True African History

Burkina Faso, landlocked and long underestimated, finds itself in a season of reckoning. In Ouagadougou, where the harmattan still bleaches the sky a weary white, checkpoints bloom like thorns along the boulevards and the air buzzes with rumours quicker than motorbikes. Official communiqués from Washington, Paris and Brussels paint the moment in stark colours—an unruly captain, Russian rifles, children starving on the roadside. Yet stroll the evening market and you will hear a counter-current: traders speak of a country prising loose the final rivets of colonial scaffolding, militia recruits boast that the tricolour of empire no longer decides which hills can shelter their cattle, and elders recall earlier promises of freedom that dissolved under the weight of foreign advice.

Two stories, then, running side by side like mismatched rails. The first insists that Burkina Faso is spiralling into chaos of its own making; the second that chaos is the entry fee for a sovereignty no donor will gift. Neither tale is innocent, for each is carried by an elite—one polished, global and well supplied; the other improvised, hungry and determined not to die with its hat in its hands. Between them stand twenty-one million Burkinabè who know that bullets and balance-sheets speak a common language: both can claim a life before the body hits the ground.

This essay follows the fault-line between the two narratives. It sets down the evidence—budget ledgers, troop withdrawals, grain prices, whispered fears—and asks who shapes the story, who benefits when it is believed, and what remains of the old colonial bargain once the storyteller loses his microphone.

The Real Terrain: How Burkina Became a Test Case

January 2022 cracked the façade. Soldiers drove out President Roch Kaboré at dawn, promising order. By September they had toppled their own leader and hoisted Captain Ibrahim Traoré, an army captain who spoke of “finishing the job.” A year later he signed a five-year transition charter, shelving elections until “guns fall silent.” Each turn, noted in the government gazette and confirmed by the Constitutional Council, widened the gap between Ouagadougou and the foreign capitals that once certified legitimacy.

Security followed politics out the door. In February 2023 the last French armoured convoy rolled north under a cloud of dust and bitter graffiti, ending a decade of counter-terror patrols. Traoré then joined Mali and Niger to form the Alliance of Sahel States, a pact sealed with Russian helicopters and the promise of a 5,000-strong joint force—figures cited by the Burkinabè defence ministry and echoed, warily, in a recent Reuters dispatch.

Money, too, began to move. The finance ministry now backs import guarantees with freshly mined bullion, aiming to loosen the grip of the CFA-franc, whose rules still send half the nation’s hard currency to a French vault. Gold already supplies more than seventy per cent of export earnings, the IMF’s 2024 trade tables show; officials speak of a “Sahel note” that would clear deals from Kaya to Gao without Parisian signatures. Traders in the Kalsaka pits feel the shift first: fewer middlemen, quicker cash, higher risk.

None of this brave talk calms the countryside. United Nations teams counted 2.2 million Burkinabè displaced by April 2025—one in ten citizens sleeping under torn plastic or the open sky. In the northern scrub jihadist columns still torch grain stores, and militia volunteers answer with rough justice of their own. The state’s reach is expanding, but so is the fear that it may run out of breath before it reaches everyone.

These intertwined experiments—political, military, monetary—make Burkina Faso a laboratory watched from Abidjan to Washington. Should the formulas hold, they will invite imitation; should they fail, the wreckage will serve as a cautionary slide for every nation tempted to rattle old chains.

The Narrative Terrain: What "They" Want You to Believe

Open a European broadsheet and Burkina Faso appears in monochrome: an unruly sinister clueless captain, gun-running Russians at his shoulder, and a nation starving itself into irrelevance. Reuters headlines speak of “collapse,” Paris radio of “another Wagner bridgehead,” while a US State Department briefing frames the junta as a “threat multiplier” across West Africa. Each dispatch repeats the same palette—lawlessness, foreign meddling, looming contagion—until the colours bleed together and blot out anything more subtle.

