Introduction
At the beginning of September 2015, Burkina Faso was once again shaken by profound and important changes. These events – the coup attempt on 16 September 2015, the popular resistance to it, and the delayed elections that were eventually held on 29 November – merit a short Briefing in a journal that focuses on the continent’s ‘political economy of inequality, exploitation and oppression, and to struggles against them’.1 ROAPE has already covered the 2014 uprising in Lila Chouli’s account of the aftermath to the insurrection populaire – as it is known in Burkina Faso – that unseated the 27-year regime of Blaise Compaoré, the President involved in the assassination of the radical leader of the Burkinabé revolution, Thomas Sankara (Chouli 2015a, 2015b).
In 2015 Burkina Faso was moving towards elections that had been scheduled for 11 October when a coup was launched by members of the Régiment de sécurité présidentielle (RSP) – the presidential security regiment. The RSP was a ‘private’ army of approximately 1200 heavily armed and trained men created by the former president Blaise Compaoré and charged with the security of members of the political elite. The coup leader was General Gilbert Diendéré, head of the RSP and a loyalist to the former regime. Partly an expression of the exclusion of the Compaoré elite by the Transitional government, officially the coup sought to correct what it saw as political imbalance in the nature of the Transition.
On the evening of 16 September it was clear that the Conseil national de transition (National Council of the Transition [CNT]), charged with preparing the country for democratic elections in October, was under attack. Leading members of the Transition were arrested, including the two most important, President Michel Kafando and the prime minister, Yacouba Isaac Zida. Diendéré declared in the evening of the same day that the coup was suspending elections and ‘restoring order’. Very quickly the streets of Ouagadougou were occupied by the RSP, with patrols of armed personnel carriers moving around the capital and suburbs in armoured vehicles.
During the Transition a major disagreement had resulted in an electoral code that precluded certain members of the former regime from standing in the election. However, the coup represented more than a quibble over the conduct of the next elections. The message was clear: the popular insurrection that had overturned the old government and sent its president of 27 years into exile, would not be tolerated. The coup signalled the first desperate attempts to take the initiative back from the moderate Transition that had issued from the struggles in 2014. The young must stay away from the streets, the poor must once again learn their place.
No coup has been so shocking, or so short-lived. By 25 September the coup had been defeated and the RSP dissolved by the government of the Transition, which had taken its place again at the head of the state. Soldiers of the former Praetorian Guard – the RSP – were forced to return to barracks or face the consequences.2 The coup leaders had either been arrested, where in ‘hiding’ in foreign embassies, or had faded back into the undergrowth of Burkina society.
Despite the rapid and decisive defeat, the coup was neither poorly executed, nor an amateurish seizure of power. On the first day, 16 September, the RSP clearly targeted areas expected to resist any attempt to usurp the gains made by the popular struggles that had blossomed across Burkinabé society in recent years. They also sought revenge. Smockey, a musician and founder of the grassroots organisation Le Balai Citoyen (the Citizen’s Broom), which had played a prominent part in the previous year’s insurrection, had his studio attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. At the time of the coup, he described some of the events:
Not only did they fire directly at people, but they have been targeting people. My house has been under fire. It is a real vendetta that is taking place. We have realised that we are in the midst of a real nest of serpents that has been in preparation for a long time. We call on all the people of Burkina Faso to step forward with pride. We also ask the armed forces of the republic to place themselves on the side of the people, because such treachery cannot be allowed to take place. (RFI 2015)3
For a time the echo of gunfire could be heard across the city. Interviewed at the start of the coup, an old resident of Ouagadougou watching soldiers from the RSP amass in an adjacent street, spoke of the resistance to come:
Organising the résistance populaire
The trade unions were a vital element in the success of the resistance. Major unions, who organised in the Unité d’action syndicale (Union Action Unit [UAS]), called for an unlimited, general strike as soon as the coup took place on 16 September. By the end of the month, despite maintaining the strike, the UAS declared victory:
The strong mobilisation of workers in all sectors, the strong popular resistance led mainly by young people through the barriers erected in the provinces and barricades throughout the city of Ouagadougou against the putsch, surprised the coup and quickly defeated their project. (Le Faso 2015)
Indicating the wider ‘potential’ of militant action, the UAS spoke of the pressing social and economic reforms needed in the country. Even after the end of the coup the strike had to be maintained:
In light of the many challenges facing the trade union movement, given the need to constantly defend democratic and trade union freedoms and considering the uncertainties still with the democratic process, the general secretaries of the UAS call on the rank-and-file leaders of the movement … and on the workers as a body to maintain and reinforce their mobilisation for the continuation of the struggle for better living and working conditions, for the defence of freedoms and for a genuine rule of law in our country. (Le Faso 2015)
The UAS responded to a movement that had quickly radicalised during the general strike. The action was marked by the militancy of the young, many of them unemployed, who had built the barricades and defended neighbours in the capital. The picture was the same across the country. Thus, in Bobo-Dioulasso, the second city, protests began before the official announcement of the coup. Their slogans were chanted across the city – ‘Free Zida,’ ‘Free Kafando.’ Arsène Kamsie, leader of a youth movement in the city, explained at the time, ‘We are getting organised to challenge the takeover of our transition. Because, quite frankly, it is a betrayal’ (RFI 2015).
