It is the second time in Burkina Faso's post-colonial history that the Burkinabè popular masses have deposed a despotic regime. The first time was on 3 January 1966 when an insurgency toppled the First Republic. After this ‘founding act’, the tradition of struggle could not be denied by subsequent regimes; all governments that have followed have had to confront this history, including the regime of Blaise Compaoré. On 31 October 2014, Compaoré was forced to resign after 27 years at the helm of the country and, from 1983 to 1987 (under the Conseil national de la revolution, the National Council of the Revolution) at the highest echelons of the state. However, the insurrection did not arise ex nihilo. Over a number of years we witnessed a ‘dramatic rise of protest actions and radical opposition to the government and its institutions. What characterised Burkina Faso [was] a series of popular mobilisations taking the street as their terrain of struggle, moving far beyond organised structures and not confined to urban and/or “intellectual” domains’ (Chouli 2014). Over several years a ‘public oppositional space’ was established across Burkina Faso, as Oskar Negt (2007) would say: ‘all potential human rebels, in search of their own mode of expression’. In the rural world as much as urban areas, salient questions such as access to land, evictions, agribusiness, land disputes, corruption, impunity and the state of public amenities were regularly the subject of organised or spontaneous mobilisations. Under the Compaoré regime, as a result of the mobilising work undertaken by certain trade unions and associations (such as the Collective Struggle against Impunity, Democratic Youth Organisation, Burkina Faso Movement for Human Rights and the Coalition against the High Cost of Living), politicised action in the country grew, and contributed significantly to the linking of social and political struggles.
The regime of Blaise Compaoré had previously experienced two cases of ‘dual power’: that of the movement born from the 1998 murder of the journalist Norbert Zongo, and the fight against political impunity which ensued. Over a two-year period this inter-class movement spread steadily throughout the country. The resulting socio-political crisis marked a turning point in the fight against political impunity and led to a real growth of popular mobilisations.
The last major expression of popular discontent before the uprising of October 2014 took place in 2011 following the death of the school pupil Justin Zongo. The mobilisations led to multiple arrests by police and the bloody repression of demonstrations that were demanding investigation into the circumstances of Zongo's death. The country was already in a near-insurrectionary situation. The ‘rioter’ phenomenon, with the burning-down of police stations and other symbols of power – regional government and municipal offices, the presidential party headquarters etc. – reached an unprecedented scale. As the movement grew, a series of military mutinies took place: about eight waves can be identified that took place over several days, and at various garrisons in a period of less than two and a half months), with other conflicts in virtually all sectors of the economy, from the peasantry to the administration and the mining sector. At this point, the country was no longer governable. Never before was the regime's weakness as evident as at this point, further exacerbated when the presidential guard itself rebelled. Throughout this period of social unrest the issue of amending the Constitution was a catalyst for the revolt. The popular uprising in 2014 must therefore be seen as part of the same historical sequence of struggle.
With the approach of presidential elections, many figures inside the ruling party sought to amend the constitution to allow Blaise Compaoré to stand for a further term in 2015 or some sort of dynastic succession in favour of his younger brother, François Compaoré. François Compaoré was Blaise Compaoré’s advisor, an MP since 2012 and a member of the political bureau of the ruling party, the Congrès pour la démocratie et le progrès (the Congress for Democracy and Progress, CDP). Mobilisation against the amendment was organised, following in the steps of the 2011 social movement. It was a response to the National Assembly's creation in May 2013 of a Senate, seen as an instrument to serve Compaoré’s interests. In June 2013 the political opposition, who for 20 years had abandoned popular mobilisation as a means of political expression, called for a march against the constitutional amendment. The ruling party, judging the balance of power as not in their favour, initially deemed a referendum preferable, but returned subsequently to their plan to have the law passed by the National Assembly on 30 October, effectively a coup.
