Burkina Faso: The Rise of a Nation That Said No to the West

In a world shaped by quiet subjugation and subtle control, Burkina Faso is roaring back, loud, unapologetic, and uncompromising.

This small West African nation, once dismissed as a “failed state,” is flipping the imperial script with surgical precision. In under five years, it has expelled French troops, rejected IMF loans, nationalized foreign-owned mines, powered cities with solar energy, and rolled out its own line of electric vehicles.

How?

At the center of this transformation is 37-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Africa’s youngest head of state and arguably the West’s newest geopolitical headache. Once a dusty pawn in France’s post-colonial chessboard, Burkina Faso is today a defiant voice in global geopolitics. And it’s not just about one man, it’s about what he represents: a continent done with dependency.

And it’s not just about one man, it’s about what he represents: a continent done with dependency.

The man who makes the West squirm

Since taking power in September 2022, Traoré has reportedly survived at least 19 assassination attempts. The targets were real. The message was clear.

Why? Because he’s dangerous, to the status quo.

He is young, military-trained, and ideologically focused. He speaks not in diplomatic pleasantries, but in the language of sovereignty, dignity, and pride. Through social media and grassroots broadcasts, his words reach far beyond his borders, inspiring a new generation of African youth. He has no interest in being legitimized by Paris or Washington.

Instead, he’s forging new alliances, with Mali, Niger, Guinea, and Russia, under the Alliance of Sahel States, a regional bloc anchored in self-defense, resource control, and African-led governance.

The threat is so real that Traoré has publicly said: “They want me dead, not because I failed, but because I refused to kneel.”

From French Colony to IMF Laboratory

France colonized Burkina Faso, then Upper Volta, in 1896. It extracted gold, cotton, and labor, and left behind a hollowed state by 1960. But even after independence, France’s grip never loosened. It continued to dominate the economy through control of the CFA franc, foreign mining contracts, and military presence under the guise of “counterterrorism.”
For decades, Burkina Faso lived in a loop: coups, Western aid, IMF austerity, repeat. Structural adjustment programs slashed health and education spending while protecting elite interests. Meanwhile, French and Canadian companies extracted over 60,000 kilograms of gold annually by 2024, while most Burkinabè remained in poverty.

The Black President the West can’t control

When Traoré, a little-known military captain, ousted the French-aligned regime in September 2022, it wasn’t just a change of leadership; it was a rupture. Traoré didn’t just challenge the West rhetorically. He has done it operationally.

But Traoré didn’t stop at regime change. He launched a revolution, not with slogans, but with blueprints.

• He expelled French troops.
  He rejected IMF loans, calling them “modern-day slavery.”
  He told foreign donors to stop building mosques and start building factories.

As he bluntly put it in a widely circulated interview, “Don’t bring us aid. Bring us ownership. We’ll run the manufacturing facilities ourselves.”

The revolution was basic, but radical

Captain Ibrahim Traoré didn’t arrive with billion-dollar bailouts or corporate mega-deals.
He did the basics. Just the basics. But in a region sabotaged by centuries of extraction and dependency, doing the basics was revolutionary.

He focused on nation-building, community-building, and economic development. He prioritized education over military spending, science over religion, manufacturing over dependency, and agriculture over mining. He focused on food security, community empowerment through small businesses, and natural resources conservation through sustainable agriculture practices, mining with a plan, and self-sustenance through local production of goods. He beefed up government services to provide basic needs such as healthcare, education, and electricity. He ripped the governance of corruption and financial misappropriation.