In Bobo-Dioulasso, as elsewhere in the province, these protests had the tacit sympathy of the army and police. Even in the historical bastion of the RSP, the city of Pô in the south of the country, the watchword was the general strike. ‘In the streets of Pô’, reported the city’s mayor Henry Koubizara, ‘the population has risen as one to the union’s call for a general strike. Shops are closed, the market is closed, there is no economic activity. People are mobilised, they are doing sit-ins’ (RFI 2015).
Militant action by workers had played a central role in political radicalisation across the country for a number of years (see Chouli 2012). Trade unions had been organising marches, conferences and debates on the questions of democracy and social reforms. Through such action – that might be called ‘consciousness raising’ – members of different unions were encouraged to generalise from their immediate concerns to wider questions of political power. This important work of raising awareness was not limited to the unions. A recent study of the Transition argues:
We can add that the Centre pour la Gouvernance Démocratique [Centre for Democratic Governance] and the Association National des Étudiants Burkinabè [National Association of Burkinabé Students] have also participated in the awakening of consciences. Through the conferences, panels and discussions, youth and students were informed, sensitised, to the importance of democratic transformation. The themes of these discussions were related to the issue of democratic alternatives, the role of civil society and the importance of social mobilisation. (Kientega et al. 2015, 55–56)
Although the mobilisation was led, in part, by trade unions, action in September 2015 was called by the many organisations of the Transition that had helped to coalesce opposition to the Compaoré regime – Balai Citoyen (which had played the main role in the protests and Transition the previous year), the Coalition nationale contre la vie chère (National Coalition for the Struggle against the Cost of Living, Political Impunity and Crimes) and the Mouvement Burkinabé des droits de l’Homme et des peuples (Burkinabé Movement for Human Rights). Political parties participating in the Transition added their voices to the movement.4
The calculations made by the leaders of the coup, counting on a quick and decisive victory, quickly unravelled. Instead of intimidating the city’s population, the opposite occurred. There was a general call to resist from leaders of the Transition, now in hiding. Prominent among these was Chérif Sy, president of the CNT, who soon became the ‘underground’ voice of the resistance.5 Although many radio stations were forced off the air, others managed to continue broadcasting or were set up specially to report on events. Radio 108 – which became known as Radio Résistance – was run principally as a loudhailer for Chérif Sy. From his hiding place in the capital Chérif’s clandestine broadcasts were the coordinating voice of the resistance. Thousands mobilised across the country.
Opposition was varied, plural and diverse, but without the national reach of the general strike, it would have been difficult to uproot the coup. However, the major figures and parties of the Transition managed to hold their political authority. The countrywide shut-down continued after 25 September, which helped to maintain popular pressure on the streets and secure the quick release of political prisoners.6
The struggle on the streets
Neighbourhoods across the capital built barricades, following instructions from the Transition, but also acting on their own initiative. Tyres, rubble and rubbish were dragged across dusty roads, alleyways and major thoroughfares to prevent the RSP from moving freely around the city. One effective technique, widely used during the resistance and described by Bamouni Bertrand Leonce, a 45-year-old militant of the 2014 uprising, was:
to stop the tanks and armoured vehicles we attached large cables from one side of the street to another, fastening the ends to lamp posts or walls. When the RSP tried to get through, voilà!, they would be sliced in two. We prepared bottles of petrol, with small, torn pieces of cloth which we would light and then throw at the RSP – or those young enough to throw them would! (Interview, Ouagadougou, 7 March 2016)
Other methods of resistance were adapted and used to good effect. Barricades built in the capital were mobile, so often young militants would monitor and control who was allowed to pass. A militant of the barricades, Sougue Yaya, describes how activists would hide, ‘see who approached and either raise or maintain the barricade. This was a type of barricade that we decided was mobile and intelligent. We could monitor who was who’ (Interview, Ouagadougou, 13 March 2016). This was an adaption of a familiar strategy, ensuring that the RSP were unable to move freely around the city while not alienating members of the community who may have needed access. These act were both spontaneous and organised.