In the same period a number of civic organisations sprang up, including the Balai Citoyen (the Citizen Broom, formed in July 2013) or the Collectif anti-referendum (the Anti-Referendum Group, formed in early 2014), their priority to prevent Blaise Compaoré from standing in 2015. The role of these ‘citizen’ movements in the mobilisation in Burkina Faso – and not in the popular insurrection – is indisputable, however it seems largely overrated in the media, especially the international media. In fact it is important to not to reverse cause and effect with a simplistic approach of the modes of subjectification that were at work. It is because the Burkinabè popular masses were already aware – over and above their limited awareness of the longevity of the regime – and hostile to the amendment of Article 37, that the protests called to counter Compaoré’s project of constitutional change all witnessed massive and repeated participation, and not because structures leading this mobilisation would have ‘helped’ in this raised consciousness. It is not surprising that in our era of depoliticised discourse on the ‘end of history’, for example, or neoliberalism with its celebration of individualism and the power of the ‘spectacle’, that the leaders of civic organisations use the media to represent themselves as the foundation and centre of the process. While in Tunisia and Egypt Internet users and bloggers were presented as the main actors of popular mobilisation, in Senegal (the Y'en a marre movement) and in Burkina Faso popular musicians were presented as the indisputable leaders. Some organisations or political parties close to Blaise Compaoré also mobilised to support his candidacy for the next election in November 2015.
However, it is important to emphasise that the main organisations’ demands were limited to only preventing Compaoré from standing in 2015, without considering what would happen afterwards; those who tried to emphasise the inseparable link between the struggle against Compaoré’s project and the construction of an alternative political and social project were accused of being ‘objective allies’ of Compaoré. This position suited both the opposition parties seeking to replace the CDP but wary of exposing their political projects, and also French/European and US embassies who sought to confine the demands of the protest movement within the framework of democracy, understood as a market economy plus multipartyism. This sort of avoidance of a debate on a post-Compaoré future and an absence of a critical approach in part explains the fact that some leaders of civic organisations and intellectuals helped to facilitate the hijacking of the popular uprising by the military. So the number two figure in Blaise Compaoré’s presidential security regiment, the Régiment de sécurité présidentielle (RSP), whose mission was to protect the president, became a leading figure in the Transition, as we shall see. It was a mission that the RSP, an ‘army within the army’, accomplished in full. The justification given for the support of the military – i.e. the need to stop the looting and pillaging, and to maintain order – showed up the limited and confused political vision of a number of the civil society leaders. This was a strategy aimed at saving the essence of the state in the face of the Burkinabè masses determined to force Blaise Compaoré to step down there and then, and one that would have been quickly implemented on the evening of October 30.
In the event, the radicalism of the masses on 30 October surprised both political parties and civil society organisations (CSOs): that day the goal of the mobilisation was to prevent the passage of the law and thus Blaise Compaoré’s ability to put himself forward as a candidate in November 2015. The masses considered that Blaise Compaoré had been in power far too long and that he must be forced to resign.2 Flanked by activists and intellectuals, the RSP's Isaac Zida proclaimed himself head of state on the Place de la Nation. The protesters, not having driven out one soldier in civilian clothes (Compaoré) for him only to be replaced by another in fatigues (Zida), spontaneously indicated their refusal to the hijacking of their victory by the RSP number two. But Zida eventually imposed himself by force.
The figures that supported Zida's seizure of power, and especially the army, very quickly blew the whistle in an attempt to end the direct intervention of the masses in the organisation of the city, but were not really heard. Mass pressure for a civilian transition, having received the late support of the ‘international community’, finally defeated the military's attempt to lead the transition. A ‘reasonable’ agreement was found for a civil–military transition, with Zida as prime minister and Michel Kafando as interim president and foreign minister. The post-insurrectionary state thus finds itself led by two former employees (military and civilian) of the ousted president.
Michel Kafando, who presents himself as a former diplomat, has been at the service of military regimes, including that of Blaise Compaoré (as Ambassador to the UN). He was the army's candidate for the presidency of the Transition. A convinced liberal – openly hostile at the time to the direction of Thomas Sankara – he was appointed by a board of 23 members including the ‘military, clerical and customary authorities’ and ‘with the quiet approval of Addis Ababa, Abuja, Paris and Washington, who seek to preserve the country, the base for French and American special forces, from any danger … ’.3 On the other hand, Prime Minister Zida, who is defence minister as well, has three other colonels with him in the government, including Auguste Denise Barry in Territorial Administration, Decentralisation and Security and Boubacar Ba at the strategic Ministry of Mines and Energy (the country has experienced a ‘mining boom’ in recent years). In the Conseil national de transition (National Council of the Transition, CNT) of 90 members, this at least led by a civilian, defence and security forces have 25 members, as many as the civil society representatives, nearly a third of the parliamentary body.