Human-rights bulletins pile on. Amnesty details militia killings; UNICEF exhibits photographs of infants with arms thin as tamarind twigs. The images may be real, but they travel with a subtitle: this suffering began the moment French troops departed and elections were postponed. Cause and effect are thus welded, giving misery a neat origin in the presidential palace.

Next comes the ledger. The World Bank warns of “unsustainable fiscal practices”; the IMF postpones a review “pending governance benchmarks.” Brussels floats sanctions; ECOWAS talks of “restoring constitutional order.” The financial lifelines that once ran unremarked through Ouagadougou are paraded in public, coiled like leashes in a trainer’s hand.

Local grandees join the chorus. Dislodged technocrats—fluent in the acronyms donors prefer—grant interviews lamenting “isolation” and “brain drain,” careful never to recall how their own programmes flourished on the same external tutelage. Their grievances travel well; editors in London and Washington recognise the cadence.

Thread these elements together and a tidy morality play emerges: Burkina Faso chose vanity over stability; outsiders must either discipline or abandon her. The storyline is as old as the rail spur that once carried ore from the Sahel to Atlantic ships, and it still points in the same direction—back to the ports, back to the patrons, away from any road the country might build for itself.

Hidden Machinery: Levers of External Control

Peer behind the headlines and you find an apparatus more enduring than any coup. It settles into ledgers, treaties and flight plans, humming along even when ministries change their letterheads.

One cog lies in the purse. Since 1945 every CFA-franc nation has been obliged to lodge half its hard-currency reserves in the French Treasury. The rule sits in a treaty footnote few voters have read, yet it decides how quickly a drought loan clears and how much interest a hospital bond must pay. Bank of France statements show the arrangement earned Burkina less than two percent last year—well below inflation—while Paris put the same money to work at home.

A second lever is the aid pipeline. World Bank tables confirm that, on the eve of the first coup, foreign aid financed forty-one per cent of Burkina’s budget. The cash arrived with consultants who redrafted procurement codes and power-pointed civil-service reform. When those disbursements pause, salaries at the ministry of health stall first, and the message is understood long before any ambassador lifts a phone.

The third lever wears camouflage. Until February 2023 French armoured cars idled outside Camp Kamboinsé, and drone feeds from Niamey fixed targets for Burkinabè pilots who had never flown a combat sortie alone. Declassified defence papers note that strike approval still passed through a liaison cell fluent in both military acronyms and the subtler language of political risk. When the convoy rolled out, a lifetime of hard-wired dependence rolled with it.

Together these levers—currency, cash, and the calibrated threat of force—made policy in Ouagadougou a matter of negotiating margins, not choices. Traoré’s project is dangerous precisely because it reaches for the mains switch rather than the dimmer.

Breaking the Chains: Traoré’s Gamble

Captain Traoré’s strategy is speed—move faster than treaties can tighten and faster than creditors can convene. He calls it “closing the door while the hyena hesitates,” and his play book shows the pattern: announce, implement, then invite debate after the fact.

First came the militias. The government claims ninety-thousand Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland now carry state-stamped rifles; Human Rights Watch, counting graves as well as recruits, believes the figure lower and the training wafer-thin. Yet in villages around Kaya merchants swear the roadblocks manned by these volunteers have cut ambushes in half. Guns and hope arrive together, each with a price still to be reckoned.

Next, the external shield. Defence-ministry communiqués list Russian helicopters, Malian artillery instructors, and a planned five-thousand-strong joint Sahel force. Western analysts warn that such alliances come freighted with their own debts—this time measured not in francs but in favours owed to Moscow. Traoré replies that a man drowning in the Niger River does not lecture the rope about its colour.

The boldest play is monetary. Central-bank bulletins confirm that freshly mined bullion now backs import guarantees once stamped in Paris. Officials speak—softly—of a Sahel note, cleared from Ouagadougou to Gao without passing through French vaults. It is alchemy at national scale: turn gold and nerve into liquidity before foreign ratings agencies can downgrade the experiment out of existence.

