Burkina Faso: End of the ‘error’ of Africa’s strongman rule?

Documents burn outside the parliament in Ouagadougou on October 30, 2014 after hundreds of angry demonstrators stormed the building before setting it on fire. AFP PHOTO | ISSOUF SANOGO 

By DANIEL K. KALINAKI, The EastAfrican

In Summary

• A close examination of the events in Burkina Faso should worry Africa’s tyrants and inspire its patriots, from Bamako to Burundi.
• The Arab Spring, and now the events in Burkina Faso, are the citizens’ response: Learning how to change leaders without using elections necessarily.
• Compaoré probably over-estimated his own cleverness and under-estimated the weight of history and demographics.
• Events in Burkina Faso will be watched closely in Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda which all have relatively youthful leaders, but where presidential term limits are currently the subject of much debate.

President Blaise Compaoré resigned on Friday, October 31, following violent protests in the capital Ouagadougou, with army chief Honoré Traore taking over as head of state.

Compaoré went from trying to extend his rule in Burkina Faso by five years, to trying to hang onto power and complete his current term but angry protestors burnt parliament, homes of Members of Parliament and demanded his resignation.

Earlier on Thursday, the army said that it had dissolved the government and announced a 12-month transition in an attempt to return calm to the country.

Compaoré, in power for 27 years, had insisted he would stay in charge during the transition period but angry protestors poured into the streets and demanded his immediate resignation.

Several people were reported dead in the battles that raged on Thursday with several more injured, although some sections of the police and army were said to have joined in on the side of the protestors.

It is too early to tell how events in Burkina Faso will pan out, but the protests in the capital, Ouagadougou, are significant beyond the borders of the small, poor, landlocked country.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings between December 2010 and December 2013 that swept away entrenched regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya that many previously considered invincible, many wondered when and if these revolutionary street protests would spread south of the Sahara.

Instead, the Arab Spring spread mostly within North Africa and the Middle East, inspiring regime changes in Yemen, civil uprisings in Bahrain and Syria, as well as major protests in Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Israel and Algeria.

In Sudan and Uganda, the only two African countries where the green shoots of revolution appeared briefly, authorities were quick to step in and clamp down on dissent, often violently.

In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s militarised police force imposed a permanent blockade on all public squares and open spaces in the city, battered activists who tried to launch “Walk to Work” protests, and effectively put opposition leader Kizza Besigye under a quasi-permanent state of “preventive arrest.”

The protests in Ouagadougou, which seem to have taken many across the continent and the world by surprise, suggest that the green shoots of revolution remain alive, and that the parched lands of sub-Saharan Africa remain thirsty for the blood of tyrants and patriots.

A close examination of the events in Burkina Faso should worry Africa’s tyrants and inspire its patriots, from Bamako to Burundi.

Compaoré took power in 1987 in a counter-revolutionary coup d’état masterminded by the Ivory Coast and orchestrated, in the background, by France, in which Thomas Sankara was martyred.

Sankara had spooked the French with his revolutionary ideals, including seeking to cut the umbilical cord with Paris, inciting African states to reject the large foreign debt that had accrued from the exploitative history of colonialism and an unfair trading regime, and calling for self-sufficiency and deeper intra-African trade.

While those ideas are today seen as de rigueur, they were far ahead of the curve in the late 1980s when Africa was firmly under monolithic political systems, or under the grip of corrupt, despotic strongmen like Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Mobutu Sese Seko, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Juvenal Habyarimana, Kenneth Kaunda, Daniel arap Moi, et cetera.