Ibrahim Traore And The Tale Of Another African Messiah (1)

Burkina Faso President, Captain Ibrahim Traore, has received so much publicity in the last two years since his coming to power in 2023 through a military coup that deposed the regime of Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba. Col. Damiba himself was a product of a military putsch that overthrew the democratically elected government of Roch Marc Christian Kaboré eight months earlier, underscoring the fragility of that west African state.

Traore’s reign so far has been a more lively spectacle than the military regime he overthrew. The 37-year-old soldier has carried on with the swagger of a liberator and is wearing the garb of a neocolonial cum pan-African ideologue reminiscent of the iconic four-year regime of his compatriot, Thomas Sankara. No doubt, Traore has a mission as can be seen in his actions so far. He has rebuffed his country’s post-colonial alliance with France rather embracing Russia’s military help as the nation battles against relentless Islamist insurgents. He has nationalised the nation’s gold mines seen as long-serving the economic imperialism of France. He has embarked on an ambitious agricultural programme aimed at achieving food self-sufficiency and is pursuing other economic reforms. Importantly, the regime is implementing anti-corruption measures to improve public accountability.

However, so much is being dramatized regarding what Traore is doing in Burkina Faso. Social media space has been awashed with reports of how he has been performing wonders in the country, achieving near-impossible feats in less than two years. For instance, there is a report that hunger has vanished in Burkina Faso whereas truth is that Traore’s agricultural programme only targets 70% food sufficiency by 2027. There are many other splendid claims which are too good to be true. While the new president has been implementing reforms, expecting magical transformations in a matter of months is as unrealistic as it sounds. Of course, none of his praise singers is talking about the obvious fact that his alliance with Russia has failed to stem the tide of insecurity in the land; the jihadiats are unrelenting and statistics shows more people have been killed since he took over

Besides the claims of historic transformations within months, a cult personality is being built around Traore with narratives that bear the surrealism of Hollywood thrillers. There have been reports of how he has rebuffed an offer of visit from an American diplomat, incredibly survived western-engineered assassination attempts, held a world audience captive at Harvard University where he made an outstandingly cerebral speech to counter a claim by a western scholar regarding the role of Africa in history, written a letter to Pope Leo XIV to protest the long history of Western imperialism and injustices against Africa with the Pope responding to the letter in a public speech where he admitted the culpability of the church while endorsing Traore’s position etc. etc. etc.

With the above narratives and many many more, the Burkina Faso leader is being presented as something close to a superman; extraordinarily brave and courageous, outstandingly intelligent, and exemplarily virtuous. How else is a cult personality built if not by adorning a person with such rare heroic qualities? The fact that Ibrahim Traore appears to be assuming a cult personality should be a danger sign to his compatriots and other people seeing in him a beacon of hope for Africa. I shall return to this point later.

I must confess that I find deeply worrisome how many people are readily, if not complacently, believing all those stories – many bothering on fairytale – about the Burkina Faso military ruler. Characteristically, the narratives are packaged as online videos, which in the real sense are not videos, but a series of still photos accompanied by a voice-over narration telling stories which real videos would have told better. Use of artificial intelligence is an obvious thing in all this. In the video of the Pope purportedly responding to Traore’s letter, AI was used to impose a different voice and lip movements on images taken from Pope’s recent interaction with journalists at the Vatican. It was very disappointing that many people believed the video until the Vatican officially debunked that piece of media content which poor packaging clearly betrays as fake. In other instances, Traore is presented speaking eloquently in English whereas the foreign language he is known to be fluent in is French. Secondly, how a president of a French-speaking country would be delivering all those speeches in English makes the whole affair suspect.

It is baffling that many people, including individuals who should be considered intellectuals, uncritically assimilated those contents that, even upon casual examination, reveal an amateurish attempt at disinformation. In the light of experience, however, this is not too surprising given that the era of digital and social media has since exposed the fact that people are not indeed as intellectually sophisticated as may have been assumed when it comes to discerning what is real and what is unreal. Given the ideology borne by those contents as well as their relentless and choreographed character, the allegation that they are a product of a Russia-orchestrated propaganda campaign sounds convincing. My only source of misgiving is the amateurish quality of the contents which one may not be too confident to associate with Russia given its level of technological and cultural sophistication.

Now to the implication of Traore’s emergence and approach to the development of Burkina Faso and Africa; my first worry is that we have seen a number of leaders who rode on the tide of anti-imperial and pan-African fervour, but the legacy they ended up leaving has been far from the anticipated promised land. We have seen, for instance, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Mummar Ghadaffi, and Robert Mugabe. There was also Abdel Nasser of Egypt. These leaders, like the Traore-led junta in Burkina Faso, framed Africa’s problem as largely rooted in the imperial structure that tilts the global development dynamics in favour of the West and to the disadvantage of Africa.

