Michael Kevane

An interview with Newton Ahmed Barry today on BBC French, even he does not know what is happening.

Interview from August when he was being harassed by regime.

How often in recent memory during a coup or popular uprising or interregnum do you get two factions of the army declaring that they are in charge, but not actually fighting?  Was that what happened in Madagascar?  Hard to think of many cases like this for Africa.

If looting continues and standoff continues, deals will have to be struck.  Then a new regime starts off with the same tainted stain as previous regimes.

Dans une interview accordée à RFI, Salif Diallo affirme que le rapport de force militaire serait en faveur du Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Zida. En rappel, monsieur Zida collabore avec les manifestants et la société civile.

via Burkina24 – Dans une interview accordée à RFI, Salif….

She reminds people that Sankara’s revolution was a military coup d’etat.  This one should not become that one all over again.

Nous venons d’assister à la seule et véritable révolution digne de ce nom menée au Burkina Faso. Pour cela, l’Armée doit également savoir partir et ne doit pas chercher à troquer sa tenue contre une veste de démocrate.

via Chute du président Blaise Compaoré : des opposants saluent « le courage et la … – leFaso.net, l’actualité au Burkina Faso.

And not just because I am a director of Friends of African Village Libraries, which will be working this year to establish 20 village libraries in northern Burkina Faso in a project with Catholic Relief Services funded through a U.S.D.A. grant. But more broadly, what has happened in Burkina Faso is a massive popular uprising, what we would call in the economics and political science literature a tipping point, where all the old patterns of preference falsification (going along with the regime because everybody else is going along with the regime) suddenly crumble.  Now the messy part begins as people sort out their true preferences and have to craft new institutions of restraint.

What should U.S. policy be?  The United States has “invested” (in the VC parlance) billions of dollars in Burkina Faso. Why? Because policymakers hoped that a stable, democratic Burkina Faso would be an important bulwark against the spread of AQIM and Ebola (yes, long before Ebola there were national security worries about global disease vulnerability from an unstable Sahel) and more importantly because that was the right thing to do for the people of Burkina Faso, who have long been very friendly towards the United States (ask Ambassadors Tulinabo Mushingi and Jeanine Jackson).  So our partnership with the people of Burkina Faso needs to continue, now more than ever.

When Nimeiri was ousted by a very similar large-scale people’s uprising, Gen. Swar al Dahab led a palace coup that stole all the thunder from the uprising.  He did transition to power a year later, but by then all the old guard traditional elites reestablished themselves, and the result was the disaster that became Sudan.

Now there can be a good weekend!

• Opposition very organized, very disciplined, gets those 500,000 people out to Kosyam and basically sits down at the gates until Compaoré is forced to resign. Massive peaceful civil disobedience.  Shut the city down. Tahrir Square-like.  Roch, Zepherin and Salif and Benewende agree to go that route. Set up a big tent in front of Kosyam.
• Opposition disorganized, tries to get people out to Kosyam, but bad job, security forces use tear gas, get groups to start running away, provocateurs and frustrated youth start looting, security forces stand by and do nothing.
• Opposition takes over National Assembly building and central Ouagadougou, declares itself legitimate government.  Just bypass Kosyam.  Run central government.  Roch, Zeph, Salif and Benewende would have to agree.  Hmmm.
• Opposition says “We won!” and let’s Compaoré stay, trusting that he really will step down in December 2015.  Of course, there will be a dozen reasons why the election will have to be postponed.

What others seem likely?

So nobody in the army is going to side with the opposition, it seems.  No civil war, perhaps, but no alternance, either. Except for Luc Adolphe Traoré…

Le général Lougué explique ne pas comprendre pourquoi les manifestants scandent son nom, même s’il se sait populaire et connu de la population. Il assure être du côté de ses frères d’armes.Le général Lougué ne remet pas en cause l’autorité du chef de l’Etat. Lorsqu’il a été contacté par RFI, il parlait depuis l’état-major des armées et assurait juste avant la déclaration du chef d’état-major que le président Compaoré est le chef suprême des armées, mais qu’il allait se ranger à la décision de l’état-major. Il a expliqué qu’il y avait eu des réunions toute l’après-midi, et que l’important à ses yeux était que l’armée se range du côté de la population, et qu’elle avait pour vocation d’être toujours du côté de la population.

via Burkina Faso: qui est le général Kouamé Lougué ? – Afrique – RFI.

He calls on everyone to put the nation’s interest before theirs. Something he never did.  After 27 years, doesn’t putting the nation’s interest first mean ensuring a peaceful transition of power through democratic elections?  This whole crisis, and people killed, because he refused to do that.  Now he needs to be judged.