The result of this second massive display of popular mobilisation in less than a year meant that the initiative, briefly captured by the coup leaders, quickly fell away. As Bassolma Bazie and François De Salle Yameogo, leaders of two independent trade unions, stated,
our victory over the coup, and equally the popular uprising on 30 and 31 October 2014, are of historical significance: both events reveal the determination, courage and immense potential of our people, especially youth. We must capitalise on these moments so as to defend and strengthen the gains made in favour of the insurrection. (Le Faso 2015)
Reporting the coup and the resistance
The momentum carried decisively by the streets, the unions and protests, meant that a compromise proposed by regional leaders would not be accepted.7 The defeat of the coup was not a result of a diplomatic triumph carried out by the UN, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). More widely the international community played a game of catch-up, so although the coup was condemned, it was hardly the swift and decisive diplomatic action celebrated, for example, by the London Guardian.8 When power finally shifted back to the Transition in cities and towns across Burkina Faso, it was, as the scholar Jean-Hubert Bazié writes, ‘the Burkinabé people who reacted with such unity that ensured the failure of the coup’ (Bazié 2015, 42).
These diplomatic initiatives are not incidental to our narrative. International reporting of events, apart from a few important and unusual exceptions, described the ‘tireless’ efforts of diplomacy, international involvement and high-level interventions, not the extraordinary events that took place across the country. There were few stories that reflected the actual nature of the popular action. Tragically the arbiter of Burkina Faso’s future, from the end of September, seemed to have passed seamlessly to international players and elite deals.
The aftermath of the coup: the elections
In the aftermath of the coup, with the liberation of the leaders of the Transition, elections were rescheduled for 29 November. The party Mouvement du Peuple pour le Progrès (People’s Movement for Progress) and their candidate Roch Marc Kaboré won the election that took place without major incident, securing victory in the first round with 53.49% of the vote.
The new government is being judged quickly and harshly. Already, in August 2016, as this postscript was being written, serious question were already being raised. The new government has promised to investigate the murder of Norbert Zongo, an investigative journalist murdered in 1998, and, of course, Sankara’s assassination in 1987. Pressure is on the government to successfully accelerate these inquiries, but without forgetting the victims of repression during the anti-Compaoré protests. The families of those murdered in the recent coup, if not the majority of the population, must also see justice after almost three decades of official obstruction and discouragement.
Yet the most important question remains resolving the country’s terrible poverty. Burkinabé citizens who gave their blood, sweat and lives for the new government expect tangible improvements in their daily lives. All paths must return to the struggle for meaningful democratic and social change.
There are many reasons to remain sceptical of the new government. Kaboré himself was a prominent figure of the Compaoré days and emerged as the revolution’s ultimate paradox. His election poses a question that rests at the centre of this volume. Why did a movement of such popular power which had managed to overturn one of continent’s most deeply entrenched regimes – a dictatorship despite the veneer of democracy – allow prominent members of the old regime, a recycled elite, to step back into power? This question raises others. Why could the small, combative working class, allied with the politicised urban poor and youth, not impose itself and its own power – displayed so magnificently, over many years – in the place of a practiced political elite? How could the project of popular political transition become a thoroughgoing programme of social revolution? A revolution for the poor, led by the poor? These questions are too complex to be answered here, though I can present some of the issues.
On the periphery: unpicking Burkina Faso
This Briefing has sought to contribute to our understanding of ongoing struggles in Burkina Faso, and we have seen the potential of political activism to change outcomes and also the power (and weaknesses) of organisation – of workers and others. By the same token, however, it demands an answer to the question ‘why?’ What is it about the political economy of Burkina Faso that enables such effectiveness? In other words, what is it about the economic structure of this landlocked West African country that contributes and shapes political action? To what extent is Burkina Faso industrialised, and to what extent has there been a process of proletarianisation? Finally, will answers to these questions help explain why the urban population is radicalised and politicised to this extent?
Some of these questions can be answered immediately. Burkina Faso, in a government report 10 years ago, had a rural population of approximately 11 million and an urban one of 3.1 million (GBF 2006). Today’s total population is over 17 million. The country has experienced an average economic growth from independence in 1960 to 2014 of 5.92%, although there is great variation in this rate, with spikes of 14.72% in 2014 and lows of 1.2% in 1960 (Perspective Monde 2016). Despite these rates, the fundamental weaknesses of the economy – extractive, export-based, with low levels of industrialisation – has remained largely unchanged since independence. The country’s poverty and the extreme suffering of its people remain staggering: the UN lists Burkina Faso 183rd out of 187 countries (UNDP 2016) in terms of human development. Predictably, if we dig into these statistics, we see stark income differences; so while 46% – nearly half the population – live below the poverty line, 10% of the population together own half of the country’s riches.
