I wasn’t a fan of Traore or any of the other two Sahelian heads of state until France came into the picture. France has always been the same old, ugly-faced monster masked as a helper, one that is behind most of Africa’s longest or deadliest conflicts and underdevelopment.
As a good student of history, I know France too well, and I know her many atrocious deeds in the Black world.
She keeps Africa down and divided for exploitation. With her greedy allies, France, within a space of 60 years, destroyed Haiti, a 95 per cent Black nation. France never lets go of her former colonies. She is a leech on their resources, without which she could have been a distant Third World nation (apologies for using this dated terminology).
The moment Traore began to take a hardline posture against France, he gradually warmed his way into my heart. Not long after, Tchiani of Niger and Goita of Mali came through as well. I began to appreciate them for their anti-imperialist views and actions.
My ‘African Politics’ classes in the United States, for two sessions, were dominated by critiques, discussions and projects by my students on the visions, deeds and policies of these three men.
The students became fascinated by the discovery that there is an emerging class of capable leaders with exploits that were once considered impossible in a much demonised continent dismissed as a labyrinth of doom.
But for some inexplicable reason, I didn’t totally trust Ibrahim Traore. His images and videos, many of them AI-generated, are all over the internet. 80 per cent of the information is fantasies or wishful thinking.
I saw more propaganda in the content, and one of my students brilliantly pointed out the same oddity.
Traore, unlike his two fellow presidents, likes to make a show of every situation, project a larger-than-life image, some emergent power, and a reincarnation of Thomas Sankara.
Photo credit: Alain MINGAM / GAMMA-RAPHO
While I admire his character and rare brilliance, charismatic qualities, and acknowledge his revolutionary policies in Burkina Faso, I see him as a polarising figure.
Unlike Sankara, whom he claims to relive, Traore is divisive. Sankara sought African unity, pursuing the deepening of integration among African states and ECOWAS in particular.
Traore seeks schism, insulation and exclusion, as demonstrated by the Sahelian states’ pullout from ECOWAS and parts of the AES. He was the brain behind the decision, and it was he who strongly opposed Niger’s return to ECOWAS when efforts were made frantically to bring it back in.
Unlike Sankara, Traore treats West Africa with suspicion and disrespect. Sankara believed that making fundamental change meant being within the system and working hard to persuade everyone.
Traore prefers “secession” or separation and the tearing apart of an integrating sub-region. His vision and approach appear to favour coups that take down legitimate governments and then connect with military leadership to build a rival regional bloc. Traore hardly engages other leaders, except the president of Ghana and his Malian and Nigerien counterparts. He reaches out more to Russia and China than to any other African nation.
Traore is the most influential among the three AES leaders, and he surely knows how to pull the strings. He is behind their strength and resolve to stay away from the rest of West Africa.
Guinea, led by a military president who had been one of the group, left quietly more than a year ago for reasons not yet disclosed. It could be due to contrasting visions or the overbearing nature of one of the leaders, most probably Traore.
On the misadventure involving the Nigerian military aircraft C-130, as expected, Traore has used it to show off and appeal to his base, mostly African youth, that he is a defiant and strong leader. The internet has exploded once again with the news, with “Intervlog”, Traore’s alter ego, and others awash with narratives about how he is dealing with the so-called Giant of Africa. This opportunity could not have come at a better time, coming just days after Nigeria showcased its power in Benin. As neighbours, and considering what Nigeria has always represented in Africa, a unifier and protector of sub-regional stability, the emergency plane landing in Bobo-Dioulasso should never have escalated to this point. Even a non-African state would have handled the issue in a more measured manner. But as expected, and as always, Traore chose to make a meal of it.
Ibrahim Traore is no doubt a great guy, charismatic, intellectually sound, knowledgeable about African history, and fluent in foreign languages.
You will like him for his youthfulness and wisdom. But he is far removed from what his role model, Thomas Sankara, represented in terms of bringing Africans together on a larger scale.
- Prof Folarin, a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Future of Knowledge, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, teaches politics at Texas State University, United States.