Stay Awake for the Vote

Returned to Ouagadougou to cover what may be the most difficult assignment of my freelance career thus far: how to turn a deadly dull election into a compelling story about the ins and outs of African politics.

Less than a week after Liberians voted in the continent’s first woman – as much a surprise to them as the rest of the world – Burkina is displaying all the politic tendencies that paints Africa as the model of political regression, where big men with big guns, big ambitions, big streaks of malevolence and little brains, sympathy or human decency rule by fear, intimidation and oppression.

The city is literally awash in the green, red and yellow campaign photo of Blaise Compaore, the military leader who took power 18 years ago. There are billboards, signboards, placards, posters, framed portraits, yellow and white T-shirts, black and white ball caps, watches and scarves. Women and men wear entire outfits fashioned out of material with Compaore’s portrait woven into the fabric. Buses, cars, taxis, even bicycles and mobylettes, are plastered with posters saying “Votez Blaise Compaore.”

Compaore is the sort of man who’s a throwback, the Idi Amin figure who’s more interested in making himself and his friends comfortable than doing anything for his country, who pops up on the world’s radar screen every now and again in an attempt to improve his image.

For nearly two decades, Burkina, a dustbowl on the edge of the Sahara, packed with gentle, sophisticated round-faced creative types who adore proper cinema – not the trash produced hastily in Nigeria – and make incredible music, has hovered at the bottom of nearly every development index produced.

If it weren’t for the Burkinabe, the country would have no redeeming qualities. There are no forests, no water, no coastlines or lakes, no fish, no arable land, no high quality herds, no diamonds, little gold, no oil or bauxite or any other minerals the world longs for, no industry to speak of. A flour mill and sugar refinery in the Banfora region both went bankrupt. All farming is subsistence; the cotton industry limps along with handouts of donor aid. Literacy is about 20 per cent, employment is staggeringly high and the country is seriously overpopulated, with most of its residents under the age of 15.

Yet there has been an enormous amount of fighting between people who want to own the place: between 1980 and 1987 alone there were five coups, each fairly bloody. The most notable feature army captain Thomas Sankara, whose Marxist-Leninist leanings have been remembered well in history, as a progressive thinking that saw enough doctors for each rural village, 350 new schools built and government corruption cut.

It was Sankara’s promise that he would open his bank accounts to public scrutiny that was the start of his undoing. Skimming from the government’s coffers was a well-honoured tradition amongst most Africa leaders and Sankara’s supporters were not about to let utopian ideals get in the way of the easy life they envisioned.

So in 1987, Compaore, who had helped bring Sankara to power and had served as his minister of state, enlisted two more army men to organize another coup. Sankara and 12 of his aides were rounded up and executed. (Two years later, Compaore had his comrades arrested and killed.)

By 2000, a constitution was put in place, one that allowed for a multi-party state and a fairly free press. But the reality was much different than the document suggested. Of the two men who challenged Compaore for the presidency in his first election, one was murdered and the other was attacked and seriously injured. The press was muzzled; in fact, a well-known journalist was burned to death.

The next election hardly fared any better. Only a quarter of all eligible Burkinabe voted, since campaign irregularities, including intimidation and threats, had caused all of the other parties to boycott the election. (There are some 100 registered political parties in Burkina, some with no more than a handful of members.) There was only one other competitor, a candidate named Ram Ouedraogo, who used to be a showbiz manager.

This time around, Compaore enlisted the help of the Supreme Court to hold onto his presidency, since the constitution clearly states no one can seek a third term. But Compaore argued, successfully, that since the constitution came into effect after he was last elected president, it shouldn’t apply retroactively.

Ouedraogo is running again, under the banner of the Green Party and on a platform of development through environmental protection. He sees doom in the brush fires that are deliberately set in Burkina’s tall grasses at the end of each rainy season. He knows there is already not enough rain and climate change is only going to make things worse. He speaks of job creation through recycling plants and production of new forms of energy, like combustible brickettes that use recycled materials and produce no smoke.

Very esoteric stuff for a population that is largely illiterate.

All the same, Ouedraogo said he saw “total misery” when he campaigned in Burkina’s sparse countryside. While Ouagadougou is a relative oasis of gardens, museums, restaurants and cinemas, the rural towns are clusters of crumbling mudhuts, baked under a relentless sun that has killed all their crops for the past three years.

Last year, when locusts descended, the world heard about starvation in Niger and Mali. Burkina Faso, which is sandwiched between them, also saw several thousand people die of hunger. When they needed it most, the millions in donor money that flows into Burkina each year failed to reach them.

Voters were probably thinking about that neglect when Compaore’s helicopters reached their dried out towns. He came carrying gifts: the T-shirts, ball caps and handkerchiefs so ubiquitous in the city, worn in such great quantities, one would think Compaore was a popular, well-loved guy.

Ouedraogo is confident it’s all a façade. Voters are afraid, he said, and they feel intimidated and oppressed.

“These people are very poor. Very poor! If you give them a T-shirt, they’re going to wear it,” he told me.

“That’s not engagement, that’s not politics, that’s just clothes.”

“He’s used these things to corrupt these people, in order to get them to vote for him,” adds his campaign manager, Yabre Hermann.

Local journalist Jean Ky, who provided media training to a handful of the 12 candidates vying for president, calls the tactic “empty belly politics.”

There are rumours that Compaore spent billions of CFA on his campaign, flying five helicopters and two planes all over the country to distribute off his image-laden graft, occasionally dropping a few million CFA to local councils and making promises to re-open privatized and bankrupted salt refineries and flour mills.

(It’s unlikely there are even five helicopters in the country, but judging by the amount of Compaore T-shirts and ball caps on display in the capital alone, the campaign budget was clearly high.)

Despite Compaore’s dismal record, weary voters remember well the violent struggle for power in the 1980s and say they have no viable alternative. The opposition is so fractured and weak, even the two coalition parties couldn’t agree on a single candidate and instead, they each submitted three.

The desperation to stay president is largely fuelled by Compaore’s dirty hands, Ouedraogo said.

“He’s worried that if he’s no longer president, they’ll come after him for killing all those people,” he said.

While he may be easily, if not ethically, returned to the office, he will have to deal with the growing unrest of a hungry population that has seen the riches of his campaign.

He’ll also have to appease the more than 300,000 Burkinabe who were expelled from Cote D’Ivoire, as part of that country’s campaign to cleanse itself of all but “pure” Ivoirians, one that has led to civil war. Compaore did little to quell the racial overtones coming from his country’s biggest trading partner and some saw his pronouncements as fuel for the fire.

The two countries have a long, imbalanced relationship, with Cote D’Ivoire’s rich mining and cocoa plantations providing jobs to Burkinabe, who propped up the economy with their remittances to family.

Now, with exiles returning in droves with little more than suitcases, there is even more poverty.

Still, the chances of being toppled are dim, yet Compaore is pulling out all the stops. He has even barred a Burkinabe human rights group from monitoring the elections, claiming they failed to make an application for observer status before the deadline.

Yet Fako Bruno Ouattara, national coordinator of the MBDHP, the French acronym for the group, pulls out several copies of the letter sent to the national elections commission, dated well before the October deadline, offering to staff each of the 12,000 polling stations with two independent observers.

He said they’re most bothered by the fact that voters can obtain a ballot using any one of seven pieces of identification, rather than a voters registration card, a highly unusual circumstance.

“It’s like that in Africa,” he said. “In the west, the people tell the chief when he is chief. But in Africa here, the chief tells you when he is chief.

“When the chief gives you something, you say, ‘merci.’ When he gives you nothing, you say nothing. That’s how it is.”