Back in Burkina and What a Week It Was

It was a blessing that my plane landed at Ouagadougou International Airport at midnight on Tuesday, 28 October and not much later in the week.  News on the American media was sparse.  Emails from the U.S. embassy on Ouaga were much more helpful in filling the many gaps.  I could expect anything from major demonstrations to a near dead calm on the streets.  Thank God it was the latter.

I picked out Jonathan’s face in the crowd as I passed through the vaccination check and infrared early Ebola warning temperature scan.  Jonathan’s familiarity with almost everyone in the capitol city made passage through customs almost a breeze.  Getting through would have been simpler if I had not shown the officials the manifest for the crate containing the cell phone amplifier system I was to install for Wycliffe Associates at the translation center in Ivory Coast.  The manifest included the costs associated with all of the equipment and could have resulted in duty charges if not for some very fast talk from Jonathan.

Jonathan and I parted company in the airport parking lot after filling the bed of my small pickup truck with all the baggage.  Jonathan took off for home on his moto and I warily headed down the dark streets of a nation which was about to chase a very unpopular president out of the country. 

The week following my arrival saw numerous demonstrations, some peaceful and others violent enough for the US embassy to warn expats to “shelter in place.”  The Parliament building, the mayor’s offices, the national television offices, other public buildings, private business, and some homes of targeted family and friends of the soon-to-be-former president were gutted and burned.  Cars we set afire, windows smashed, and some stores were sadly looted.

Barely a week later the president, after considering the better part of valor, took off to visit the Ivory Coast with a small entourage of thirty or so SUVs and a French military escort.   The citizenry celebrated by taking to the streets once more, but in a rush of civility they cleared and cleaned the streets of the reminders of the fits and fires of a few days before.  This is after all “the land of upright men.”

The government has a new interim head, Colonel Isaak Zida who has declined to observe an African Union demand to yield his position to a civilian leader within two weeks of a somewhat indeterminate date.  Talks among an unusually inclusive group of players have so far garnered sufficient patience if not confidence to allow life in Ouaga to return to some degree of normalcy.  People have returned to their jobs, bars and schools are open, the curfew is limited to midnight to 5:00am, and conversations in the street are more frequently are about topics other than what some view as a people’s revolution.

Even from my limited view, there is something encouragingly different going on here in Burkina.  There is optimism that the nation is at an historic and pivotal juncture, especially for a poor, developing country whose fortunes rise and fall with the price of cotton and the quantity of rainfall.  This is a popular and inclusive change in leadership.  Burkina enjoys some unique opportunities to start anew without the burden of a presidential power structure older than half the population.

Inertia is on Burkina’s side as long as the road to a consensus, civilian government is not too long and as long as the culture of nepotism dies with the Compaoré power structure.  The opportunity to forge a new popular democratic government is hers to lose in this what may very well prove to be the land of upright government.