The Contradictions of Military Junta Leaders: Lessons from Burkina Faso

2023-07-31 16:14:33

He thought he had touched the icon in the person of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, former commander of an artillery regiment in Kaya, capital of the center-north region of Burkina Faso, when he became the chief of the military junta following a coup last October. At 34, the red beret became the youngest head of state in the world, and like most putschists, he justified his coup because of “the continuing deterioration of the security situation”.

Before him, in Mali, Colonel Assimi Goïta had not said anything else, and today in Niger, the new strong man, also from a recent military putsch, General Tchiani, says nothing else neither. This copy-paste has something suspicious, to believe that they have all learned their lesson from Sergei Lavrov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia.

Unfortunately, the Burkinabe must be disillusioned, ten months following his coup, the jihadist attacks of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group are still continuing in the country, mourning many dead. The captain, too, fails to secure his country.

The same Burkinabés were also no doubt surprised to hear their captain hold forth during the Russia-Africa summit which has just been held in Saint Petersburg in the presence of Vladimir Putin and several African Heads of State and Government. And above all to hear him castigate his counterparts, “the elders” of the continent, accused of coming to beg for wheat from the master of the Kremlin. And to give them a moral lesson from the height of his 34 years, strong from the anointing he had just received from Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Captain Traoré only forgot to say that, like the bourgeois of Calais, the trip to Saint Petersburg was his own way from Canossa, where he pledged allegiance to the man who never ceased to want to extend his political influence to the Sahel and to drive out the French presence. And that as a reward, he received the thirty denarii of Judas, namely the equivalent of 1,339,245,542 cereals from the new tsar, where most of the other African heads of state, “the old ones” see themselves in the obligation to buy their Russian cereals. So which one is the most beggar of all? There are gifts that do not always honor those who receive them.
Morality, is not Sankara who wants!

* President of the “Other Future” movement

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