programs (SAP) and the collapse of market fundamentalism requires the re-emergence of the state. It is in this context that Cea (2011) and UNCTAD (2007) urged African countries to build developmental states in order to become active agents in development, like the Asian ‘Tigers’ or ‘Dragons’ and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
  • Always connected to the external debt of the continent, Thomas Sankara was one of the few African leaders, if not the only, to have criticised and rejected the adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF, which have increased the debt burden and impoverished African countries. His government refused any form of collaboration with these institutions and rejected their ‘help.’ He developed and implemented his own self-adjustment program, which had been supported by the people who understood the merits of his policies and the sacrifices required of all, both citizens and leaders.
  • Today, whilst both South Africa and Namibia are formally independent and ruled by African majorities, the people of the Western Sahara continue to remain under occupation by Morocco. Today, which African leader publicly sides with the Palestinian and Saharaoui peoples and demands the withdrawal of Morocco and Israel from the land of the Saharaoui and Palestinian people?
  • Similarly, Sankara’s internationalism extended to his visit to Grenada where he met the then Prime Minister Maurice Bishop before he was tragically assassinated by the forces of imperialism. In his address to the Harriet Tubman School in Harlem in October 1984, Sankara mentioned his meeting with Bishop and how they gave each other ‘some mutual advice.’ He also watched a ballet at the school and told the crowd: ‘As I watched your ballet, I really thought I was in Africa’ – to which he received an applause that was prolonged when he added: ‘That is why, as I have always said – and I’ll say it again – that our White House is in black Harlem.’ [12]
  • he reiterated his stand with the peoples of Afghanistan, Ireland, Grenada, East Timor, Western Sahara, South Africa, and Ireland at a time when all these peoples confronted political and economic domination. He specifically condemned foreign aggression against the island of Grenada an
  • Back in 1986 he correctly denounced ‘fallacious Malthusian arguments’ that Africa was overpopulated and made a radical proposal that ‘at least 1 percent of the colossal sums of money sacrificed to the search for cohabitation with other planets be used by way of compensation to finance the fight to save our trees and life.’ To cite him at some length, Sankara eloquently declared: ‘While we have not abandoned hope that a dialogue with the Martians could result in the reconquest of Eden, we believe that in the meantime, as earthlings, we also have the right to reject an alternative limited to simply a choice between hell or purgatory.
  • The height at which he always refused, despite strong pressure from his entourage, to eliminate his opponent who was also his best friend, is enough to place him among the rank of great men of modern history. One rests in peace with himself, while the other has to live with his conscience.
  • His popularity derived from the qualities that he used while in power: in his energy, his intelligence, his creativity, his resolution, the scope of work that he was able to accomplish, his ability to lead his entourage and his people, but also in his integrity and his moral rectitude.
  • Is it only a dream to want to build a society in which this minimum can be realized? Certainly even the richest countries such as France or the United States have not managed to meet these needs for everyone. It is not because they lack the means but rather with globalization, now the motor of society is based on the search for profitability rather than the satisfaction of basic human needs. The word revolution is henceforth absent from political debate, as it has been so totally perverted. How can we make the satisfaction of basic human needs of primary importance again?
  • The only real criticisms that could be leveled against him is that he took power when he was too young; that he wanted to move very quickly in a very difficult situation with respect to the objectives of the revolution and the available means to achieve them. In the end, Sankara can be reproached for having been too human, too sensitive. It is his humanity that forced him to push his entourage to tackle a task that many thought inhumane because it was too ambitious.
  • Here we come to the limits of the action of a man facing the objective realities in a specific historical context. Productive forces were hardly developed in Upper Volta. The revolution did not consist of seizing the property of the middle-class owners of the means of production which were quasi non-existent, to put them in the hands of the people, but rather to create a national industry. This cannot be done in four years.
  • The revolution was focused above all on developing a truly national economy, on trying to break free from political and economic external pressures and on resisting efforts at destabilization. We showed (on this subject) all the obstacles from the donors that Burkina Faso faced. Finally, Upper Volta has very little mineral resources; a large part of its territory suffers from drought. It is in this context that the revolution broke out. Upon what forces could it rely in the absence of a working class or a politically aware peasantry? On the urban petit bourgeoisie made up essentially of salaried civil servants or intellectuals, on a part of the army whose commitment is necessarily limited, on young academics and on the numerous unemployed. As for organized political forces, capable of leading the process, they were weak and the best structured were dismissed in the first year. Others were lost to internal fighting. It is in this context that the army gained so much weight in seizing power then in the leadership of the revolution and finally in the tragic outcome of the crisis.
  • The journey of Thomas Sankara from childhood to the presidency of the republic did not make him a hero. Although he had a good disposition and lived, despite the difficulties that he knew, a privileged childhood compared to most of his fellow countrymen of his generation. But for the rest, the key to his rising were, work, observation, study, perseverance, resolution, listening, curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, loyalty.
  • In reviewing the different stages of his life it appears as though he was constantly on the alert and that he knew how to maximize each one of his experiences to get the best out of them. From his childhood he remembers how unacceptable injustice was; from his religious education he retains the lessons of humility from Jesus and a certain humanism; from his adolescence he recalls his classical training and assuredly lessons about the French revolution; from his encounters with Marxism the rigor of the analysis of social relations and the prospects of change; from his stay in Madagascar, valuable lessons about the economy but also a real-life experience of a revolution; and from the war with Mali, a horror of blood spilt needlessly. Is it necessary to continue?
  • Cameroonian gay rights activist Eric Ohena Lembembe wrote in his last blog post: ‘Unfortunately, a climate of hatred and bigotry in Cameroon, which extends to high levels in government, reassures homophobes that they can get away with these crimes.’ This July, his body was found in his home, covered with iron burns, his hands and feet broken.
  • He continued, asserting that homosexuality was imported from the West during colonization and as a weapon to control African governments since. The ties between sexuality and power in African politics resound, alternating between claims that politicians sexually devour women or undergo homosexual rites of passage to achieve political statue. This reaches the highest echelons including, for example, the rumour that Cameroonian President Paul Biya subsumed the office only after being ritually sodomozed by the former President Ahmadou Ahidjo.
  • The key ideas of the political ideology of Thomas Sankara - including warmth and compassion towards other humans, dignity for peasants, self-sufficiency for all Burkinabes, women’s emancipation (“l’emancipation de la femme burkinabé”), and a politics of anti-imperialism - along with his thoughtful considerations of Burkinabe traditions and histories assert Pan-African alternatives to the discourse and practices of homophobia that are based on supposedly anti-imperialist ideologies. The great irony is, of course, the importation of homophobic discourse and law to Africa from the West, namely US evangelical groups.
  • Dynamic African leaders such as Ft. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana, Yoweri Musevini of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Isaias Aferworki of Eritrea and several others, followed in the footsteps of Africa’s founding fathers, and sought to reverse the decline of the continent and build progressive nations in which people’s rights are respected, in which different ethnic groups lived together in peace and harmony and a world in which Africans were respected on equal terms with others. ‘Developmentalism’ became the new ideology of the day. Future generations will judge them but for now, let us celebrate their good intentions.
  • It should be noted that Burkina Faso and its capital Ouagadougou is one of the most historic places in West Africa. It was the scene to intellectual and cultural renaissance before colonialism desecrated this land.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso's long-serving leader resigns - and why it matters - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • 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."
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  • Notably, Vital Kamerhe, leader of Congo's Union pour la Nation Congolaise, has tweeted a message of solidarity for Burkina Faso's protesters, saying they are in the "same struggle." And while many analysts are hesitant to make the comparison, some Burkinabè protesters have likened the protest to the Arab uprisings that began in 2010. "October 30 is Burkina Faso’s black spring, like the Arab spring,” Emile Pargui Pare, an official from opposition party the Movement of People for Progress, told the AFP.
Arabica Robusta