• Education over war: In 2023, after cutting defense ties with France, Burkina Faso expanded investments in education. The government launched school meal programs, restored rural classrooms with solar power, and increased funding for universities and technical institutes by over 40%. The goal: produce engineers, not aid recipients.
• Science over religion: When Gulf donors offered to build 200 mosques, Traoré refused. “We don’t need more mosques. We need factories,” he said. In 2024 alone, more than 500 local technicians were trained in solar energy and electric vehicle manufacturing. New training centers in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso are preparing youth for careers in electric vehicle production, renewable energy, and light manufacturing.
  • Solar power and electricity: In 2021, only 19% of Burkina Faso had access to electricity. By 2025, solar plants like Zagtouli (33 MW), Kodeni (38 MW), and Zina (26.6 MW) added over 150 MW of clean energy capacity. Off-grid solar microgrids began powering rural health clinics, schools, and small businesses.
  • Homegrown EVs: In 2025, Burkina Faso launched the ITAOUA, a 100% solar-powered electric car designed and built locally. With a range of 330 km, it’s a symbol of national pride and proof that the country doesn’t need to import the future, it can build it.
• Agriculture over mining: Traoré didn’t abandon mining, but he demanded it work for the people. From 2023 to 2025, food production increased by 30%, driven by subsidies for seeds, solar irrigation, and rural cooperatives. Over 200,000 smallholders received access to off-grid storage and market access. New mining licenses now require community benefit clauses and environmental accountability.
• Governance: In just two years, over 900 government officials were investigated for corruption. A special audit unit was established to oversee public procurement and natural resource management. Government presence in rural areas increased by over 40%, restoring trust in basic public services like healthcare, water, and education.
• Gold and sovereignty: A national gold refinery, opened in 2024, now allows Burkina Faso to process its own mineral wealth for the first time. Traoré is also moving to nationalize foreign-run mines, ensuring profits stay within the country instead of being siphoned off.
• Healthcare: Under Traoré, the government launched solar-powered mobile clinics offering maternal care, HIV testing, and cancer screenings, especially in areas where health services were once only available through foreign NGOs.

Traoré’s genius wasn’t in declaring independence. It was in making it visible, through food on tables, light in homes, teachers in classrooms, and factories run by Burkinabè hands.

In a world where many leaders chase headlines and foreign handshakes, Traoré chose something rare: he governed, he turned sovereignty from an abstract concept into a lived experience.

And that, more than anything, is what shook the West: a leader who didn’t beg for recognition but built a system that couldn’t be ignored.

Contrast this with Pakistan, where the state has long been held hostage by a toxic mix of religious extremism, foreign debt, and military-first governance. Decades of IMF bailouts, military compromise, and external dependencies have left the nation politically unstable, economically shackled, and branded as an eternal beggar.

Wise Traoré saw that trap, and refused to walk into it. Instead, he turned down aid with strings. He demanded partnerships with ownership. And, he rebuilt his nation by starting where others wouldn’t, at the roots.

The voice the West can’t silence

Burkina Faso’s revolution isn’t just political. It’s cultural. It’s generational. It’s viral.

Across Africa and the Global South, Traoré is no longer just a president. He’s become a symbol of what’s possible when sovereignty is not for sale.

The age of silence is over. The Global South is speaking. And Ibrahim Traoré is the voice the West can’t shut down.

What Correctly Defines Pan-Africanism in 2025 and Beyond

Since its initial organizational expression in 1900, the phrase Pan-Africanism has been expressed in many different forms.  For some, its current meaning is defined as unity between all people of African descent across the world.  For others, Pan-Africanism is an ideology defined by nebulous elements of the type of unity previously described.  For still many others, Pan-Africanism is represented by social media famous individuals who claim Pan-Africanism as a set of beliefs without any clear defining criteria.

For those of us who identify Pan-Africanism not as an ideology, but as an objective, we define Pan-Africanism as the total liberation and unification of Africa under a continental wide scientific socialist government.  This is the framework for revolutionary Pan-Africanists who endorse the concepts of Pan-Africanism laid out by the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, and others.  The reasons we humbly, yet firmly, advance one unified socialist Africa as really the only serious definition of Pan-Africanism are connected to dialectical and historical materialism.  By dialectical and historical materialism we mean the historical components that define matter and the conflictual elements that transform that matter.  In other words, the history of a thing and the forces that have come to shape that thing’s characteristics over time.

