Captain Ibrahim Traore – the myth and the man
By Femi Olugbile
There is a man who is now so popular in many parts of Africa and the black diaspora that many people are comparing him to Liberation heroes of yore. Musicians are composing songs about him, and crowds are gathering in African and even European cities to hold rallies in his support. He reminds some people of another Burkinabe by the name of Thomas Sankara, who was young and handsome, with a swashbuckling attitude and a holstered pistol that made him a crowd puller anywhere he went. Nigerians of a certain age would remember what happened several years ago when Thomas Sankara visited Abuja for an African leaders’ Summit after the 1983 putsch that brought him to power. He had launched an ambitious social and economic reform programme and become an icon of Pan-Africanism with his anti-France, anti-imperialist rhetoric. The geriatric African leaders with whom he was meeting were suspicious, not knowing what to make of this irrepressible stripling. Ladies crowded around him to take photographs and get a handshake with the young President, or just to bask in the penumbra of his presence.
There was great mutual admiration between Sankara and the radical Afrobeat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, based on their shared ideology. Sankara was an avid listener to Fela’s incendiary music. Fela, in turn, was twice Sankara’s guest in Ouagadougou.
Almost predictably, it did not end well.
Soon afterwards, Sankara was assassinated, in a coup abetted by the old colonial power France. The groundwork he had laid to take his impoverished country away from France’s economic and cultural domination was promptly reversed.
After his death, a saddened Fela released a song in his memory titled ‘Underground System’:
‘…When e reach Sankara’s turn to be Chairman
African leaders dem start to fear
The Underground system in their lives
This one corruption and destruction…’
The Sankara story is another story, really.
Today’s handsome young military President with the gift of the garb from Ouagadougou, who is taking Africa by storm, is Captain Ibrahim Traore.
Last January, he arrived at the inauguration of President John Mahama in Accra wearing battle fatigues, with a pistol at his hip. He immediately became the cynosure of all eyes, diverting journalists’ and audience attention from the older African leaders in the VIP seats.
People may wonder why Burkina Faso, a poor landlocked West African country and its leader have been receiving so much attention all over the world lately. Traore’s face is one of the most regularly seen on the internet, and YouTube is awash with videos of him. While some of the videos are authentic, such as his celebrated twelve-second handshake with President Mahama, many others, such as his ‘dialogue’ with Donald Trump are AI-generated fakes.
Burkina Faso has a population of twenty-three million people. Thomas Sankara changed the name of the nation from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso in 1984.
Colonised by France, the nation achieved nominal independence on 5th August 1960. It went on to experience several military coups as ambitious upstarts jostled for power.
In September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traore led a successful coup, and took over as ‘Interim Leader’.
Thus began what may be termed The Traore Era.
His predecessor’s promise to hand back power to civilian rule in two years went out of the window. The governing ‘Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration’ ordered French forces out of Burkina Faso. By February 2023, the French Army ended all operations in the country.
Traore withdrew from ECOWAS and formed an alliance of Sahel States with fellow military-led governments of Mali and Niger.
He has tried, with limited success, to quell the Jihadist war waged by terrorists in a large part of his country, He has reversed salary increases for government officials and tried to improve living standards for civil servants. He nationalised some gold mines and stopped the export of unrefined gold. He built a new airport, invested in agriculture, and established a National Support Centre for Artisanal Cotton Processing.
Burkina Faso is still a poor country, but Traore, the youngest serving President in the world, is widely adulated, not so much for his modest achievements, but for the promise of youthful hope as a pointer to an African salvation he seems to symbolise, in a continent where all the power is in the hands of old and jaded politicians, cynically observing the rituals of Western ‘democracy’.
Having pulled the plug on an unforgiving imperial predator like France, he walks about with the resigned but resolute swagger of a man who knows there is a target sign painted on his back.
On the ground in Ouagadougou, the reception for Traore is more mixed. There have been coup and assassination attempts. Some people are not happy about the indefinite suspension of ‘democracy’. Protests are put down with a heavy hand.
There is concern that in rejecting the exploitative embrace of France, Traore is moving into the iron grip of the Russian Bear, or the inscrutable Asiatic grip of China. Russian ‘military advisers’ are in Ouagadougou ‘to help’. Russia is interested in ‘trading’ in minerals with Burkina Faso, as is China.
There is a necessary question to be asked. Who is responsible for the massive public relations exercise, including AI generated Videos stoking the Traore myth on the internet. Is it the Burkinabes themselves? Is it enthusiastic admirers who believe in his cause and see him as a generational hero? Or is the Russians, or the Chinese, acting with intention to build a superhero? It is ironic that a Russia that has itself departed from Socialist Revolution and turned to Populist Dictatorship under President Putin may now purport to stand as guarantor of socialist change in a resurgent youth-led Africa, but that may be one of the realities of the modern day.
DH, a brilliant exiled one-time BUSINESSDAY columnist and gadfly of the Nigerian establishment, sees promise in Traore, releasing a video recently that provided inside details of how ‘The Empire’ sentenced Muammar Gaddafi to death for pushing a pan-African agenda they found an existential threat, an action similar to what youthful Traore is doing.
How will the Traore story pan out?
If he survives, and succeeds, he could inspire youths in other African countries to radical, even revolutionary action, generating creative turbulence to shape the future of the continent.
That, of course, is a big ‘IF’.