Every move widens the gap between the junta and the machinery described earlier. It also thins the margin for error. Treasury receipts are down; international grants have slowed to a trickle; United Nations tallies show 2.2 million citizens displaced by war and drought. If salaries falter or grain trucks fail to roll, rifles may pivot inward as quickly as they once faced the frontier.

Traoré’s wager, then, is brutal in its clarity: either Burkina Faso secures a new foundation—military, fiscal, emotional—before the old levers tighten, or the country becomes another cautionary footnote in the long ledger of aborted independence.

The Counter-Moves

Foreign chancelleries answered Traoré’s sprint with a war of adjectives. Within hours of any government communique, wire services carried rebuttals titled “collapse” or “chaos”; debunk columns bloomed even faster. When a rumour in April claimed the country had cleared its foreign debt, Reuters dismantled the story before nightfall, and embassy newsletters circulated the correction at dawn. The pace is deliberate: tarnish each success claim before it can harden into belief.

Money followed words. Washington froze nearly £128 million in security and development funds after the first coup; Brussels pulled the plug on direct budget support; an IMF review now hangs on “governance benchmarks,” a phrase that means cash remains padlocked. World Bank data show external grants have fallen by a third since 2021, yet loan interest continues to accrue. The longer the drought of hard currency lasts, the louder sceptics in Ouagadougou mutter that patriotism cannot pay civil-service salaries.

Neighbouring presidents add pressure of their own. ECOWAS communiqués speak of a “responsibility to restore constitutional order,” and military planners in Abuja sketch scenarios for a rapid intervention force. No armour has rolled, but the threat lurks like heat on the horizon: invisible until the mirage breaks into movement. Inside Burkina Faso the prospect alone forces Traoré to keep one eye on border crossings and another on the loyalty of battalion commanders.

Finally, whispers drift through the officer corps—offers of asylum, hints of frozen accounts unsealed if the captain is eased aside. A leaked court filing shows four senior colonels charged with plotting an April putsch; their lawyers cite “foreign encouragement” without naming a flag. Whether the evidence holds matters less than the suspicion it seeds: the hedge against outside pressure may already be wearing the nation’s uniform.

Each of these counter-moves—narrative, cash, regional menace, covert inducement—seeks the same end: slow the gamble until it stalls, then brand the wreckage proof that the old machinery must stay in place.

Power Rearranged on the Ground

Across the northern provinces, authority now rides in pick-ups bearing the insignia VDP rather than the tricolour cockade. Human Rights Watch field teams, travelling the Kongoussi–Barsalogho corridor in late-2024, recorded villagers who credited these militia escorts with reopening markets long closed by ambushes; the same report logs summary killings committed by other VDP units fewer than fifty kilometres away. Security, once a French export, is today a local commodity—protective in one hamlet, predatory in the next.

Food moves—or fails to—according to that new geometry. The World Food Programme’s April 2025 logistics update notes that convoys to Djibo now require militia or army escort and must still break the journey into nocturnal sprints; when the escorts are unavailable, aid is airdropped at roughly triple the cost of road delivery. Every delay converts into thinner rations for the two million people whom OCHA counts as internally displaced.

The capital feels the shift in its pay packets. World Bank budget trackers show external grants down by one-third since 2021; the finance ministry’s February circular warns of salary arrears if revenue does not improve. Civil-service unions, once buoyed by donor-funded training stipends, now stage lunch-hour vigils outside shuttered project offices, their placards aimed as much at Brussels as at the presidency.

Gold, by contrast, flows freely. IMF trade data record a twenty-three-per-cent jump in bullion exports during 2024, and the central bank confirms that new purchases back letters of credit once guaranteed in Paris. Brokers in Kalsaka and Yalgo, interviewed by a Reuters commodities desk, report cash settlements in forty-eight hours—twice as fast as the previous banking channel—though they also note a spike in armed robberies along the haul routes.