For example, for African people (“All people of African descent are African and belong to the African nation” – Kwame Nkrumah – “Class Struggle in Africa), the reason we live on three continents and the Caribbean in large numbers in 2025 is not the result of higher desire on our part to see the world.  It’s not because God placed people who look like us in every corner of the planet.  The only reason is because colonialism and slavery exploited Africa’s human and material resources to build up the wealth of the Western capitalist world.  As a result of this irrefutable reality, it makes zero sense in 2025 for African people to imitate the logic of other people in defining ourselves based solely upon where we are born.

This approach is illogical because African people were kidnapped from Africa and spread across the world.  Even the Africans who left Africa on their own to live in the Western industrialized countries, did so only because colonialism made the resources they seek unavailable in Africa.  Consequently, an African in Brazil can and does have biological relatives in the Dominican Republic, Canada, Portugal, the U.S., etc.  These people will most likely never meet and even if they came across each other, they probably could not communicate due to language barriers, but none of this changes the cold stark reality that they could easily be related.  So, it makes no sense for Africans to accept colonial borders to define ourselves i.e. “I’m Jamaican and have no connection to Black people in the U.S., etc.”

Secondly, and more important, wherever African people are in 2025, we are at the bottom of that society.  The reasons for this are not that there is something wrong with African people or that we don’t work hard enough and don’t have ambition.  Anyone who has arisen at 5am on any day in Africa knows those conceptions of African people are bogus.  Any bus depot at that time of morning shows thousands of people up, hustling, struggling to begin the day trying to earn resources for their families.  The real reason we are on the bottom everywhere is because the capitalist system was built on exploiting our human and material resources.  As a result, capitalism today cannot function without that exploitation.  In other words, in order for DeBeers Diamonds to remain the largest diamond producer on earth, African people in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Azania (South Africa), etc., must continue to be viciously exploited to produce the diamonds.  Its this system that has made the zionist state of Israel one of the world’s main diamond polishing economies despite the fact diamond mines don’t exist in occupied Palestine (Israel).  Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Hershey, Godiva, Nestle, etc., all rely on similar exploitative systems that steal African resources and labor to continue to produce riches for those multinational corporations while the masses of African people die young from black lung, mining these resources, often by hand.

Meanwhile, since the wealth of capitalism is dependent upon this system of exploitation to continue uninterrupted, the mechanisms of the capitalist system have to ensure that African people are prohibited from waking up to this reality.  Thus, the maintenance of systems of oppression to keep the foot of the system firmly placed on the necks of African people everywhere.  Whether its police, social services, etc., this is true. This exploitation marks the origin of the problem, and therefore, logically, it is also where the solution must be addressed. In other words, while we can recognize that the consequences of this exploitation have global dimensions, we cannot expect the problem to be resolved solely through actions taken outside of Africa, such as in the U.S. or elsewhere.

All of the above explains why one unified socialist Africa has to be the only real definition for Pan-Africanism.  Capitalism, as the driving force behind the exploitation of Africa and the global African diaspora, cannot serve as the solution to the suffering it has created. Instead, Africa’s vast resources—including its 600 million hectares of arable land, its immense mineral wealth, and the collective potential of its people—must be reorganized into ways to eradicate poverty and disease, including

Ways to educate all who need education to increase the skills to solve these problems. And, in accomplishing all of this, our pride as African people based upon our abilities to govern our own lives, coupled with the necessity for others to respect us for the same, eliminates the constant disrespect – internal and external – which defines African existence today.

This Pan-Africanist reality will eliminate the scores of African people who are ashamed of their African identity overnight.  Now, what we will see is those same people clamoring to instantly become a part of the blossoming African nation.

Revolutionary Pan-Africanism cannot be mistaken in 2025 as a pipe dream or simply the hopes of Africans everywhere.  Building capacity for this reality is the actual on the ground work that many genuinely revolutionary Pan-Africanist organizations are engaging in on a daily basis.  The work to forge that collective unity based upon the principles cited by people like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Robert Sobukwe, Lumumba, Marcus Garvey, Amy/Amy Jacques Garvey, Carmen Peirera, etc.  Principles of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism.,the Revolutionary African Personality articulated by Nkrumah, the understanding of how to build political party structures as documented by Ture,the understanding of the role of culture in guiding our actions as expressed by Cabral, etc., and many of these types of cultural and principle approaches to building society have been seen in recent times through the work of the former Libyan Jamihiriya and what’s currently happening in the Sahel region.  These efforts will only increase and become even more mass in character.