Alexandra Reza: New Broom in Burkina Faso?. New Left Review 101, September-October 2016. - 0 views

  • A group called Balai Citoyen (‘Citizens’ Broom’) played a key role in the protests. Balai was founded by prominent musicians: Smockey, a rapper, and the reggae artist Sams’K Le Jah, whose music helped to energize the mainly young crowd—60 per cent of Burkinabès are under 24. As well as Balai Citoyen, other social movements mobilized, among them the Mouvement Ça Suffit (‘That’s Enough’), along with trade unionists and established opposition politicians such as Zéphirin Diabré and Saran Sérémé, who had formerly been members of Compaoré’s ruling party.
  • the Burkinabè protests bear comparison with the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt—not just in their scale and militancy, but in their equivocal outcome: some of the old regime’s functionaries could soon be found at the head of Burkina Faso’s post-Compaoré government.
  • Eighty per cent of government expenditure is covered by international aid. [2]
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  • Given the extent of chiefly collaboration with the French authorities, it was little surprise that the chiefs found themselves at odds with the country’s new rulers. In 1962, Maurice Yaméogo, Upper Volta’s first president, cancelled state payments to chiefs and forbade their replacement in case of death or removal from office; the following year, his government abolished the cantons, placing chefs de canton on the same level as the previously subordinate village chiefs.
  • Sankara was no democrat. He had come to power in a military coup, and was unforgiving towards those he considered to be counter-revolutionaries. His government banned political parties and trade unions, and fired striking teachers. Seven people linked to a plot to overthrow him were executed in 1984. The cdrs (Comités de Défense de la Révolution), which had been set up to mobilize the population behind Sankara’s revolutionary agenda, were widely accused of abuses against those who got in their way. Naturally, the president was unpopular with those whose privileges he attacked, especially the chiefs, whose role he denounced as feudal, ‘retrograde and obscurantist’. [12]
  • He tried to get Burkina Faso’s donors to co-operate with one another and to fund parts of his programme. The donors, more used to dictating conditions themselves, boycotted his regime—although they would come back for Compaoré.
  • The Reagan administration had asked to see his un speech in advance, and insisted that certain passages be deleted; when Sankara refused, and declared his solidarity with the Palestinians and with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, he was denied permission to visit Atlanta at the invitation of its African-American mayor Andrew Young. [15] Harsch, Thomas Sankara, pp. 113–5. He also attacked Mitterrand for his complicity with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
  • Compaoré dismissed his old friend in blunt terms: ‘His success in the international press had so spoiled him that he found it dishonourable to pull back. He preferred to get rid of us. He played the game. He lost.’ [18]
  • Then as before, there were widespread complaints of fraud, with three-quarters of the population illiterate, and 13 per cent of ballots spoiled. Some voters had been told they were taking part in a test to identify the incumbent. [25] ‘Disbelief Suspended’, Africa Confidential, 18 November 2005. But foreign observers applauded the lack of violence, and La Francophonie, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ecowas) all endorsed the outcome. In an open letter to Compaoré, Chirac praised the ‘dynamism’ of his campaign and expressed his hope for ‘the enrichment, with your help, of the strong and amicable partnership that unites our two countries’. [26]
  • Compaoré had no such inhibitions: the first loan agreement was signed in 1991. Liberalization and privatization proceeded apace, while social expenditure was pared back; the maternal mortality rate for women registered at health clinics rose from 350 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 492 in 1995.
  • His allegory, in which the heron was decked out in borrowed ‘democratic finery’, suggested that a façade of democracy could be more pernicious than none at all. The tale was equally damning about the heron’s sycophantic friends, who approved of him because he appeared to look like them. In the end, the friends betray the heron, taking back their loans and leaving him naked ‘before the eyes of the entire world, a hideous spectacle of brutality and cruelty’. [35] Zongo in Wise, ed., The Desert Shore, p. 166. In the light of recent events, Zongo’s story now seems most prophetic.
  • The crisis of 2011 differed from that of 1998–99 in two important ways. First, it was less concentrated, in both political and geographical terms. Discontent was not channeled by any organization; the protests developed spontaneously, without leaders or demands; moreover, ‘demonstrations began in the periphery and not the centre’. [45]
  • This drove a wedge between the rsp and the army; the fact that rsp mutineers escaped punishment, while hundreds of regular soldiers were imprisoned, did nothing to ease tensions. This would prove to be a factor of some importance when the President finally overreached himself.
