Traoré: Hero, villain or somewhere in between?

Your Proximities deep dive

Hello everyone,

A couple of things caught my eye this week on the subject of Burkina Faso’s massively popular military leader Ibrahim Traoré.

The first was a Human Rights Watch report that said his forces have killed more civilians than the al-Qaeda- and ISIS-affiliated rebels they are currently locked in war with – a war partly responsible for paving Traoré’s path to power.

The second was an interview he did with Sky News’s excellent Africa Correspondent Yousra Elbagir and other journalists. As part of a media roundtable, Sky and Italian state TV channel Rai became the first Western news organisations to interview Traoré since he came to power in a coup in 2022.

As I’ve written before, I don’t attach automatic importance to the first Western reporting of a story but what’s significant here is that Traoré has taken an avowedly anti-Western stance in his politics, expelling the forces of former colonial power France and becoming widely popular in Africa for it.

He has also expelled French media from the country. So what he might say to Western news organisations was interesting. Yousra asked some tough questions in a wide-ranging discussion with four journalists and reported that several generals who were watching in an adjoining room could be heard jeering her.

And, in a discussion that touched on several issues, there was one quote above all others that caught international media attention.

"People need to forget about the issue of democracy,” the young army captain told the journalists in a lavishly-decorated boardroom. “Democracy is not for us.”

Certainly seems a good time for a Q&A.

Until next week,

Barry.

PS: This is the 30th deep dive published by Proximities. If you become a paid subscriber you get access to the entire archive.

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How did Traoré justify what he said about democracy?

In a way, it’s refreshing. Just bear with me.

There has been a wave of coups across West and Central Africa in recent years. And the refrain is pretty familiar. There will be a transition to elections, leaders promise, which will usually be scheduled for a few years later. But this is often just a fig leaf and the reality is that military rule is in for the long haul.

Traoré, perhaps emboldened by his hero status, has stopped pretending that any of that will happen, despite making a pledge to transition to civilian rule by 2024 when he took power. In January, he dissolved all political parties, with Interior Minister Emile Zerbo saying it was necessary to “rebuild the state” and that the parties, of which there were 100 registered and 15 in parliament, had been "promoting division among citizens and weakening the social fabric."

So what I mean by refreshing is that the people of Burkina Faso know exactly what they’re dealing with. Unlike in several other countries, they’re not being gaslit with promises of elections that are constantly kicked down the road.

What they do with that certainty is, of course, another question. As is how they respond to the methods he will use to stay in power, which have already turned oppressive.

You said he was popular. Why is that?