Although it lacks the leading lady, the army remains a major political actor during this transition. Note too that although the new Transitional government derives its legitimacy from an insurrection carried out by those from below, the process of transition was carried out from the top, even by the military hierarchy, symbolised by Lieutenant Colonel Zida. Between a kind of ‘emotional expectation’ of a military messiah and a search for a (symbolic) identity, the military confiscation of power in the first post-insurrectionary days led some observers to compare Isaac Zida to Thomas Sankara – for some, the revered image of an insurgent people. Yet, according to a recent article in Jeune Afrique, ‘Zida is not a new Thomas Sankara. He has neither the record nor the vision, nor the desire, to go by his entourage. He does not have roots in the country's Sankarist past, even if he has made promises to civil society.’4
To mark the desire to break with the regime of Blaise Compaoré, the ephemeral president Isaac Zida immediately took certain steps intended to please the masses, such as arresting CEOs of companies deemed close to the former presidential clan and dissolving municipal councils. However, commitments announced shortly afterwards by Zida once he became prime minister – including a possible extradition request for Blaise Compaoré, who had fled the country, and nationalisation of businesses – were quickly tempered by President Kafando. This could be interpreted as a division of roles, rather than as an expression of real disagreement between the two men over the question of the violent crimes and nepotism of the previous regime. Even Operation Clean Hands, otherwise a very messy ‘operation’, looks like an attempt to divert attention. During an interview, Lt Col. Zida asserted that the accounts of former regime officials had been frozen as soon as he took office, but ‘according to a source close to the case, it was actually later on November 17 – that is, 48 hours before he assumed his position as head of state [and more than two weeks after “these people” had fled, giving them time to organise their affairs] – that Zida acted by sending a letter to the banking institutions and credit unions in the country.’ In this missive, he charged them to freeze the assets of 23 people linked to the former regime. ‘Some are well known, such as François [Compaoré] or Alizéta [Ouédraogo, former president of the Chamber of Commerce] but all the largest economic figures who are devoted to the former regime are not included in the list’ laments the same source.5 There would also have been both the organised flight of capital and documents of the previous regime.6 Important documents, one imagines, forgotten by the former president at the time of his getaway, would even have been recovered subsequently by the palace, ‘under the escort of soldiers of the Presidential Security Regiment’, whose number two had already become head of state.7
In the same way, regarding violent crimes committed in the Compaoré era, Zida and Kafando were quick to pronounce their willingness to facilitate the resolution of two ‘popular’ and unresolved cases, namely those of Thomas Sankara and Norbert Zongo, but even on these popular cases they eventually backtracked. Indeed, on the case of Thomas Sankara, on 21 November, the president of the Transition said: ‘I also took the decision, by the authority invested in my role [i.e. by government fiat], that the investigations to identify the body of President Thomas Sankara will no longer be subject to a judicial decision, but will be the responsibility of the government.’ This was reiterated by Zida, declaring that the Sankara case would be ‘fully reopened and justice done’. On 22 January 2015 Kafando spoke of ‘misunderstandings’ with the family: ‘clearly the family has problems in undertaking these investigations … . But don't expect the Transition to undertake the examination! It is for the family to initiate the procedures and for the government to accompany them and help them identify the body.’
On 25 February 2015, President Kafando gave assurances that Thomas Sankara's family and the Transition government were now in agreement on how to proceed with the investigation (although this was denied by Sankara's widow). Finally, as a result of pressure from the family and the people, the government, in a decree adopted by the Council of Ministers on 4 March 2015, authorised the exhumation of the body. The family is maintaining pressure for the truth to come out and for justice to be done.
Above all, despite the romantic image we may want to give an army working in collaboration with the people – which does not mean that some soldiers are not actually on the side of the masses – several dozen people died during the popular uprising, some attacked by the RSP and the police, with hundreds injured, according to a report by Amnesty International (2015). Homage may have been paid, with a great deal of pomp, to the ‘martyrs of the revolution’, but the Transition has not, it seems, made a real priority of addressing these crimes. Real change from the ousted regime would also involve the end of impunity for defence and security forces, including the RSP.
