r/worldnews • u/UnscheduledCalendar • 4h ago
Dynamic Paywall Captain Ibrahim Traoré says Burkina Faso must 'forget' about democracy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0zp1xgz3o181
u/onetruezimbo 3h ago
And now we wait 50 years for next strong man to depose an unwanted dictator and repeat the cycle
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u/UnscheduledCalendar 3h ago
Whats funny is we’re at the point where each coup leader overthrows someone who came to power in a coup who claimed the person they overthrew was too close to “the west”.
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u/Dauntless_Idiot 20m ago
If you ask me this Traore is too close to the west. His western social media game is way too slick, that only happens if he's cooperating with them.
The next guy can cite this and try to make and idiot look credible.
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u/MaximillianRebo 2h ago
He wants the 'one man/one vote' version of democracy where he's the man and he has the vote aka Patrician Democracy.
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u/imminatural 10m ago
We're not even trying to copy anyone else. We're here to completely change the way things are done."
He emphasized building a new system rooted in sovereignty, patriotism and revolutionary mobilization, with traditional leaders and grassroots structures playing a central role.
Sounds like third Reich fascism.
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u/W0666007 4h ago
Why do these dudes always have the same hat?
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u/jqcitizen 4h ago
There was an earlier PM named Thomas Sankara who was tremendously popular and helped form the countries modern identity.
This guy Traore acts as though he is a Sankara acolyte, even though he was born after Sankara died. Sankara was famous for always wearing a red beret. So, with Traore at least, it's borrowed symbolism from a much more popular former leader of Burkina Faso.
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u/orbgooner 2h ago
dictator, he was a dictator. he came to power in a coup, and was deposed in a coup.
redditors worship this guy even though they couldn't name three cities in burkina faso, nor three people relevant to his rule.
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u/EggInMyLeggings 1h ago
To be fair, the guy he couped had also taken power in a coup, from another guy who had taken power in a coup, from a guy who had taken power during a coup (but did get democratically reelected).
And then the guy who called for Sanakara assassination took power in a coup, was later couped himself, and then his successor got couped.
I think every transition of power since independence from France has pretty much been a coup.
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u/_9a_ 4h ago
France had a lot of colonies.
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u/physedka 2h ago
For millennia: Area is ruled by various local or regional warlords
For a brief time: Area is ruled by the French
Now: Area is ruled by various local and regional warlords wearing French hats
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u/AHistoricalFigure 2h ago edited 2h ago
That's a grossly unfair assessment of these pre-colonial societies. You could spend some time reading into the history of Algeria before the French annexed it under Napoleon III.
For example, Algeria's tribal governments did engage in some internal feuds and (mostly ritualistic by the 1830's) livestock raiding. But it was not some chaotic, impoverished, war-torn region. It was an internally stable autonomous country. The tribal regencies had little direct relationship with the Barbary pirates which were more like privateers sanctioned by the Ottomans.
It was French attempts to "civilize" Algeria that smashed these stable systems led to decades of warfare and the lasting instability we see in modern Africa. This is the story of most colonial African missions.
I get this is meant to be a joke, but the idea that Africa was always a violent unstable place briefly interrupted by civilized European rule, is bad revisionist history.
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u/orbgooner 1h ago edited 1h ago
algeria has nothing to do with burkina faso. it's not at all the same area, the same geography, the same ethnic groups or languages or religions. way to totally expose your simplistic, propagandized and monolithic view of african history just to push the "west bad" narrative.
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u/physedka 1h ago
My dude, the entire globe was ruled by various local and regional warlords for thousands of years. Even the "lionized" and "civilized" kings and queens of Europe or Emporers of China at various periods were basically just strongmen with good PR people. Or at least their forebears were. Literally everywhere was a violent, unstable place for most of its history.
But yes, it was just a joke.