  • Africa Confidential suggested that much of the rsp’s anger was directed towards Zida, Diendéré’s former deputy: Diendéré had—wrongly—calculated that Zida would be the instrument by which he could get the transitional government to do his bidding. However, Zida turned out to have a mind of his own and began arguing for the rsp to be dismantled. The coup was, first and foremost, a settling of scores between Zida and his former comrades-in-arms, who felt betrayed by their old second-in-command. [48] ‘The people take on the putschists’, Africa Confidential, 25 September 2015.
  • The immediate political winners from the uprising had been (very) late arrivals to the party. Kaboré and his ally Salif Diallo had been part of Compaoré’s inner circle until shortly before his ouster. Kaboré, a former banker, served as president of the National Assembly, prime minister and cdp chairman under the old regime; Diallo also held several prestigious portfolios. Their break with Compaoré was triggered by his plan to change the constitution, of which Kaboré had been openly critical for a long time.
  • An academic (and former Sankara ally), Valère Somé, had published a book charging Diallo with complicity in acts of torture on himself and other prisoners.
  • Diallo naturally denied everything. The real question, he insisted, was how much Somé had been paid to write such ‘insanities’; it was best not to pay any attention to a man who deserved the ‘Nobel Prize for lying’. [56]
  • He has recently become an Ivorian citizen in order to stave off the threat of extradition. [58] ‘Burkina Faso ex-leader Blaise Compaoré becomes Ivorian’, bbc News, 24 February 2016. The Abidjan villa where Blaise and Chantal live belongs to the Ivorian Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko—also, among other things, a good friend of Roch Kaboré. [59]
  • The ugeb advanced similar criticisms, emphasizing the importance of activism and dissent in creating social change. Four days before the election, they released a statement urging their members to free themselves from ‘electoral illusions’ and remain organized to press demands on the government. The students’ union pointed out that no candidate had proposed a break with the Bretton Woods institutions and the ‘criminal policies of structural adjustment’—indeed, Diallo and Kaboré were ‘the very people who were in business when structural adjustment programmes were introduced’—and warned that ‘students have nothing to hope for from the elections of 29 November 2015.’ [62]
  • ‘Democracy is what happens between elections,’ says Aziz Sana, national co-ordinator of the Mouvement Ça Suffit. ‘It’s the manner of governing and using power. To be always with the people.’ [64]
  • While Burkinabè trade unions have historically been central players in the country’s politics, they were divided on the overthrow of Compaoré; instead, young people mobilized by musicians like Smockey, as well as social movements and even politicians from the official opposition, played a leading role.
  • Civil servants and public-sector workers are the most important social base for trade unionism in Burkina Faso, as in many African states. The elimination of public-sector jobs as a result of imf programmes has weakened unions, which now often rely on government subventions and ilo support in order to survive. Furthermore, the unions remain a predominantly urban and middle-class phenomenon, in a country where the vast majority of the workforce earns its living either through subsistence farming or the informal economy: recent estimates suggest that just 2 per cent of informal-sector workers have been unionized. [72]
  • The year before that album came out, huge protests had stopped Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade from extending his twelve-year reign. Awadi and his fellow musicians were instrumental in leading the charge against Wade. A movement of younger rappers and journalists called Y en a Marre gathered momentum, and helped bring thousands of young people onto the streets of Dakar. In March 2012, Wade was defeated at the ballot box; it was a triumph in the face of entrenched power. Next came the victory in Ouagadougou. Like Y en a Marre, Balai was founded by musicians, and initially relied upon their financial support—though the organization soon had its own self-financing branches throughout the country. [74]
  • It is clear that the space for change which emerged in 2014–15 is already beginning to contract. In his investiture speech, Kaboré cast himself as spokesman for ‘the nation’: ‘the nation is grateful to the brave sons and daughters, fighters for freedom and democracy these past years and especially during the popular uprising.’ He led a minute’s silence for the deceased, saluting Burkina Faso’s young people and the victory of democracy over dictatorship. But the new president went on to rail against ‘incivility, the undermining of the authority of the state’, and insisted that ‘order and discipline must prevail’—‘I am the first to know that the return to normality won’t be easy, but it’s the price we must pay if we don’t want to continue living in a Burkina Faso that runs at different speeds, with an uncertain future, where the gap is widening every day between a dwindling number of the wealthy, who have rights, and the broader masses doomed to poverty and exclusion.’ It sounded as if Kaboré was worried that too much unrest would put off the foreign investors
  • There is every reason to be wary of this characterization of state power as an individual, a man, an elder, someone who knows better than the Burkinabè people themselves—and of the framing of ‘normality’ as a time when ‘order’ and ‘unity’ must prevail, given that the most forceful expressions of popular sovereignty in Burkinabè politics have come when dissent has managed to hold its head above the parapet.
Arabica Robusta