There has been little attention paid to what happened in rural areas during the days of the insurrection and therefore among the most disadvantaged sections of society, as the focus was rather directed towards the capital and major cities and to certain agents of the social movements. But the popular uprising involved many parts of the country;8 many different struggles took place in industrial or artisanal mining sites, which also resulted in deaths. If the moral legitimacy for a democratic transition is not in debate, people are also fighting against their social marginalisation, which is connected certainly to plutocracy and nepotism, but also to Burkina Faso's status as a neo-colonial state. The majority of popular and spontaneous mobilisations across Burkina Faso for years have had economic causes and speak to social marginalisation. Certainly, the popular dynamic is not limited to a purely materialistic cause; it is also connected to a widespread contempt from both central and local government institutions – contempt which over the years has radicalised modes of protests and opposition. This underlies the anger that led to the burning of the National Assembly and threats to its members if they voted to amend the Constitution. But it is clear that social and economic issues were central to many of the people involved in the insurgency across the country, and yet these issues are absent from the current institutional debate, as if it is enough to evoke the fight against corruption. This is not to trivialise the issue of corruption, which is important, but is to see the structural phenomenon as it is, as a neo-colonial and neoliberal state. Corruption is a characteristic not only of the clan close to Compaoré – others have also participated, such as certain economic operators (in addition to Alizéta Ouedraogo) and senior military officials – some of whom may sit on the CNT – as accused by those involved in the uprisings of 2011 (Chouli 2012).
If Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world – despite mostly positive macroeconomic indicators from a neoliberal perspective – this is primarily due to its status as neo-colonial state, and is accentuated by the neoliberal, macroeconomic reforms taken by the regime from the early 1990s. The ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2010) (especially the ‘mining boom’ and development of agribusiness etc.) has been undertaken by transnational and local companies with an unquenchable thirst, which has aggravated social vulnerability. Today, this structural framework is completely swept under the carpet, class differences being replaced by the distinction between pro and anti-Compaoré. But as the authorities have pointed out, the priority of the Transition is the organisation of elections scheduled for 11 October 2015. As in the time of Blaise Compaoré, the majority have fixed their eyes on the presidential election this year. Many social forces focus their energies in relation to free and transparent elections, while no alternative economic and social project to that of the previous regime is proposed or even considered.
The main challengers in the presidential election are divided between neoliberals and social democrats, even though they were important officials during Blaise Compaoré’s regime. Some of these figures were the architects of his regime, even macroeconomic decision-makers, before manoeuvring themselves away from their position alongside Blaise Compaoré. One such person is Zephirin Diabré, head of the Union pour le progrès et pour le changement (Union for Progress and Change, UPC), a party started in 2010. Diabré, leader of the political opposition until the establishment of the Council of Ministers in November 2014, was a minister several times in the 1990s, first at the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Mines to ‘see through an active policy of privatisation. Which he went on to do.’ He then went on to manage the devaluation of the CFA franc (in January 1994), and the implementation of structural adjustment plans as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Planning. Thereafter, he continued his career outside Burkina Faso, within the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and then, from 2006 to 2011, the AREVA Group, which gave him a substantial network of contacts.9 A convinced neoliberal, he confided to the journalist Anne Frintz, who asked him two weeks before the uprising what his plans were, that ‘The programme is that of the donors.’
The Mouvement pour le peuple et le progrès (Movement for the People and Progress, MPP) was established following the departure on 4 January 2014 of more than 70 members of the presidential party, including several pillars of the old regime who had been largely marginalised in recent years by Blaise Compaoré. These were Salif Diallo (special advisor to Blaise Compaoré, several times minister and Compaoré’s right arm before his ‘disgrace’ in 2009); Simon Compaoré (former mayor of Ouagadougou); and Roch Christian Kaboré (former party president and president of the National Assembly). These defections from the ruling party were motivated not by an organic disagreement with the previous regime, but by a certain nepotistic defining moment: the place taken by François Compaoré, brother of the president, in the political game. Moreover, the crisis of legitimacy of Blaise Compaoré’s regime was further illustrated in recent years by the near insurrection of 2011, followed by the campaign against the constitutional amendment; it indicated to those who had been faithful to Blaise Compaoré that it was time to leave, as they were at risk of going down with the same ship as their president. Thus, despite attempts by some of these politicians to rewrite history (see Chouli, forthcoming) and promises aimed at pleasing the masses, and out of step with the consensus regarding protection of the neoliberal international financial institutions,10 it is a near certainty that the social and economic situation will remain unchanged. Even after the Transition, the wishes of the imperialist powers – from where the pressure exerted by the ‘international community’ on the nature of the civilian-led Transition has come – will be easily accommodated in a civilian–military government.
