Declan Hayes
Though Traoré will most likely follow Lumumba and Sankara to an early grave, he and his pals have rekindled a patriotic pan-African movement, Declan Hayes writes.
Although 37 year old Burkina Faso President, Ibrahim Traoré, seems to be fit as a fiddle, he should expect to die violently long before he reaches his 63rd birthday, which is the current average life expectancy of his compatriots. Let's look at the actuarial facts that really matter in buying him his premature tombstone. The Congo's Patrice Lumumba was 36 when NATO offed him, and Burkina Faso's own Thomas Sankara was 38 when NATO dispatched him. Although Libya's Muammar Gadaffi is an outlier in that he made it to 69 before NATO murdered and sodomised him ( we came, we saw, he died ha ha ), no matter which way we look at it, Traoré is living on borrowed time.
Let's look at Traoré's rap sheet to confirm this. Burkina Faso is one of those countries POTUS Trump described, perhaps not inaccurately, as a shithole and Burkina Faso's GDP is certainly in the toilet, with over 80% of the population barely subsisting. Traoré professes to be affronted at that and he has instituted a number of reforms in the medical and infrastructural areas to change all that. He is making education and hospital care free and he has imported heavy machinery, so the Burkinabé can build roads rather than pay French contractors outrageous amounts to pretend to build them.
The roads are important benchmarks as Traoré has pointed out that these gangsters have not even built good roads to the gold mines of Burkina Faso, which is his country's main source of wealth. Burkina Faso currently produces about 57.3 tons of gold a year and Traoré is expanding his government's control over these mines through the state-run Société de Participation Minière du Burkina (SOPAMIB), which recently acquired two gold mines previously owned by the Canadian Endeavour Mining company, and he has plans to nationalise many more such mines, just as the sodomised Gadaffi (foolishly?) nationalised his nation's resources.
Although Burkina Faso is also rich in zinc, copper, manganese and diamonds Traoré, much like Lumumba, Sankara and other African leaders of that stripe before him, feels that the Burkinabé should get a decent part of the proceeds and so, as NATO's Mafia would say, he has to go. To illustrate that death sentence contract, consider this meeting of AFRICOM Commander General Michael Langley reporting to the US Senate that Traoré wishes to use his nation's gold for his own base ends and not for those of the ordinary Burkinabé or, more to the point, of the Canadian, Australian and other NATO companies which are currently living high on the hog at the expense of the impoverished Burkinabé.
Although NATO could conceivably work around Traoré's insolence, his crimes, in NATO's eyes, are magnified by his collusion with other independent-minded leaders in the Sahel. NATO sees the current leaders of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali as dangerous trail blazers, who might just set sub-Saharan Africa on its own independent and sovereign trajectory and that is a situation up with which NATO cannot and will not put.
That is why Ukrainian mercenaries are in Mali, American and Romanian mercenaries and every other devil from hell are in the Congo and why Traoré is at the centre of the mother of all storms. Belgian agro-colonialism remains rampant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Malawi buys 150,000 Kgs of rice from India every year, even though its neighbours, Tanzania and Madagascar, are major rice producers and, if Malawi were to source its rice from them, then that would be a further $175 million that could rotate between the Southern African Development Community (SADC), much as the slain and sodomised Gadaffi envisaged.
Although Traoré seems like a top chap, who is doing the impossible in Burkina Faso, and to coin the old joke, miracles take a little longer than the impossible to perform, were China to lend a hand, Traoré might actually have a chance of succeeding. Trade between China and Burkina Faso is currently negligible, with China selling mainly $40 mn worth of trucks, tractors and motor bikes in exchange for manganese, raw cotton and oily seeds. Though China could easily change that equation to the benefit of both parties, it is doubtful that China has the moral fibre it takes to upset the NATO applecart and that epitomises the threat that AFRICOM poses not only to Traoré, but to all of Africa as well.
AFRICOM's mission is to contain and eventually eliminate the threat Traoré's lot pose to NATO's ongoing scams, the chief of which is to keep Africa subservient to the larger NATO family. Should the Sahel upstarts continue their shenanigans and, for example, should China expand its port facilities in the Côte d'Ivoire's Abidjan, then Traoré, his chums and their compatriots would have a greater chance of getting off Trump's shithole country list and charting their own independent destiny. But, because AFRICOM is charged with smothering Burkina Faso and allied African countries, I cannot see that happening, just as I cannot see Traoré remaining in the land of the living for much longer.
Still, ex Africa aliquid semper novi, from Africa always something new as Pliny the Elder once quipped. And, though Traoré will most likely follow Lumumba and Sankara to an early grave, he and his pals have rekindled a patriotic pan-African movement that NATO will find ever harder to contain and control when other Africans follow the trail blazing path Traoré, Lumumba and Sankara have laid out for them. Though the writing may not be on the wall for AFRICOM in Africa, the architects of their demise already have the chalk in their hands and good on Traoré and the rest of Africa's trail blazers for that.