Burkina Faso Exploitation-Resistance

The NPA’s implicit claim that Colonel Isaac Zida’s coup and his negotiations with the bourgeois opposition are a “victory resulting from the popular uprising” is an absurd political lie.

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.

The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.

“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.

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.

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.

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 country was liberated from a regime but not from a system. We should complete the work we began during last year's popular uprising through the ballot box," Me Sankara said over the weekend, urging the Burkinabe people to defeat the system established 27 years ago by deposed president Blaise Compaore.

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.

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.

A coup would mean the end of significant U.S. aid to this impoverished nation.

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."