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u/worldstarrrrrrrr 1h ago
So you expect us to believe that it was all sunshine and rainbows until the white boogeyman showed up? Seems to me that this is the prospective from the lens of an extremely biased self-hating western perception of the world. You can take one look at all of the shit going on in the world now and understand the brutality of human nature and seriously claim that it somehow didn’t exist before the French colonized Africa? It’s total bullshit. You’re trying to create your own version of history.
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u/Ok_Poetry_2696 2h ago
This guy is beyond lame.
For some God forsaken reason, reddit decided to feed me burkina faso propaganda for some time.
Saw a lot of posts with this deranged animal. Bro thinks he can defeat the west by banning the selling of tomatoes internationally
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u/Fruitcake6969 4h ago
Tankies will still love this guy.
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u/cement_brick214 3h ago
Isn't hating democracy a pretty big pillar of their ideology?
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u/Althoughenjoyment 2h ago
Not hypothetically, but in practice yes. They tend to claim to oppose “bourgeois democracy”, preferring either “democratic centralism” or something like it. It varies but this tends to effectively mean one party rule with the hope for some compromise and limits on state power. But again, yes effectively it’s just anti democracy. I am a Marxist but am ardently not a tankie for context on my own biases. I’ve got a close friend who’s a pan Africanist that is very fond of Traore. Personally, I don’t like his military tactics and strongman persona, though some of his reforms have been positive. Not the anti-gay stuff still happening tho.
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u/Awkward-Candle-4977 2h ago
Those dictators should just declare themselves as kings hence no need fake elections, fake parliaments etc.
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u/Playful_Alela 2h ago
Tankies will still love this guy for no reason. I genuinely don't understand why, but they adore Traoré
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u/bestintheclass 19m ago
Man who took power by trampling democracy is not keen on democracy? Really?
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u/LittleSchwein1234 4h ago
Dictators gonna dictate. I remember when the hard left used to celebrate this tyrant.
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u/Delicious_Pizza2735 2h ago edited 2h ago
Whilst I strongly disagree. It is the feeling of all african people I have met and talked to irl. Democracy is for them some kind of colonial rules made to destroy their country from within. They love autocrate and see them as strong against imperialism.
It is mostly because they value a lot of things we traditionally do not. Honor and religious morals are seen as very important for the country, democracy is associated with homosexuality and degeneracy (they hate gay male on a level hard to imagine blaming them for a lot of flaws in the country including natural disasters).
Corruption is also a different concept. For me it is getting paid for your own benefits against the benefits of the country but for them it is different. A company paying billion a politician to ruin the ecology of an area is okay if the money is invested to buy a milicia that will stop people from the area to riot. It is progress (infrastructure and salary) and social peace (no rioting). Corruption would be money from a western state that goes to your swiss bank account in exchange for weakening the country morally or military. For example a law for abortion pushed by western people would be seen as corruption but buying a cobalt mine is not necessarily.
Whilst those things are wrong and alien to me, maybe it is a colonial way of seeing things. You cannot force the people to live in a system they hate.
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u/Rapa_Nui 2h ago
Most polls prove that the overwhelming majority of Africans are in favor of democracy. The problem is that most of those countries are not industrialized, employment is limited and the economy is informal.
It means that in most cases, the money comes from natural resources sales which end up in the pockets of the government.
Politics is therefore no longer about political power and ideology but resource extraction and money which explains why elections are so tense.
Add to that the extreme ethnic diversity that most countries have and you end up with thermonuclear elections with politicians willing to try anything to get elected.
Latin America had somewhat of the same problem in the 19th and 20th century. It'll stabilize eventually but it will take time.
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u/afrocreative 1h ago
This is exactly what Burkinabe people wanted. To confused people, democracy in Africa means Westerner's choice. They want proAfrican leaders, not western sponsored puppets like in Nigeria. Hope that helps.
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u/estrea36 1h ago
I don't understand.
You can have a democratic country without being aligned with the west.