Good New York Times reporting.

As the crisis deepened, Gen. Honoré Nabéré Traoré, the chief of staff of Burkina Faso’s armed forces, said at a news conference Thursday night that a transitional authority would lead the country to elections within 12 months. He did not say who would form the interim government. He also announced that a curfew would be in effect from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. nightly.A reporter’s request for a visa was denied by the Burkina Faso Consulate in New York on Thursday night, on the grounds that the country’s borders had been sealed.

via Government of Burkina Faso Collapses – NYTimes.com.

Pour dire un mot rapide sur la déclaration du Chef d’Etat-major général des armées, pour reprendre une réflexion de Ablassé Ouedraogo, elle est incomplète, sinon insensée. A quel titre a-t-il signé cette déclaration ? En tant qu’exécutant de la décision de Blaise Compaoré ? Ou en tant que nouveau chef de l’exécutif ? En sa qualité de Chef d’Etat-major général des armées, il n’est pas habilité à dissoudre quoi que ce soit. Et, pour l’instant, il ne s’est pas déclaré non plus nouveau Chef de l’Etat.

via Réflexions à chaud sur la Déclaration du Chef d’Etat-Major Général des Armées … – leFaso.net, l’actualité au Burkina Faso.

• Sams K’Jah who supposedly is camped out at Ronde Point Nations Unis or Place de la Nation.
• Arsene Bognessan Ye – He was brought back by Compaoré to manage the whole political transition after 2011… he botched it, in retrospect. Where are his loyalties now?
• Augustin Loada – At Univ. of Ouagadougou, the top political scientist for Burkina Faso.
• Sylvestre Ouedraogo – Also at Univ. of Ouagadougou, economist and civic activist.
• Magloire Somé- also at Univ. of Ouagadougou, historian and a leader of one of the university syndicates
• Alizeta Ouedraogo – Burkina Faso’s richest woman, daughter married to Francois Compaoré.  With great wealth comes great responsibility. To go on the record.
• Maitre Pacere Titinga – well-connected to the traditional elite of Mossi society, and influential before in the legal environment.  Pretty old now, but will have some interesting perspectives probably.
• Vincent Ouattara – at Univ. of Koudougou – a trenchant critic of Compaoré wrote the book about all the political killings in Burkina Faso 1980-2010.

And for ordinary people’s views I would go out to Saaba, out to Nongremasson, out to Pissy, and see what was happening there.

Of course, this is out of anybody’s hands now, because when the army guys decide they are going to sort something out the rest does not really matter, does it?

They came in and read their communique, and the Army Chief of Staff acted confused when reporters asked a simple question: Where is Blaise Compaoré? and they all walked out of the room.  Painful to watch.  At least take power with a little bit of panache.  Or did they Youtube the Thai military’s takeover speech and translate into French?  And Traoré is the same guy who put down the Bobo mutiny in 2011. So maybe as the conspiracy-theory de l’heure has it, he is talking on phone with Blaise about how to salvage the situation.

Blaise Compaoré is holed up maybe in Kosyam, the presidential palace, with presidential guard (very powerful) remaining loyal.  Compaoré announced he would remain as president until elections at end of 2015, and he would not try to change constitution (and so would be termed out and could not run).  But, Army Chief of Staff Honoré Nabéré Traoré had earlier issued communiqué saying *he* was in charge and would form a transition government for a return to constitutional order.  Meanwhile the opposition said they would not accept either arrangement and that President Compaoré had to be forced to resign immediately.

(Sources for all this the Twitterfeed #lwili and so of course impossible to verify here in San Jose, CA)

A few hours ago I flinched after one tweet exchange with the inimitable Jon Lee Anderson.  Fuck!  I’ve been reading him in The New Yorker for years, and he tweets about Burkina Faso, and I try to be all sassy like I know more than he does, and I get schooled.

Basically the brief exchange was about nuance when commenting on what is and has happened in Burkina Faso.  I bristle when I sense commentators putting things into sinners-saints and heros-villains.  I’ve always loved Bertold Brecht’s lines from Galileo: Andrea: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.
Galileo: No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.

Heros with capital H are not the answer to anything.  As reporter Joe Penney pointed out (one of the few western journalists on the ground during today’s demonstrations) the real lower-case heroes are the hundreds of youth who defied the security forces and pushed through the police barricades and said “trop, c’est trop.”  But they have no names.  And they deserve more than a sinner-saint version of history.

