The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Ibrahim Traore

  • Traore’s nirvana

    Traore’s nirvana

    “After all,” Jero quipped, “it’s the fashion these days to be a desk general!”

    In Burkina Faso, it’s Ibrahim Traore’s dizzy season as giddy messiah — all tizzy lies pushed as redemptive balm: the making of a junta nirvana on X!  What mirage!

    Whatever fibs this junta upstart feeds the long-suffering Burkinabe is no concern here. What’s of concern is sons and daughters of perdition, pushing Traore’s lies as model for redemption in Nigeria — after eons of best-forgotten military rule!

    But back to Brother Jero.  That closing quote, in Wole Soyinka’s Jero’s Metamorphosis,  wasn’t just the rogue beach prophet mocking the Nigerian military-in-power of his day.

    It was Prof. Soyinka, piercing  wit, devastating humour, lacerating political generals.  Pray, how’s a “desk general” different from the desk sergeant in your neighbouring police station? Neither has gone to war!

    But those were even the early Gowonian era, with comparative sublimity and sanity. Headlined by the cherubic Gen. Yakubu Gowon himself, many of the top guns could still pass as the archetypal officers and gentlemen. 

    By the time of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and cronies, pepper soup generals had taken over! 

    Peeper soup, so-called because Alozie Ogugbuaja, an otherwise high-flying Police spokesman, blurted that Nigerian soldiers of his day were gloriously idle they retired early to their mess, to soak selves in pepper soup and beer, and plot endless coups! 

    That got poor Alozie, a Police Superintendent, a quick-march posting to Siberia!

    Under Sani Abacha?  It was the age of well and true brigands — again, headlined by Abacha himself!  Abacha  would loot and plunder, with relish.  But at the risk of hot death, he would keep out a looting ensemble!  Thank God for small mercies?

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    Even Abacha’s chief of army staff (COAS), at near-forced retirement, as near-sole martial archetype in Abacha’s dream army of rich rot, declared the army he was leaving was an “army of anything goes”! 

    The post-June 12 annulment mess proved exactly that. But until Sani himself mercifully expired — with thrilled folks hollering “divine intervention” it was a close shave!  He died so the country he wilfully raped could exhale!

    Why this foray into a best forgotten era, though?  Another upstart from Burkina Faso spins a ceaseless yarn about turning his dirt-poor country into instant paradise.

    You believe that, as British crime thriller writer, James Hadley Chase, would have quipped, you believe anything?  But tell that to the Traore plebs on X, as gullible as they come, touting Traore as some new revolutionary-saint, come to chisel the whole of Africa in his power robber’s pan-Africanist image!

    Those campaigns, particularly by “African Hub” on X, are as hare-brained as they come. Indeed, it seems a savage tweak of the famous Awo quip: only the shallow call to the shallow!  Chief Awolowo’s deep called to the deep.

    What does this fella think he is — some reincarnated Kwame Nkrumah, in military fatigues?  Isn’t that galloping absurdity, just thinking of it?  Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism wasn’t frothy X stuff.  It was deep scholarship, captured in liberty classics as Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism.

    Yes, Nkrumah was friendly with Soviet Russia, which threw the West into a tizzy of panic, leading to his military overthrow. 

    But he wasn’t pawning Ghana’s new freedom for USSR’s new shackle, as Traore now does, trading Burkina Faso’s old French cuffs, for new golden chains, from Vladimir Putin’s rogue Russia — all for regime survival! 

    How far that will last, in the dog-kill-dog grim poetry of junta rule, is left to be seen.

    Traore is even no Thomas Sankara, the idealist young officer, that changed his country’s colonial name of Upper Volta to Burkina Faso — Land of the Honourable! 

    His treacherous pal, Blaise Compraore, sure proved every inch a cad.  But Sankara, for redemption, only reached deep into his African roots, not trade French slavery for Russian thrall — and feeling hip about it.

    Still, even the Burkinabes themselves, victims of Compraore’s wasted years, ought to know nothing good comes out of military rule.  Their cup of tea!

    The Alliance of Sahel States (ASS), with which these power outlaws bluff ECOWAS, is yet another quandary. What mandate do power bandits have to commit their countries to such a union?

    But even beyond that: a land-locked three-member ASS is imposing union duties on the 12-member ECOWAS regional bloc!  Isn’t that act of ASS well and truly asinine? 

    If that doesn’t show outright the sterility of military rule, nothing will!  Should ECOWAS respond in kind and freeze out this trio, who loses?  There simply have got to be a limit to junta bluff and bluster! 

    In Mali, Assimi Goita, soon to plague his country with severe political goitre, just awarded himself a five-year transition.  But transition to what exactly — political death, as IBB/Abacha unfurled in Nigeria?

    Traore is busy misguiding himself on X.  Niger’s Abdourahmane Tchiani has settled down to uneasy quiet, after an initial anti-Nigeria sabre-rattling. 

    In Guinea Conakry, head of the junta there, Mamady Doumbiya, has quietly — but wisely — stayed off the asinine rascality of ASS.  In Gabon, former junta head, Brice Oligui Nguema, just transmuted in an elected president, posting a too-good-to-be-true vote tally, after elbowing from power, his Omar Bongo clan cousins.

    This quad again underscores the futility of military rule, as the sad Nigeria experience. A confirmed route to perdition can’t change into a sure path to salvation.  There is no Pauline conversion here.  No blinding flash on the way to Timbuktu!

    Which is why you wonder at the Traore Nigerian plebs on X — were they living in Mars?

