After Mali in May 2021 and Guinea in September, Burkina Faso was in turn the theater of a putsch. The military benefits from the feeling that the elites are disconnected from the daily problems to return in force.
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Who is the turn? This is the question that is now shivering West Africa. The coups seem to be oil spot in this region: Mali twice since August 2020, Guinea in September 2021, Burkina Faso on January 24th. If the putschists in uniform justify their taking power by local reasons, their brutal return in the political field demonstrates that international sanctions and roodomontades have no deterrent effect and that democratic principles are in regression in this area.
In Bamako, Colonel Assimi Goïta highlighted the deliquescence of the regime in place to justify the reversal of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta; In Conakry, Capital of Guinea, Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya ounced Alpha Condé less than a year after the latter was re-elected for a very disputed third term; In Ouagadougou, Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba was able to rely on “the obvious disability of Mr. Roch Marc Christian Kaboré” in the fight against jihadist groups to explain his fellowness.
According to a good source, the Burkinabe army “never felt the confidence of the authorities”. A distance that the massacre of 49 deprived cargo gendarmes for two weeks, on November 14, 2021 in Inata, in the north of the country, had increased. In this context, the fall of President Kaboré did not surprise any observer from the country. Sign of time, while the street had risen against “the most stupid coup of the world” worn, in 2015, by nostalgics of the former Blaise Compaore President and immediately aborted, today no one manifest for the defense of election institutions. In Ouagadougou, as in Bamako or Conakry, the street encourages young officers who, as the rule wants, promise to redress the nation and swear of their disinterest for power.
The dictatorial regimes of the past are rehabilitated
West Africa, however, thought, turned the page of the years of putschs and pretorians in khaki and smoked glasses. At the edge of the 1990s and the launch of the national conferences that would open the way to multiparty politics, the Ivorian Rasta Alpha Blondy sang “too many coups in Africa, that’s enough like that”. It is clear that this hope has been stretched.
Four of the twenty successful coups in the space of the Economic Community of West African States (Cédéao) since 1990 were perpetrated in the last eighteen months. Symbolically, the dictatorial regimes of the past are rehabilitated: in Mali, the junta and its supports do not lack an opportunity to praise former President Moussa Traoré (1969-1991), while the current power in Guinea multiplies the Gestures at the location of the family and memory of Sékou Touré (1958-1984). The sponge coup on past repression does not seem to move only the descendants of the victims.
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