So what am I referring to exactly? Well in Burkina Faso’s case it is the tendency to cast Thomas Sankara as an other-worldy combination of Mother Theresa and Che Guevara, a manly killing machine who would wipe out imperialism in the name of the lepers and then pick up his guitar and strum “Across the Universe” around a campfire while comrades did the cooking and women cleaned the guns.

Here’s the nuance in some bullet points:

• Sankara took power in a coup d’etat. By force. And he didn’t announce a transition to civilian rule. He intended to stay in power.  For a good long while.  Who did he admire? Jerry Rawlings.  Would he have followed his example? We will never know. Because he also admired Fidel Castro.
• Sankara’s fellow coup plotter in 1983 was Blaise Compaoré.  Sankara had been imprisoned by Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo (an army doctor who had assumed the presidency in the military interregnum of 1983), and Blaise’s forces had freed him.  So if Blaise is the devil, then Sankara was a serious misjudge of character.
• Killing Sankara can never be justified, but Sankara’s forces themselves had killed Gabriel Somé Yoryam, the previous army chief of staff, in their 1983 coup.  Sankara did not offer to put himself on trial for that killing.
• In 1987, when Blaise loyalists killed Sankara, it was not something that happened out of the blue. Sankara himself knew that he was in a power struggle with Blaise and others.  Blaise and others wanted rectification and pragmatism, Sankara wanted to devote more attention to revolutionary internationalism.  The regime had lost almost all its legitimacy and was struggling to survive.  The “political class” of Burkina was against the young revolutionary military captains.  Why? Well, one reason was that when the teacher’s union went on strike, Sankara ordered them all to be fired!
• What forces in the country did Sankara characterize as evil owls? Traditional leaders like the Mogho Naba.  Who have all the opposition figures today asked to intercede and negotiate a transition? The Mogho Naba.  Whatever one thinks of the Mogho Naba and inherited rule (which personally I loathe) politically-speaking it was a major miscalculation on Sankara’s part.
• The major opposition leaders- Salif Diallo (formerly Blaise’s right hand man in politics), Roch Marc Christian Kaboré (formerly head of CDP and speaker of the National Assembly that was just looted), and Zepherin Diabré (formerly finance minister and Africa chief of AREVA, the French nuclear giant)… well…. they were also part of Sankara’s revolution.  Should they all be characterized as traitors and sinners?  None of them went out on the line in the past 15 years, until 2013.  Diabré, to his credit, started earlier, and presumably was pursuing a real-politique.
• Blaise asked for pardon and was given pardon by the political elite in 1999, the year after the killing of Norbert Zongo.  The political elite led enormous demonstrations against Pres. Compaoré.  They chose to compromise, rather than pursue a more “street” approach.  Right or wrong, that was the choice at the time.  Blaise and his circle then manipulated and consolidated their hold on power.  The opposition, in the inimitable words of Joseph Ki-Zerbo, basically went back to sleep. They finally woke up in 2013. (After clicking the snooze button in 2011.)
• At the local level, the CDP controls practically every municipality.  Local politics easily could have been more vibrant and contested.  Political leaders chose an accommodating path of patronage and participation.  The regime wasn’t all-powerful, it was all-coopting.  There is a big difference I think.
• Why was CDP all-coopting?  Because at the end of the day, the regime delivered.  Burkina had maybe 3% per capita GDP growth for 15 years.  Very rapid urbanization. Ouagadougou was booming.  New universities constructed.  Cell phone network throughout the country.  A new wealthy middle and upper-class emerged.  Political and media discourse became freer and freer.  A real transition seemed like a likelihood.  And then Blaise for reasons that remain very unclear, decided to ruin it all by insisting that he stay in power even after 27 years.

*That is Yoweri Museveni, and no Blaise Compaoré, in the photo!

Now is when it gets Borgia-like, right?  Everyone has known for years that the slow but steady growth of Burkina Faso for last 15 years could vanish in a puff of smoke and a lot of broken windows, in three days of rioting.  I hope so much that Burkina doesn’t go down the Mali/Guinea/Cote d’Ivoire/Liberia/Sierra Leone/Guinea-Bissau/Togo route.  Hmm… what are the odds?  Well, Burkina Faso has reasonably good “traditional” institutions, has a well-deserved reputation for ethnic and religious tolerance, has an optimistic youth population, and has a lot of friendly donor countries.  So maybe things will come out OK.

PS.  Just for the record.  It has been a good rainfall year.  October-Nov is not a “hot” month in Ouagadougou.  Rain and heat did not cause this popular uprising.  Clear?