While these leaders appeared to have noble intentions, their approach seemed not to have given attention to the imperative of building internal institutions in their respective nations as an engine of growth and a very reliable bulwark against detrimental foreign interferences. Institutions strengthen a nation and efficiently power its engine of growth, leaving no gaps for foreign profiteers to exploit. For instance, Nigerians have complained about the exploitative activities of foreign oil companies dominating our oil industry. But little attention seems to be paid to the internal institutional weaknesses that make this possible, or at least aids it. One of them is the festering corruption that has rendered regulatory bodies ineffective in checking the excesses of the foreign multinationals. It is instructive that some of the reckless activities of these multinationals in Nigeria (such as environmental degradation) are not seen in other climes where the same companies operate because the regulatory institutional framework is not as weak in those countries as it is here. A good example is Scotland where the likes of Shell, Elf and Total have also been operating long before they came to Nigeria.

Second, our culture of weak public governance has hindered us from developing indigenous oil and gas technical capacity, worsening the reliance on foreign firms. A public institution like the NNPC has, over the years, so much degenerated that the only remedy we can think of is to privatise it. Otherwise, that public oil and gas firm ought to have evolved from a mere (incompetent) operator of refineries and pipelines to become a fully-fledged oil and gas entity with globally competitive upstream (oil prospecting, exploration, and driling) capabilities in the mould of Rosneft and Gazprom owned by the Russian government.

President Traore is trying to change the economic balance in favour of his country through transferring gold mining firms from foreigners to the state-owned entity, Société de Participation Minière du Burkina (SOPAMIB). He is constructing the first state-owned gold refinery expected to refine 400 kilograms of gold daily.

Exciting and auspicious as these initiatives are, greater attention ought to be paid to the need to ensure institutional robustness in regard to these entities that are taking over economic responsibilities from foreigners. Nigeria similarly took over some of the shares of foreign oil companies and invested them in NNPC, and today, owing to gross institutional weaknesses, the NNPC is urgently in need of a life line. It has mismanaged everything put in its care including refineries, pipelines, and trillions of naira in revenue. Again, even where foreign enterprises are to be taken over by local private investors, attention ought to be paid to the strength and resilience of public institutions that should check the activities of the private entities, otherwise the private firms may become agents of destruction as against building.

In Nigeria, institutions bequeathed by the colonial masters were much more robust and efficient under the colonial authorities than they became after few decades of indigenous management. Think about Post and Telegraph Department (later NIPOST and NITEL), Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (later NEPA), public water works etc. Also think of government colleges (also called unity schools today) and the picture will become clearer. Little wonder all the excitement of gaining independence (freedom) from the various colonial masters across Africa soon petered out when the realities of poor indigenous management began to make people see clearly the difference between merely gaining independence from external powers and building a livable native land.

This has been the dilemma of Africa, and Traore’s Burkina Faso should not lose sight of history as it tries to change the course of the ship of the country. The anti-imperial narrative has its merits, but it is only one side of the story. The difference between Africa and other colonized peoples like India is that while the later has moved on, building strong political (democratic), economic, and cultural institutions, the former are consistently failing to put their house in order while looking outside its borders in search of a historical or present enemy to blame for their woes.

Blaming the former colonial masters must have its limit. In his study of the oil and gas industry in Nigeria and the many environmental issues associated with it, Dr. Samuel Okoro gave an in-depth attention to the allegation that the British colonialists are to blame for these environmental crises having failed in the first place to give Nigeria a robust legal framework to check them. After a robust evidence-based analysis comparing the legal frameworks in Nigeria and UK before and after the British left, Dr. Okoro made a number of revealing findings. First, the laws which the British colonial authorities gave us were exactly the same laws they made for their country in the period; in other words, they merely imported their local legislations into Nigeria. Second, during the decades after independence, the laws we made for our oil and gas industry were largely the same laws Britain made for its own territory in the period; in other words, we copied the British laws. Hence, he asked, if Britain and Nigeria operated exactly or almost exactly the same laws pre-and post-independence, why then were there different outcomes – with Britain maintaining a healthy environment amidst oil and gas activities and Nigeria experiencing just the opposite? After considering available evidence, Dr. Okoro then concluded that the difference in experience between the two nations is that while Britain’s institutions for regulating oil and gas activities have been up and doing, their Nigerian counterparts have been so weakened by indolence and deep-rooted corruption that they have not only been incompetent to implement the extant laws but have in some cases directly collaborated with unscrupulous foreign firms to sabotage the nation (see Okoro’s research at https://ezenwaohaetorc.org/journals/index.php/AJLHR/article/view/2166).

So, as Traore carries on with his avowed mission of liberating his nation from the chains of underdevelopment, he should reflect deeply to be sure which of the chains were fashioned by French imperialists and which were fashioned by his own people. This is very crucial if the whole exercise will not end up becoming shadow chasing. History, they say, has a way of repeating itself.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.