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

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.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union inspired a continent-wide political-economic revolution in Africa. This was manifested in two forms. First, no longer able to play the West against the East, the post-Independence monolithic political systems were forced to adopt political pluralism and open themselves up to competition.

Second, with the collapse of socialism, economic liberalisation was now forced on Africa in Structural Adjustment Programmes that came with privatisation, drastic reductions in state spending on education and health, the removal of subsidies and foreign-exchange controls, and the opening up of domestic markets.

Neither leg of this “revolution” went far enough, however. Economically, the free-market reforms sparked economic growth but they widened inequality and created predatory and corrupt networks of local elites who, either on their own or in conjunction with foreign capital, took national assets on the cheap and extracted private value.

Politically, the introduction of multiparty systems claimed a few early victims, such as Kaunda in Zambia and Mathieu Kérékou in Benin but, by and large, the Independence parties continued to dominate power, be it Tanu/CCM in Tanzania, Frelimo in Mozambique, MPLA in Angola, and so on. The more the leaders changed, the more the dominant party, ideology and vested interests remained the same.

The fragmentation of the continent into many ethnic-based political parties that many had feared did not necessarily happen. Instead, the competition for power and resources became militarised, giving rise to civil conflicts in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, etc.

Even where military conflicts predated the end of the Cold War, for instance in Mozambique, Angola or Uganda, political pluralism was offered as an antidote in form, rather than substance. Rivals could compete, but they could not win.

By the time Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, Tunisian market vendor self-immolated and lit the spark for the Arab Spring uprisings, African countries could roughly be divided into two political groupings.

There were the Lions, which included countries that had made meaningful political reforms, including new constitutions, separation of power, and limits to presidential authority and tenure, that allowed for the peaceful transfer of power from one elected leader to another. These included Malawi, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, and others that had a history of strongman rule.

In these countries, once an elected leader accepted defeat and peacefully handed over power to another, it did not just open the door to genuinely competitive politics; it blew it off its hinges.

However, there had also emerged a category of countries — let’s call them the Ostriches — that has mastered the rhetoric and form of Western-style democracy, such as regular elections, without the substance of strong institutions, rule of law, transparent and accountable governance. These include countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Uganda, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, et cetera, whose farcical pretences at elections were, in reality, coronations of the strong men and exercises in giving legal cover to illegitimate rulers.

The fact that Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were swept away soon after being “re-elected” with healthy margins was evidence, if any was needed, that Africa’s despots had learnt to hold elections without losing, while buying their heads in the sand and pretending to see no evil, hear no evil.

The Arab Spring, and now the events in Burkina Faso, are the citizens’ response: Learning how to change leaders without using elections necessarily.

From the pig protests in Nairobi and Kampala to Julius Malema’s red-beret anarchists in South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters, Africa is on the cusp of a change that seeks to complete the post-Cold War political and economic revolution where it has not been started, where it has been corrupted, and where it has been manipulated and bastardised.

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President Compaoré was caught out trying to bend the rules and do away with presidential term limits. In doing so he was borrowing a leaf from Uganda where President Museveni’s government ingratiated itself with the Bush Administration in its War on Terror and then bribed Members of Parliament to scrap the term limits before they had even been used once.

Where Museveni used Uganda’s military activities in South Sudan, DR Congo and Somalia, Compaoré bought himself regional influence by meddling in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Guinea.

Domestically, he had sewn up enough support from opposition parties (another trick in the despot’s handbook — create your own opposition to make the contest look real) to pass the motion scrapping the term limits.

Compaoré probably over-estimated his own cleverness and under-estimated the weight of history and demographics.

Before his revolution was cut short, sabotaged by a combination of neo-colonialist reactionaries and his own managerial inexperience, Sankara had initiated regular street-cleaning exercises in which citizens would pick up brooms and clean their neighbourhoods.

It was a simple and powerful metaphor for self-sufficiency and cultivating a good work ethic. It was also the inspiration for Le Balai Citoyen (the citizen’s broom), the grassroots movement that emerged to mobilise support against Compaoré’s scheming.

“We carry brooms because we want to sweep out the president and his clique,” Samsk Le Jah, the 43-year-old musician behind Le Balai Citoyen told news agencies last week, before the protests turned dramatic.

Compaoré was 36 years old when he took power, and just a year younger than Sankara at his death. Now 63, and forgetful or disdainful of Burkina Faso’s history of youth-led revolution, he was trying to keep his grip on a country where only one in four people is aged above 25.

The crowds milling in the streets of Ouagadougou and other towns brandishing brooms and calling for his neck were mostly made up of young men and women who weren’t born or were toddlers when he took power.

Surprisingly, such hubris is not peculiar to Burkina Faso. Eduardo Dos Santos, 72, Robert Mugabe, 90, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, 72, Museveni, 70 and Paul Biya, 81, are all trying to hang onto countries whose demographics expose them to be dinosaurs.

However, it is not only the dinosaurs trying to keep their aged claws on power. 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.

While the reversals of revolutionary gains in Libya and Egypt gave currency to the idea that some countries deserve, and maybe even need, their dictators, the recent elections in Tunisia, where the Islamist Ennahda party conceded defeat to the secular Nidaa Tounes party, show that the liberty to choose leaders will always ultimately triumph over the stability of dictatorship.

In many ways, therefore, the Citizen’s Broom revolution in Burkina Faso is not just a geographical extension of the revolution across the Sahara, but an attempt to deepen political reforms, give substance to form, and add flesh to the bare bones of political ritual.

If faith without works is dead, then the life-support machines have been turned off on the comatose caricature of elections without change.

The Citizen’s Brooms in Burkina Faso may have finally send Compaoré to the dustbin of African history but the dust they have raised will be carried by the Harmattan winds across the rest of the continent.

Only time will tell whether the Ostriches will raise their heads from the sand in time, but the curtain is slowly coming down on the “error” of the African strong man.