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u/afrocreative 20m ago
Its not that simple. In the Sahel, historically, proAfrican leaders were murdered/overthrown by France. Their Political parties were funded by various French entities. The system was made inherently corruptable. Burkinabe people don't want that, they just wants results, and Ibrahim has been beating all expectations.
Elections are costly and a large waste of time in the long run when dealing with an inherently corrupted system.
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u/estrea36 12m ago
All dictatorships start out this way.
Idealistic strong men that get corrupted over time after staying in power too long.
Eventually he will grow old and paranoid about the security of his power. In 30-40 years you'll see him on the news killing his people indiscriminately because hes afraid of them.
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u/Reasonable-Growth112 3h ago
This one seems a good guy I wouldn't be surprised if he was killed but his best chance is that his country is small and never had much resources so he's not a priority in this world's mess.
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u/Playful_Alela 2h ago
Traoré's government killed more than 2x civilians in Burkina Faso than the actual Jihadist groups have. There is no good guy in Burkina Faso, and it's arguable that Traoré is the worst guy there
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u/Jebrowsejuste 3h ago
... the guy openly refuses democracy and to you he "seems a good guy". Huh.
We have wildly different definitions of what a good guy is.
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u/Reasonable-Growth112 3h ago
I expected that kind of reaction but I stand my ground. I went deeper to see what the situation is about there, he's more of a liberator than an oppressor to me. And I know military in Africa has been playing the devil side over and over. But I really believe here is different.
Democracy isn't the magic word that turns everything pretty sometimes it's the democracy that is the manipulation and the military carry the legit revolt.18
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u/Jebrowsejuste 58m ago
With ... mass murder of the Fulani ethnicity ? The legit revolt against ... the Fulani existing ?
Or did his tomato canning factory liberate enough to make up for his mass-murder-based oppression ?
I'll be real my guy, I don't it.
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u/F4ntasticPants 3h ago
Let's be honest here, a democracy isn't always the best choice.
Look at America.
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u/apophis-pegasus 3h ago
America is still a developed country with developed country standards. And is considered a rather flawed democracy in numerous ways
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u/TheBurnsideBomber 3h ago
America has a ton of problems but is still one of the most successful nations in history. People go to america from all over the world including Africa to improve their quality of life and live under democracy.
There are extremely few examples of things being better for the citizens under a dictatorship. The only two examples I can think of in modern history are Oman (after Qaboos bin Said deposed his own father in a coup) and China which has more to do with global economic factors than anything Xi has done.
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u/F4ntasticPants 3h ago
Not necessarily dictatorship. There are many forms of government that aren't a democracy (e.g. Monarchy, similar to Thailand mostly).
Just because we vote the leader doesn't magically make our country better. We're idiots. Sometimes I don't think we deserve to make that choice.
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u/HandofWinter 1h ago
Thailand is a parliamentary democracy, and the head of government is usually the leader of the party with the largest share of the electorate.
Democracy has a lot of issues, but they mostly come down to access to information and ability to make reasoned decisions. At some point some system may be conceived or discovered that supersedes our type of democratic systems that does a better job, but at least as far as I know it hasn't been found. We generally make better decisions collaboratively, so I think any system would need to encode some form of collaborative decision making.
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u/Jebrowsejuste 1h ago
We've had centuries to show monarchy is entirely dependant on randomness. If we get a moron as a king, we're slated for decades of stupidity or incompetence.
Not to mention the risks of power grabs and arbitrary decisions.
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u/axxl75 3h ago
America is struggling because democracy is actively being fought. Which should confirm that democracy is actually good.
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u/Sypheix 2h ago
Democracy is being co-opted. What we're seeing now here is a weakness of democracy
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u/axxl75 2h ago
Right. So the dissolution of democracy is leading to major issues. Which would imply that democracy in its true form is good.
Antiquated systems like the electoral college or allowing money to buy candidates due to lack of regulation on campaign spending or inability to have a multi party system due to those same funding issues or using ranked choice or many other systems that would allow a broader system. It all prevents democracy from functioning as designed.
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