Thoughts About International Players in Burkina Faso: Zen about Zida to Can-do Kafondo ... - 0 views

  • Probably most important is the suggestion that in the post-Compaoré period there would be an audit of mining revenues. In this context the recent (Aug. 6) suspicious looking bankruptcy-liquidation of the UK’s Amara, formerly Cluff, Gold’s Burkina Faso subsidiary (Seguénéga Mining SA (“SMSA”) appears interesting. Additionally declaring Force Majeure due to a coup would allow other, perhaps failing, mining companies to receive insurance monies.
  • Probable Amara Sega extension to Kalsaka Mine, zoom of upper left corner. The biggest institutional investor of Amara is (or was) reportedly the rather mysterious Franklin Advisers, Inc. which is a privately owned investment manager in San Mateo, California. The biggest fund investor is (or was) reportedly Franklin Gold and Precious Metals Fund.
  • The mining costs claimed by Amara appear excessive compared to the Burkina average and even more so if they did not pay the contractor doing the work!
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  • This 362 million dollars could give the 16.9 million citizens of Burkina Faso twenty-two dollars each, but could make a hand-full of people wealthy. In 2011, mining revenues earned Burkina Faso 127 billion CFA (US$247 million). Between 2007 and 2011, it brought in 440 billion CFA, (837 million US $) [variation in figures due to exchange rates] )http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_Burkina_Faso
  • A major concern of the US appears to be protecting the pipeline from Chad to Cameroon and other oil and gas interests in the region. For France it would be protecting its uranium mines, and the pipeline for its energy needs, as well as oil and gas interests in the region. There is also the debt service. If Burkina Faso doesn’t pay its debt then the taxpayers of the loaning governments will have to pay. The US, for instance, borrows money in order to loan it!
  • The gold services the debt. The so-called “terrorists” may now indeed include Islamists, but also includes those non-Islamists protesting environmental destruction and exclusion from the benefits of the mining and/or the petroleum industry, along with Tuareg nationalists.
  • The US, Canada and others had to help protect French government owned Areva’s uranium mines (and surely other types of mines) in Operation Serval (a type of wildcat). Recall which three countries participated in the kidnapping of Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide? The US, Canada and France.
Arabica Robusta