Blaise Compaoré had flung open the doors of the country to French and US special forces, making Burkina Faso a linchpin in the ‘fight against terrorism’ in the Sahel. But the length of time the regime was in power and the increasing number of demonstrations placed the country in limbo, exacerbating an instability detrimental to the interests of these powers. Washington, in the words of Barack Obama, and Paris, as shown in François Hollande's letter to Blaise Compaoré, wanted a change at the head of the Burkinabè state, based on an undisputed ‘democratic’ legitimacy, devoid of hostility to capitalism and major foreign powers while serving their interests in the sub-region. The profiles of the leaders of the main opposition parties to Blaise Compaoré were consistent with these international prerogatives. Thus, France, after helping Blaise Compaoré to become president of Burkina and to maintain the presidency for 27 years, smuggled him out, in the middle of the insurrection, to Côte d'Ivoire, thanks to their Special Operations command on the ground. As in the past with Blaise Compaoré, the French authorities favour the stability of the country that is part of the neo-colonial Operation Barkhane in the region. While waiting for the election, Zida and Kafando seem quite willing to reassure French and American interests. They have also both said that if they are elected as head of state they will ensure that the country maintains its ‘international commitments’. Kafando (in the service of Blaise Compaoré) spent ‘13 years at the UN in New York’. Zida, meanwhile, between 2002 and 2011, was ‘liaison officer as part of the Compaoré mediation in the Ivorian crisis’, in which Burkinabè and French complicity with the armed rebellion is an open secret. He also received training in counter-terrorism at the MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and attended training in military intelligence in Botswana funded by the US government in 2012. This is far from the anti-imperialism characteristic of Thomas Sankara, with which some analysts have hastily drawn parallels in order to justify the attempted military hijacking of the uprising, supported by civil society who proclaim Zida's ‘Sankarism’.
On 30 and 31 October 2014 two processes were taking place simultaneously. On the one hand, there was clearly a popular uprising which brought together hundreds of thousands of Burkinabè throughout the country. On the other hand, we have seen the hijacking of the popular uprising by the military. In the present case, the situation reminds us of Egypt in 2011, where again the army knew how to hold onto its power: by getting rid of Mubarak, which was not a great sacrifice, in order to ensure that the same system remained unchanged. How many overthrown presidents have been prevented from standing, or forced to resign, without bringing an end to the domination in the absence of a fight against a system that reproduced poverty and injustice and of which Compaoré was a long-term symbol?
It is likely that if the elections do take place, the army will remain a central player. If the members of the Transitional government are not permitted to stand as candidates, nothing prevents the army from finding a candidate, and turning an army officer into a ‘civilian’ exactly in the manner of Compaoré – and like many others elsewhere. Some also see the prime minister in a possible scenario in the manner of Amadou Toumani Touré in Mali mutatis mutandis, with a few minor adjustments – that is, preparing himself for future opportunities to return. The way he is positioning himself towards the masses and his tone, calculated to appeal to public opinion, suggest that this is a reasonable possibility, besides what may happen in the Transition, both in terms of members of the fallen elite, and the role of the army: the army unit that the prime minister is from has already made its views known to him in no uncertain terms. Thus, some see the RSP as the de facto ‘guarantor of the transition’.11 Indeed, the RSP prevented the Council of Ministers from meeting on 4 February 2015, in an attempt to have their own demands met and to oppose their own disbandment, the latter a long-standing demand of the people of Burkina Faso. By doing this, the RSP proved that it is one of the greatest dangers to the transition.
Many social conflicts have taken place in different sectors (peasantry, mining etc.). However, CSOs have already called for an end to the protests while the minister for security and the president himself have openly threatened to put an end to protests, which, they claim, come under the province of hysteresis de l'habitus.12 As for the political parties, their competition to distance themselves from the Compaoré regime (in which many served, some with great zeal) and to gain power rages on. It is feared that the transition will leave room only for politicking, which seems to be the fate of almost all existing political organisations around the world with no alternative project to neoliberalism. As for civic groups, for the most part they are not organising themselves against state power, but rather are wedded to the current hegemonic concept of civil society, that is to say neoliberalism, in which they are just keeping a watchful eye on ‘good governance’. In this context, demonstrations are organised with a view to the agenda for the Transition and political parties, where only the electoral timetable is of importance, rather than with a view to specific social issues. While various social forces and the authorities repeat over and over again that nothing will be as it was in Burkina Faso, the first months of the Transition and what it indicates for the future do not make obvious the nature of the change.