The country has undergone significant restructuring and been part of the celebrated and largely absurd notions of ‘Africa rising’. Recent commodity prices booms have impacted on Burkina Faso, but have made no serious impact on the country’s underdevelopment. Until 2009, cotton dominated foreign earnings, when it was replaced by gold – the precious metal has been extracted in the region for hundreds of years, but large-scale mining is a recent phenomenon. Gold is currently the primary export, contributing three-quarters of the country’s export earnings. Multinational mining companies, including High River Gold Mines and Iamgold Corporation, both of these based in Canada, have rushed to open and operate mines in the last 10 years, and the result has been an expansion of the country’s small working class, but also terrible insecurity and violent labour disputes (see Chouli 2014).
However, these developments have not significantly altered employment distribution, with almost 92% of the labour force in 2014 employed in agricultural labour, in subsistence farming and cotton cultivation – statistics largely unchanged since Thomas Sankara’s radical experiments at pro-poor development in the early 1980s. Agricultural work contributed 30% to GDP in 2012 (FAO 2014). Hence, incredibly weak industrialisation – and low levels of proletarianisation – combines with a large agricultural workforce. Yet these figures disguise real shifts in economic activity, urbanisation and the disproportionate political impact of the country’s working class, employed in mining, the civil service and teaching.9
Thomas Sankara’s influence
The events that took place across Burkina Faso in the 2014 revolution and the popular resistance to the coup in 2015 were inspired by the example of Thomas Sankara, even if many of those involved had been born after 1987. His name tumbled from the lips of activists, or self-defined revolutionaries, in the latest instalment of the popular movement. For a generation born after his murder, who knew only the rule of Compaoré regime, he remained a figure of vital inspiration. His presence, in graffiti painted on government buildings, his words printed in cheap, locally published pamphlets, in stickers for sale at pavements stalls, were never far from the action. Even if the practice of his government was in some ways distinct from the popular uprisings under way across the country, it was the example of his life (and death) that informed and inspired the movement. Sankara’s final sacrifice for Burkina Faso was perhaps his most enduring legacy, providing a vital reference point and inspiration to those fighting the old regime.
The first is a fundamental truth, forced on us again. Revolution, popular insurrection, remains a central fact in the continent’s trajectory towards its changement politique. As the Tanzanian socialist Issa Shivji recently observed,
Just as we have not seen the predicted ‘end of history’, we have not witnessed the ‘disappearance of imperialism’. African liberation and working people’s emancipation is very much on the agenda and so long as that is the case revolution is very much on the cards. One who thinks revolution is not feasible is not a revolutionary. When, how, where of course are questions at a different level. (Shivji 2016)
in the 1960s and 1970s we would have called it by its true name, ‘Revolution’, not as a project, but real life struggles of the working masses. It seems to me that much of the language and vocabulary – imperialism, revolution, liberation, etc. – became ‘profane’ words with the onslaught of neo-liberal ideology on the right, and post-modernism on the left. (Shivji 2016)
Sankara’s project provides us with an extraordinary and important example: how a poor, marginal country can attempt autonomous development, attempt to delink itself from exploitative international relationships and undertake radical pro-poor reforms. Yet the autocratic, dirigiste tendencies in Sankara’s reforms were also the ‘revolution’s’ weakest areas, the vulnerable and dangerous underbelly; in this respect the Sankara years worked against popular involvement and initiative. His relationship with autonomous trade unions and independent strike action was authoritarian. Burkina Faso’s recent, astonishing rebellions, strikes and revolution, fill out the real and popular character that was absent, or at best stifled, and sometimes repressed during Sankara’s years. Sankara’s ‘extra-terrestrial’ incorruptibility could not be substituted for wider failures of the regime, for the lack of further and deeper genuinely popular involvement.
How can we reconcile the centrally organised project of Sankara’s reforms, its focus on national self-sufficiency – the attempt to break with the logic of the market, to concentrate all resources on programmes of national development – with the popular mobilisations and self-activity we have seen in the strikes, resistance and insurrection in Burkina Faso over the last few years?
Would Sankara even have approved of such popular initiative and involvement outside the control of his revolution? The Burkinabé events, insurrection and uprisings present a challenge to the continent: how to marry the popular uprisings, insurrections and resistance with political organisation. What are the types of organisations that are needed on the continent? Only in the realm of popular protest can the hopes and demands of the ‘generation of the barricades’ across the continent for a continent freed of poverty and misery – much as Sankara dreamed of – be satisfied.