Charles Taylor Trial ended, but Burkina Faso and Libya incriminated - [[Thomas Sankara ... - 0 views

  • Also, the prosecution said that based on evidence from the UN panel of experts, the March 1999 shipment was Ukrainian arms routed through Burkina Faso. This fact was confirmed by a testimony of a witness who was present on that delivery of arms from Burkina Faso to Liberia.
  • Griffiths stressed the fact that David Crane, the first prosecutor at the UN-backed SCSL, said Muammar Gaddafi was responsible for the conflicts in West Africa.“Have you not heard of the recent utterances from David Crane? Have you not heard that this Court would have been refused funding by the British government had they attempted to indict Gaddafi because the then British government led by Tony Blair were anxious to pursue their economic interests in that country? Have you not heard that? What about Blaise Compaoré? What about Tejan Kabbah, the defence minister who allowed his deputy to carry the can and end his days in custody?” mentioned the lawyer.
  • 3, arms and ammunition from countries in the region, notably Burkina Faso, by the arrangement and coordination of Charles Taylor; 4, stockpiles of arms and ammunition from Monrovia through - from - through intermediaries working under Charles Taylor; and also finally, arms and ammunition that came from ULIMO fighters, through the arrangement and coordination of Charles Taylor.
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  • The brief cites Daf as the source of the testimony and then it cites Abu Keita. But Daf actually testified that going on this trip - he testified that going on this trip and he says that the material was originally supposed to be obtained from Libya and that this was changed to Burkina Faso. It is clear that none of the witnesses cited purportedly give different accounts at all.
  • And they indicate that, in this case, Blaise Compaoré and Muammar Gaddafi could have been indicted. Of course, a Prosecutor has an obligation to only indict those that they can prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and we welcome the fact that the Defence, from the evidence that’s been heard in this case, believes that the involvement of Muammar Gaddafi and Blaise Compaoré has been proven, because as your Honours know, having heard all the evidence, certainly there is evidence that these individuals or the governments that they headed aided the RUF.
  • Recalling, of course, that golden thread, fashioned in Libya, including among its operatives, Gaddafi, a person who will have to loosen the purse strings for this one and a half million, and Burkina Faso. So why no mention of the other pillar of that triumvirate, Charles Taylor, why not?
  • We’ve received evidence in this trial, both from the UN panel of experts, I believe that’s P-18, about that March 1999 shipment, which was Ukrainian arms routed through Burkina Faso.
Arabica Robusta

