Why Burkina Faso's Traore is right on development, wrong on democracy in Africa

Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso. [File Courtesy]

Burkina Faso’s Traoré right on economy, wrong on democracy

Since coming to power in a military coup three years ago, Capt Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, in West Africa, has fast risen in the admiration stakes, particularly among those around the continent tired of political meddling by former colonial powers—France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Portugal—plus the United States.

Of all the military men who have taken power lately in the region’s “coup belt” countries—including Mali, Guinea, Niger and Gabon—Burkina Faso’s Traoré, 38, is by far the most agreeable pin-up of the revolutionary zeitgeist in Africa of the last four decades.

When I was a babbling eight-month-old in October of 1987, Thomas Sankara (also of Burkina Faso) was assassinated. Sankara — who’s since been called ‘the Che Guevara of Africa’ —during his four-year-long hold onto power beginning in 1983, famously embraced austerity (riding a bicycle to work) and, just like Traoré, favoured an African-solutions-to-African- problems approach to development.

Part of the reason why Traoré is ‘different’ and popular, for instance, is his insistence on committing foreign-owned firms operating in his country —particularly those involved in the extraction and export of natural resources—to a greater, mandatorily transferable, for-the-people share of profits.

His policy of Africanising resource extraction by introducing, and/or increasing, State shareholding in foreign-owned firms in Burkina Faso is more widely being paraded as the standard model for the rapid, resource-fuelled transformation of Africa. His uncompromising mien is the making of his support base of Africanist believers in a hero-amplified, sterner ‘Afrosay’. And the legend of his courage, vision, exploits, novelty and stardust (especially if he keeps up the streak of toughness and manages to avoid the peculiarly African ‘curse of incumbency’) will, no doubt, live on long after he departs from this world.

Gaddafi’s model

Some very important aspects of the Traoré-evolved transformation pitch are, however, potentially inimical to the hoped-for goal that’s Africa’s collective, own-agency progress. Earlier this year, the Traoré (military) regime declared a ban on all political parties in the country.

And in the past three weeks, he has been at it again, this time making a case for an African-wide de-embrace of democracy. His thesis is that democracy is not originally an African practice. And he’s been holding up Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya as a model of post-democracy developmental wonder.

Gaddafi (1942-2011), who—then aged only 27—first took power in a military coup in September of 1969, ruled Libya for 42 years until he was deposed, and subsequently murdered, at the height of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. His admirers, however, defend his record, citing Libyans’ relatively better living standards reportedly made possible by State subsidies, particularly in such key sectors as infrastructure (housing), healthcare and education.

What many forget to mention, or deliberately omit, in their discussion of Libya post-Gaddafi, however, is that when he chose to rule through minion-packed, politburo-style committees—consequently emasculating, but mostly abrogating, systems—he mortgaged the country’s institutional future. And dangerously so. The post-2011 institutional interregnum in Libya may be blamed, and rightly so, on Gaddafi-era systemic ruination.

It is for this reason that Traoré is wrong in his dismissal of democracy in Africa as a systemically inconsequential, foreign-imposed bunch of hokum. History shows that in the absence of democracy and a robust institutional edifice, anarchy more than prevails.

Kenya, in East Africa, for instance, has, since the 1970s, been playing host to hordes of seekers of refuge fleeing the backwash of socio-political decompaction within the borders of her regional peers, Uganda, South Sudan, Somalia, DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. History as well teems with cautionary tales about the military’s intimate flirtation with political power.

In Brazil, where, for 21 years between 1964 and 1985, a brute military dictatorship presided over rights violations and resource dispossession, the barrel-and-boot fiends took advantage of, and were emboldened by, a 1979 self-instituted law that guaranteed them amnesty, including post-rulership.

Systemic rundown

In Myanmar—until 1989 known as Burma—the military takeover and subsequent jackboot that followed the last truly democratic elections widely adjudged to have been won by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party in the early 1990s have, for decades since, sustained, not only a stranglehold on institutions, but also atrocities against the country’s civilian population, leading to mass displacement but also a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Other examples of countries around the world where military-orchestrated systemic rundown would sap the sense out of the pitch by Traoré include Pakistan and Sudan.

Democracy, really, is not the enemy of progress in Africa. Our history shows, in fact, that our refusal to fully embrace it—and just wait on the full promise of its flowering—is, indeed, an important part of our problems.

So, unless he wishes to join his office-holder antecedents and contemporaries in blaming others rather than themselves for what ails Africa (having himself recently become a beneficiary of an undemocratic office-time extension), Traoré should reveal the true reason(s) for his quarrel.