Mediation falls to those with neither rifles nor spreadsheets. An International Crisis Group briefing from February 2024 describes village chiefs in Soum province negotiating temporary ceasefires so that displaced families can harvest sorghum; imams in Kaya arrange prisoner exchanges when militia commanders refuse to meet face-to-face. Their informal diplomacy lacks the glamour of foreign peace initiatives, yet without it the thin fabric that still binds north and south would tear outright.

Taken together, these documented shifts reveal a republic whose centre is fraying even as new peripheries harden. The old bureaucracy loses ground to fighters, traders and clerics; the question is whether this improvised architecture can bear the weight of a nation before outside pressures—or internal rivalries—pull it apart.

Objections Considered

“Burkina has merely swapped one patron for another; the tricolour leaves, the double-headed eagle arrives.”
Arms do come from Moscow—six attack helicopters in 2024, according to SIPRI transfer tables—but the Kremlin does not hold the country’s reserves, underwrite its currency, or staff its ministries. The most tangible Russian leverage remains transactional: ammunition today for gold tomorrow. Whether that bargain proves corrosive or pragmatic will depend on future contracts, yet it is a narrower tether than the CFA-franc rule that still parks half of Burkina’s hard currency in Paris.

“Jihadists, not foreign influence, are the real enemy; only outside troops can stem the tide.”
Insurgents kill with impunity, but French counter-terror operations from 2013 to 2021 suspiciously coincided with a five-fold rise in recorded attacks, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project notes. Foreign soldiers fixed choke-points; militants simply flowed round them. Local militias now hold some roads open, others they may abuse, yet their mixed record at least springs from local consent—something even the best-intentioned external brigade struggled to secure.

“Militia killings and press arrests strip the junta of any claim to legitimacy.”
Amnesty International documents massacres in Yatenga and the detention of critical journalists. These are crimes, not mere blemishes, and they demand investigation. Yet similar violations by forces in neighbouring Chad—an ally amply armed by Western donors—draw little punitive talk. Condemnation that strikes one offender and spares another convinces few villagers that the motive is purely moral.

“Without donor grants the treasury will bleed out; gold receipts are a mirage.”
World Bank trackers do show external grants down by a third, and the finance ministry has warned of salary arrears. Gold exports, however, rose twenty-three per cent last year and now account for over seventy per cent of foreign earnings. The arithmetic is precarious, but not fanciful: if bullion prices hold and import guarantees clear faster than before, the budget may stagger rather than collapse. Failure is possible; inevitability is less certain than critics claim.

Conclusion – A Small Republic, a Large Question

Burkina Faso has turned itself into a proving ground. On its laterite roads, a government without deep pockets is testing whether guns drawn from the east, bullion drawn from the earth, and faith drawn from villages can replace the oxygen once piped in from Paris and Washington. On every veranda in West Africa, officials and insurgents alike lean forward to see whether the lungs hold.

If the gamble fails, foreign capitals will catalogue the debris as confirmation that dependency is safety by another name. Should it succeed—even halfway—it will mark the first time since independence that a CFA-franc state has wrested daily sovereignty from the ledgers and liaison rooms of its former patrons. The result will not be neat. New elites will emerge, some honest, others hungry; the poor will still bleed first when harvests falter. Yet the arithmetic of power will have shifted, and that shift—however messy—cannot be undone by a press release.

For now the country stands where three winds meet: foreign censure, local ambition, and the unyielding mathematics of hunger. No analyst, however well sourced, can predict which gust will prevail. What is clear is that the old bargain—security for obedience, credit for compliance—has been dragged into the sunlight. A younger generation of Burkinabè, and perhaps Africans beyond, can see the hinges and levers for themselves. Whether they choose to rebuild the machine or dismantle it altogether will decide not only the fate of one small republic but the meaning of independence in the twenty-first century.