Food security: The "old" versus the "new" policy discourse - 0 views

  • The ‘old’ discourse first emerged during the 1930s and became increasingly important in the post World War II decades.[4] According to Maxwell and Slater, food policy was here rather focusing on the rural population. It was rural peasants that were regarded as being food-insecure and the general focus of food policy was on agricultural technology and production.
  • a “new” paradigm debate finally kicked off in 2007/2008 when both oil and agricultural commodity prices around the world exploded. Scholars as well as policy makers recognized that the former discourse with much emphasis on local agricultural production was outdated and global market complexities had to be taken into account when addressing issues of food security and sustainability.
  • While it seems that the literature assumes that the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ emerging discourse contradict each other, I rather believe that both approaches have to be taken into account to the same degree. Interestingly, as I later on argue in this paper, the revolutionary government in Brukina Faso during the 1980s took that already for granted when addressing the issue of its population’s food security.
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  • Sankara showed already at an early stage of the revolution that he took global interconnectivities into account in the country’s political orientation. This becomes apparent when he points at the activities of capitalist forces in Burkina Faso and when one recognizes his awareness of international political power and economic dynamics. Moreover, Sankara stresses the importance of the peasantry and that the people of Burkina Faso have to thank these peasants for the country’s wealth.[24] By the time of the revolution, approximately 90 percent of the population were subsistence farmers or cattle herders.[25]
  • Look on your plates when you eat imported rice, wheat, and millet – it is as close as that. We can produce enough to feed ourselves, but because of our lack of organization, we are required to hold our hands for food aid, food aid that blocks us and instills in us the reflex of beggars. We have to make this aid unnecessary by our own production.[27]
  • While there were still 658.786 MT of Sorghum produced in 1981, five years later the production of the same commodity had already increased to 1.010.919 MT.[30] With that, Burkina Faso could report an over-production. These years marked the period when the country could for the first time guarantee a sufficient food production for its people. However, all these efforts to reach an increase in agricultural production were directly connected to the protection and conservation of land suitable for cultivation. Especially against the background of advancing desertification, Sankara recognized the importance of conservationist initiatives. This was done by fighting illegal clearance of the forests, against bush fires and against the illegal unregulated wood trade.[31] Besides that, a vast number of trees were planted by the masses for reforestation purposes.[32]
  • This included improving the conditions for agricultural production like irrigation systems, natural fertilizer provision as well as the creation of a local demand for the locally produced food products. Furthermore, improving the health care situation as well as the educational sector was of main importance.
  • Therefore, large schooling and vaccination campaigns were initiated although against the reservations of international institutions such as IMF or World Bank.[33]
  • Sankara always stressed that anyone could participate in the ongoing revolutionary changes as long as this participation would go on in accordance with the will of the people of Burkina Faso. Particularly in regard to the country’s level of indebtedness and the involvement of the IMF in Burkina Faso’s national budget, Minister of Financial Resources Damo Baro is quoted saying: We don’t have any particular problem with the IMF, but we prefer to prepare ourselves very carefully before we approach it, which is what we are currently doing. If we do strike a deal with the IMF, the main purpose will be to allow us to reschedule our debts, as most of the loans that were contracted with a 10-year grace period are now falling due.[34]
  • Particularly in the financial sector, the administration realized that it would be crucial for further national development to guarantee as much independence from foreign capital as possible. Measures were undertaken in order to prevent foreign multinational companies from making profits from economic sectors such as the cotton industry without participation of the population.
  • The increasing importance of global interconnectivities on both political and economic levels was among the issues that shaped initiatives during the revolution. The efforts of the revolutionary government to achieve the goal of sustainable and sovereign food security had local as well as regional/global dimensions. As has been shown, actions that were undertaken all aimed at the well-being of the people of Burkina Faso while positioning the country and its economy in the wider context of external markets and power structures.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso: "Let us remain standing" | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • The government of Burkina Faso has adopted several new policies in an attempt to confront these crises. Yet unfortunately these have mainly been designed to respond to the imperatives of the dominant world powers and they have failed to take into account the realities on the ground. As a result, the main concerns of the large majority of the population have been ignored.
  • It is not that farmers are unable to produce a sufficient quantity of food, it is that they find themselves in a political system that will not allow them to fulfill their potential.
  • Made up of about 1,000 educated and non-educated women, it is a highly organised and active cooperative of women who are aware of their potential to affect change, and to secure greater access to means of production including land, equipment, training and material inputs. Groups of women like this have been able to obtain larger parcels of land through lobbying local leaders.
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  • We regularly read in the press that Saudi Arabia ↑ has purchased enormous areas of crop land for rice production, and several members of the government possess large areas of land in some of Burkina Faso’s most fertile areas without even being farmers! The recently adopted land tenure law is encouraging the development of these destabilising trends.
  • Let me give an example. In 1999, a rural Burkinabé woman, Nagbila Aisseta, accepted ↑ the Hunger Project Africa Prize awarded to the 'women farmers of Africa'. She was a poor woman aged 35 who had not left her village since birth, had never entered a car, knew nothing at all of modern life, but who, little by little, had developed initiatives to create a large organisation involved in livestock farming, agriculture, and market gardening to tackle malnutrition in her area. She was invited to receive her prize at a ceremony at the United Nations headquarters and asked to submit her speech prior to the event in the national Mooré language. It was to be translated into English, which she did not speak, for another person to read out during the ceremony. But she said “No. If it is me that has received the prize then I should speak directly to those who gave it to me. The way I was brought up, when you thank someone you thank them directly, without a go-between.” She asked the United Nations to find a Burkinabé interpreter who could understand both Mooré and English in order to ensure simultaneous interpretation. And this is how it was done. She knew her rights -  in this case the right to speak!
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    The government of Burkina Faso has adopted several new policies in an attempt to confront these crises. Yet unfortunately these have mainly been designed to respond to the imperatives of the dominant world powers and they have failed to take into account the realities on the ground. As a result, the main concerns of the large majority of the population have been ignored.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso's Troubled Legacy of Dictatorship | Crisis Group - 0 views

