Memories of past glories and faded battle fatigues loom large in contemporary Burkina Faso, and they are by and large personified in the late legendary leader Thomas Sankara. He changed the name of his nation, one of the world's most impoverished, from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, “Land of the Upright People”. Sankara created the space for the Burkinabe people to do their own thing. A visionary Pan-Africanist inspired by Marxist ideology, Sankara's sympathies were on the militant leftist anti-conservative, anti-tribalist side of things, and his charismatic style of leadership and political vision attracted legions of admirers and critics. To this day Burkina Faso has benefited from his anti-tribalist vision of his country. Unlike many other nations in Africa south of the Sahara, tribalism is not a factor in Burkina Faso politics. Certain themes do, however, recur, and the current struggle in the country in the wake of the popular uprising that ousted former president Blaise Compaore is between the civilian parties and the military. Yet, the ideological struggles of fin-de-siècle Burkina Faso have not entirely evaporated. Indeed, economic recession, rampant poverty and national collective fatigue of the 28-year-old presidency of Compaore emboldened the people of Burkina Faso to rebel against the status quo. The uprising that ensued was spontaneous. Sankara had converted popularity into power, and the Burkinabe people today are against the seedy politics of dependency on foreign aid. Sankara called for the cancellation of Burkina Faso's and Africa's debt, saying that handouts to poverty-stricken African nations were not conducive to sustainable development. As a result, the Burkinabe people want a say in the decision-making process. Feigning the implementation of a broad, though not the broadest, definition of democracy, Compaore had played a starring role in Burkinabe and west African politics. The West had turned a blind eye to his excesses and to his political intrigue both in Burkina Faso and abroad. France and the United States in particular needed his shrewd regional politicking to contain the threat of militant Islamist movements and terrorist groups in the Sahelian and Saharan belts of Africa, such as Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb. Compaore, and by extension Burkina Faso, was key to the international war on terror. But any democratically elected government should be obliged to focus on domestic development concerns. The west imagined that Sankara's 1983 Revolution rested on the flimsiest intellectual and moral foundations. But is it really plausible to ascribe the impressive performance of Compaore to that fact that he happened to sit in the former chief executive's chair? While his wily political astuteness confounded his critics, his detractors could not be silenced forever. When Burkina Faso's army cleared thousands of protesters from the capital and opened fire at state television headquarters on Sunday, killing at least one person, the harshness of the clampdown evinced a lingering strain of machismo. The power struggle within the upper echelons of the army that followed, resulting in the selection of a compromise interim president, lieutenant-colonel Isaac Zida, overriding an earlier claim by the army chief of staff, general Honore Traore, was an ill omen, and not necessarily because Traore was incapable of handling the grinding business of governing any more than Zida seems able to provide more than showmanship. Zida is at his trenchant best when demolishing received wisdom about political correctness. Nevertheless, the consensus among Burkina Faso's military establishment is to court its African neighbours and Western benefactors. “I call on the international community, in particular countries that are friends and allies of Burkina Faso, notably in the African Union and ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), to demonstrate their understanding and support our people in this difficult time,” Zida announced on national television following the uprising. The Burkinabe political establishment suspects that military men cannot be convincing policy-makers except when they are of the calibre of Sankara. As a result, Zida felt he needed to solicit the support of African nations in a televised nationwide address. It is sometimes assumed that the best way to view elements within society that are excluded from power is by saying that they want to sabotage it. In Burkina Faso, the civilian opposition parties had a vested interest in sabotaging the system put in place by Compaore. Strident critics of the ex-president are now determined to wrest control of the country. The new military rulers of Burkina Faso who stand in their way know that there has to be hope no matter how hopeless the political crisis in the country seems. They also know that they are contravening Burkina Faso's constitution in acting as they have, since under the constitution the head of the National Assembly should take office if the president resigns with a mandate to organise elections within 90 days. However, with Compaore's political demise, the army has dissolved the legislature and suspended the constitution. The barely concealed threats to retaliate by international and regional powers have been palpable. “We want to avoid having to impose sanctions on Burkina Faso,” the head of the United Nations Office for west Africa, Mohamed Ibn Chambas, a Ghanaian national, declared. “We are hoping for a transition led by civilians in line with the constitution,” he added. The UN envoy concurred with statements issued by the United States and the African Union that rejected the Burkinabe armed forces' seizure of power. This has sorely tried the Burkinabe military authorities. They know that the masses in Burkina Faso yearn for true democracy and a government that will work on eliminating abject poverty, unemployment and environmental degradation. Yet, the spontaneity of the Burkinabe uprising was surprising. Parallels were drawn with Egypt's 25 January Revolution, and charges that the military establishment is on its way to sabotage the respective revolutions of both countries are being disputed, at least in the case of Egypt. It all boils down to leadership and good governance: Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, like the late Thomas Sankara, and indeed the ousted Compaore himself, hails from a military background. But while Compaore was accused of cronyism and corruption, Al-Sisi and Sankara are widely viewed as being clean-handed charismatic leaders, exemplary and above suspicion. The latter two men have captivated their compatriots with their promises of a better future and of fulfilling the aspirations of their peoples. Compaore, in contrast, has been dismissed by the Burkinabe people as a Western stooge. He betrayed his mentor, and under his rule Burkina Faso soon metamorphosed into a classic neo-colonial state, with The Washington Post conceding that the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou was the “key hub of the US spying network” in west Africa. Compaore fled the Burkinabe capital last Friday in the wake of the uprising and surfaced in neighbouring Ivory Coast. The Burkinabe youth had long regarded the relatively prosperous Ivory Coast as a standing rebuke to their poverty and deprivation, and the people of Burkina Faso, a landlocked state of 17 million people, headed southwards towards Ivory Coast in droves during the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. But, as the economy of the Ivory Coast faltered with vacillating international commodity prices, the Ivorians turned against the influx of Burkinabes, Malians and Guineans, believing that their country was being overrun by foreigners. Tackling this sensitive issue is inextricably intertwined with the speedy transfer of power to democratically elected civilian authorities in Burkina Faso. The geography of joblessness is a challenge that any future democratically elected civilian administration will have to deal with. The fact that the chief of the country's armed forces took power after Compaore's resignation is also telling. Compaore announced his resignation in a statement on Friday and called for a 90-day transition to “free and transparent” elections in the country. France, the former colonial power, still wields much influence in Burkina Faso, but so today does Washington. The crucial question now is whether the Burkinabe people's political will, or that of Brussels, Paris and Washington in conjunction with various compradore Compaores, will determine the course of the country's future. “The European Union believes that it is up to the people of Burkina Faso to decide their own future. Any solution must be the result of a broad consensus and respect the constitution,” an EU statement read. Against this backdrop, can the Burkinabe people, about half of whom live on less than a dollar a day, take over the reins of power? Protesters stormed the parliament building in Ougadougou last Thursday and set it ablaze in a desperate bid to stop a parliamentary vote that would have permitted the now ousted president to seek a fifth term in office. But there is no point gathering political capital if the people do not use it to their advantage and for the salvation of the disadvantaged, in particular the country's dispossessed peasantry, oppressed women and disgruntled, jobless youth. Who is now destined to run a nation that is in dire distress and is suffering from similarly bleak odds to those faced by Sankara?