We challenge a single person to express why revolutionary Pan-Africanism is not what’s needed for African people. Not just as one of many ideas, but as the single objective that would address all of our collective problems.  Hearing and seeing no one who can refute that statement, the next step is how we collectively increase African consciousness around the necessity to contribute to on the ground Pan-African work.  The first step is getting people to see the importance of getting involved in organized struggle.  The second step is ensuring that those organizations have institutionalized, consistent, ideological training as a priority.

To seriously embark upon this work brings no individual recognition.  It brings no prestige.  It requires a clear focus and a commitment to detail, but what it will produce is an ever increasing capacity that will one day manifest itself in the type of revolutionary Pan-Africanism described here that will fulfill the aspirations of African people everywhere while placing us in the position to contribute to all peace and justice pursuing struggles across the planet earth.

Ahjamu Umi is revolutionary organizer with the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, adviser, and liberation literature author.

source: Hood Communist

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=19219

Now is the Time for All Anti-Imperialists and All Justice Loving People to Stand Unequivocally in Defense of Burkina Faso

It is no surprise to the Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) Africa Team and U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) that aggression is stepping up against the countries in the anti-imperialist Alliance of Sahel States. This was reflected in the flagrantly baseless accusations against Burkina Faso’s leader Ibrahim Traoré. On April 3, 2025, U.S. AFRICOM Commander Michael Langley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee and claimed without evidence that interim President Traoré is misusing the country’s gold mineral wealth in exchange for protection. Langley provided no details on how these supposed exchanges are carried out or from what Traoré needs protection.

The imperialist modus operandi is at play here and starts with demonizing and criminalizing the leader of a country as the war propaganda pretext for more direct intervention. We have seen this script before. Commander-In-Chief of Economic Fighters League of Ghana and Steering Committee member of the USOAN, Ernesto Yeboah refutes the liberal framing meant to arrest dissent against what is at stake:

“This is not about military vs. civilian rule. This is about imperialism vs. liberation. This is about Africans standing up — finally — and saying: Hands off Africa.”

The BAP Africa Team and USOAN are heeding the call emanating across Africa to unite in defense of Burkina Faso. And we further call on all anti-imperialist forces around the world, especially Black forces, to sound the alarm and publicly denounce these designs before this all too familiar strategy takes root. In 2011, Black anti-imperialist forces were unable to effectively counter the heinous plan of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination to destroy the revolutionary Pan-Africanist nation of Libya. BAP’s USOAN refuses to allow this fatal mistake to be repeated.

This time the complicity of silence by ECOWAS, the African Union, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the African (Black) comprador class around the world must be exposed.

This is a pivotal time for the struggle against imperialism in Africa. The emergence of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and the revolutionary example of self-determination being set by the people of Burkina Faso represents a historic breakthrough for Pan-Africanism that the U.S. and NATO have been eager to eliminate. The U.S./EU/NATO axis is desperate to re-colonize Burkina Faso and to halt any further influence across Africa set by the example of the Alliance of Sahel States. What the U.S is angling to undermine is a popular process of decolonization.

Under President Traoré’s leadership, Burkina Faso has advanced toward food sovereignty, established a national gold refinery, and taken critical steps to reclaim its resources for the benefit of its people. The vague and opportunistic accusations issued by AFRICOM are designed to undermine these gains and set the stage for imperialist subversion. When U.S. officials speak of “strategic interests,” they mean the unfettered right to plunder Africa’s mineral wealth, dominate markets, and exploit African labor, all without the consent of African peoples. We must not allow the absurdity of the U.S. and NATO, currently complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, to pose as moral arbiters in Africa.

BAP and USOAN call on all anti-imperialist forces to join in active defense of Burkina Faso, demand the expulsion of AFRICOM from the continent, and ensure that no African nation suffers the fate that befell Libya in 2011.

The time to act is now!

source: Black Alliance for Peace

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18926