  • Marginalising a part of the political class can only lead to strategies of contestation and destabilisation, as Crisis Group reported in June. The former majority does not enjoy much popular support, especially in the cities, but retains significant loyalties within the RSP.
  • The investigation into the murder of late President Thomas Sankara is also fuelling this explosive mix. Some senior RSP officers are believed to have been involved in Sankara’s killing in 1987, and a few RSP officers have reportedly been indicted in recent weeks in relation to the investigation. Coincidentally, the results of the autopsy and ballistic examination that were carried out following the exhumation of Sankara’s grave were due to be communicated to the lawyers on Thursday, the day after the coup.
  • The RSP and the former majority will not accept elections in which some of their candidates are excluded, and civil society and political parties will not accept to re-include them in the elections. A way out of the crisis seems far off.
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  • There are reports that some military officers are helping protesters to mobilise to force the RSP to backpedal. In Bobo-Dioulasso for example, the country’s second largest city, the curfew instituted by the coup organisers is not respected and the military officers have reportedly stayed in the barracks – for now at least. Fighting between military factions would bring the crisis to a much higher level of gravity.
  • This new instability is a major setback for Burkina Faso and the region. If the elections had taken place smoothly, this would have been a huge step forward for the country and this could have set a precedent for other countries.
Arabica Robusta

"Blaise Dégage! Sankara Vit!": Burkina Faso's Revolution | Ceasefire Magazine - 0 views

  • Meanwhile, international commentaries on the Burkinabé protests immediately drew upon a discourse of ‘uncertainty’ in post-revolutionary moments. In the shadow of post-Arab Spring disappointments in Egypt, people have rushed to consider, ‘Will this revolution be just like Egypt?’ or to posit that‘Unfortunately, this will probably be business as usual’. This fatalistic discourse fails to appreciate the enormous energy required by people to rise up against 27-years of presidential power—indeed, the energy required by people to rise up. Period.
  • we should learn from the political situation in post-Arab Spring Egypt. However, to immediately and reflexively raise doubts over whether this revolutionary moment will bring about serious political, economic or social empowerment for the people of Burkina pays a disservice—even if inadvertently so—to the protest movement as well as to the transformative potential it represents.
  • Let us celebrate this moment and look with both an optimistic anticipation fed by this recent victory as well as a critical eye for the ways in which political mobilizations in the past have been sabotaged—not because sabotage is inevitable in Burkina today but precisely because it is preventable.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso: is the cure more dangerous than the disease? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso's Reverberating Crisis - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • 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.
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  • Western governments would also be ill-advised to succumb to the siren song of fighting terrorism, which the likes of Mr. Compaoré sang with great ease, allowing him to hide domestic repression. We can work with whoever succeeds Mr. Compaoré to address our legitimate security concerns. We need not do this at the cost of the rights of the people Burkina Faso to representation and liberty.
Arabica Robusta

IRIN Africa | BURKINA FASO: Stability vital to region | Burkina Faso | Mali | Conflict ... - 0 views

  • President Compaoré responded harshly to mutineers: he took direct control of the Ministry of Defence; dismissed several important high-ranking officers, and appointed a new army chief of staff. Over 300 soldiers were arrested and a further 600 removed from the ranks.
  • Stability in Burkina Faso is vital for regional stability, said a Western diplomat, given the recent conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and the current situation in Mali.
  • The price of basic commodities - rice, oil, milk and fuel - which rose significantly in 2008, have dropped little since, with prices 20 percent above the five-year average as of August 2012, according to USAID’s Famine Early Warning System, FEWS NET. For three months following the riots, the government upped subsidies to reduce by one quarter the price of rice, cooking oil, sugar and fuel, but prices shot up after that and some say traders simply kept prices the same, using the subsidy to increase their personal profits.
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  • This year, the economy is expected to perform better with a projected 7 percent growth rate partly linked to an upsurge in gold exports and a projected stronger harvest, but vulnerability remains. Just under half of the population lives in poverty, and a lack of economic diversity means a significant proportion of Burkinabe are reliant on the cotton sector, which is vulnerable to drought and severe price fluctuations.
  • The Burkinabe government has beefed up its military presence on the Mali border. US drones are in operation, partly operating out of Ouagadougou under Operation Creek Sand, according to a Washington Post report, though US officials have not officially acknowledged this.
Arabica Robusta

Gold Mining, Poverty, Debt, Militarism and Revolt in Burkina Faso | Mining Awareness + - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Deterioration in relations with neighbouring countries was one of the reasons given, with Compaoré stating that Sankara jeopardised foreign relations with former colonial power France and neighbouring Ivory Coast. Prince Johnson, a former Liberian warlord allied to Charles Taylor, told Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that it was engineered by Charles Taylor
Arabica Robusta

Why Burkina Faso's late revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara still inspires young Africa... - 0 views

  • When most African countries depended on imported food and external assistance for development, Sankara championed local production and the consumption of locally-made goods. He firmly believed that it was possible for the Burkinabè, with hard work and collective social mobilization, to solve their problems: chiefly scarce food and drinking water. In Sankara’s Burkina, no one was above farm work, or graveling roads–not even the president, government ministers or army officers. Intellectual and civic education were systematically integrated with military training and soldiers were required to work in local community development projects.
  • When most African countries depended on imported food and external assistance for development, Sankara championed local production and the consumption of locally-made goods. He firmly believed that it was possible for the Burkinabè, with hard work and collective social mobilization, to solve their problems: chiefly scarce food and drinking water. In Sankara’s Burkina, no one was above farm work, or graveling roads–not even the president, government ministers or army officers. Intellectual and civic education were systematically integrated with military training and soldiers were required to work in local community development projects.
  • Some of his policies resulted in costly missteps, such as firing politically disloyal civil servants and striking teachers, heavy-handed tactics to discipline lethargic bureaucrats, or arming partisan civilian militia. He did show an uncommon ability to publicly admit failure and take corrective measures, when persuaded of his errors. However, he made enemies abroad and within for challenging systems of power and refusing to compromise on ideals for expedient pragmatism.
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  • Burkinabe built for the first time scores of schools, health centers, water reservoirs, and nearly 100 km of rail, with little or no external assistance. Total cereal production rose by 75% between 1983 and 1986. In 1984, his government, defying skepticism from the donor agencies, organized the vaccination of 2 million children in a little over two weeks. He also championed environmental conservation with tree-planting campaigns and greening projects.
  • Harsch quotes a former aide describing Sankara as “an idealist, demanding, rigorous, an organizer.” This discipline and seriousness started with himself. He had been first among top leadership to voluntary declare his modest assets and hand over to the treasury cash and gifts received during trips.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso: is the cure more dangerous than the disease? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The neighboring countries, especially Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin, but also Ivory Coast, have a vital interest that Burkina gains stability, again. But I think it will be France, and the US, in the end, which will weigh in and make the difference. The military knows that. They know there is no turning back to pre-2000 or even pre-1996. Democratisation has arrived in the heads, and, in form of mobile communication, in the hands of the people. News are traveling much, much faster today. And the Burkina-bé are proud of their democratic progress. Very much so.
  • The perspective that only the USA and France have the wisdom to sort out the Burkinabes problems is malodorous and ironic given that Mitterrand undoubtably installed Compaore in the pool of Sankara's blood replacing an African solution of full employment and equal rights with the "politique de la ventre" that they are much more comfortable with. It would be convenient in media terms if a messanaic leader rose to lead the revolution but maybe with the will of the masses, it has.
Arabica Robusta

How Burkina Faso's Blaise Compaore sparked his own downfall - BBC News - 1 views

  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

In Burkina Faso, A New Twist On West African Coups - Forbes - 0 views

  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

Why Upheaval in Burkina Faso Matters to US National Security - ABC News - 0 views

  • “He [Compaore] is a guy that we’ve sort of been able to work with to help with some of the issues in the region, in terms of being able to use Burkina strategically to counter the unsavories in the neighborhood,” the U.S. official said. “This change is a change that [the U.S. government] is going to have to contend with.”
  • It’s the kind of help -- along with millions of dollars yearly in foreign aid -- that the U.S. is counting on Burkina Faso needing, whoever is in charge.
Arabica Robusta

Remembering Thomas Sankara, the EFF's muse - Thomas Sankara - 0 views

  • 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,”
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  • The Burkina Faso leader had certain distinct blind spots: his rule was by no means unimpeachable and had an authoritarian bite. Sankara replaced political parties with “committees”, which he saw as a more direct form of public participation. He didn’t care for the unions, and after a general strike in 1985, he fired 1,300 civil servants and replaced them with often under-qualified loyalists. He instituted a type of public justice in the form of “revolutionary tribunals”, where people were punished for corruption but apparently also far vaguer crimes like being a lazy worker, or a “counter-revolutionary”. Sankara also increasingly clamped down on media freedom – somewhat ironically, since during his stint as Information Minister in the previous government, he reportedly resigned with the words “Misfortune to those who gag the people!”
  • Compaoré soon won back the support of Western powers by re-liberalising the economy and immediately re-joining the IMF and the World Bank. Today Burkina Faso remains one of the least developed countries in the world.
  • In other words, Sankara didn’t simply rail against violence against women or pay lip service to the need for gender parity. He was, to quote writer Sokari Ekrine, “meticulous in explaining class relations and the everyday ways in which African masculinities work in collaboration with capital in exploiting women’s labour and abuse of their dignity”.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso: Ghost of 'Africa's Che Guevara' - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • His government spurned foreign aid and tried to stamp out the influence of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the country by adopting debt reduction policies and nationalising all land and mineral wealth.
  • Compaore, though, has had some success. The mining industry has seen a boost in recent years, with the copper, iron and manganese markets all improving. Gold production shot up by 32 percent in 2011 at six sites, according to figures from the mines ministry, making Burkina Faso the fourth-largest gold producer in Africa.
  • "Sankara had many enemies because he wrested privileges from looters in favour of the poor," Yabré said. "Maybe he did this too radically and within too short a time."
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