    Didn’t they live through the military mess in Nigeria?  If they were not born then, didn’t their parents gist them? If their parents were too busy, didn’t these kids, now “forming” governance sages on X, read even a tiny bit of Nigerian contemporary history?

    As a University of Ibadan undergraduate in 1984 — the opening year of the Buhari-Idiagbon junta — a hall mate sent everyone into a wild guffaw. It was his grandmother’s x-ray of the ruling junta:

    “Buhari ni di agbon? Abasha!” — a devastating pun in Yoruba, suggesting it would all end in tears.  How prophetic!

    Abacha expired, but not before living the ultimate mess of military rule.  IBB lives to rue his June 12 election annulment.  Obasanjo, the “Army Arrangement”, planted to cover the flanks of the retreating military, blew it up on the altar of self-worship.

    Of the lot, only Muhammadu Buhari, as unsung as he is, grabbed a historic redemption: the general that aborted the Lagos Metroline became the president that federalized rail; and commissioned the Lagos Blue Line, Nigeria’s first urban rail.

    PMB also drove Nigeria’s renewed infrastructural vim, from the dead alley of the PDP years, which the Tinubu presidency has admirably kept aglow.

    Democracy is no magic pill.  But it’s corrective and sustainable — away from military quick fixes, that lead nowhere but ruin, as our giddy ASS will soon find out.

  • Phony Traore

    Phony Traore

    They are part of a new trend of anti-western sentiment, seeking to indigenise heroism.

    This new leader projects youth and vigour in his red beret, pullover and camo trousers.

     Above all, he exudes an African nationalism, as though he were a rebirth of the negritude movement with quite a few French thinkers, from Senghor to Diop, in its wake.

    Looking at once like an athlete and a soldier, he wants to claim a hero from a past. Thomas Sankara, that is.

    An untested Burkinabe leader, Sankara has grabbed myth out of martyrdom.

    Even then, he was a martyr of hope. That is, people dress him up as a martyr because of what many expected of him. He did not live long enough to be a hero or villain, or neither.

    In Sankara’s days, the boys of Karl Marx incarnated his profile. The idealist’s song grew dark when his fellow traveler and traitor swept him aside in a stab-in-the-back coup that squelched not only him but also his dream.

    Even his executioner, known as Blaise Compaore, also has eventually vanished in a blaze of populist revenge.

    Enter Traore. The man was nearly removed in a coup, and that set him into a fever. He has made himself a hero by default.

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     When he and his French colleagues in Mali, Niger and Guinea fomented coups to power, they stirred up two contradictory emotions.

    They fed an anti-French imperialism. But a worldwide democratic impulse was up in arms against a military return to power.

    These two are resolving themselves in his favour for two reasons. One, the coup that failed to oust him but lionised him as a hero. Two, a charm offensive from Russia.

    Traore is taking advantage of a fear of the West. The French have looked down on their black West African for generations.

     They were their colonial subjects. During that era, they imposed a system known as assimilation.

    It was a racist ideology that meant the French did not govern but assimilated them into French culture and way of life. It was a delusion of equality, a throwback from the failed French Revolution.

     They assumed the French had a superior civilization and they planted it after using their colonial force known as the Senegalese Sharp shooters to mow down resistance from valiant kingdoms in the region.

    Their assimilation system guaranteed them free access to the wealth of the region. But it implied that the people were not capable of deciding anything for themselves.

    They treated them like children. Paris dictated every part of their life.

    Algeria resisted this in the days of De Gaulle. Guinean leader Sekou Toure, in the Loi cadre episode, also asserted Guinean independence.

    The average French has resented this post-colonial slavery but had done nothing about it. A set of soldiers, with no idea how to govern but how to hold on to power, saw their chance.

     They plotted a coup, and have used French tyranny as an alibi. It is a cynical view of power. It is them versus us.

    But they are heroes without spine. Rather than stand as African nationalist, they are switching one master for another.

    The Russians have seen their opportunity. They have swathed the social media with pictures, videos and narratives that brandish Traore as a hero. For them, the man lives in a humble home, whereas it is fiction. He turned down IMF loans, whereas it is false.

    That he turned down American offer of visit, another lie. Traore is making his myth on the go.

    They have turned the opportunist into who he is not. The Russians, on the other hand, have been doing deals and posting their outfit known as Wagner Group to provide army, materiel, and propaganda. The Russians are building schools, hospitals, etc as tokens of empathy. More like tokens of contempt. Immediately, after the failed coup, Traore signed a sweetheart deal for gold mining.

    This is the making of an exploiter, in the mould of cynics we saw during the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States carved spheres of influence in Africa. History has also told us that leaders tend to look to the past as a refuge.

     They hide in the shadows of men of quality. In Nigeria we have had small men who wanted to be like the big men. For instance we have had little Awolowos, little Ojukwus.

     In the United States, Ronald Reagan birthed Lilliputians known as Reagan Republicans. Reagan Democrats, the most unlikely, emerged as well.

    Napoleon lit up young passions all over Europe that Ralph Waldo Emerson described as Little Napoleons. Napoleon III arose and saw himself as Napoleon reborn. The novelist Victor Hugo wrote a pamphlet that put him in trouble.

    He mocked the fellow in the piece Napoleon, The Little.

    It was a writing that turned into a mathematical formula in showing how a people can be sold any lie. Hugo asserted that in trying to distort the truth about the stature of Napoleon The Little, two plus two equals five.

     It was an idea that other writers took up to poohpooh how leaders turn realities upside down, including Dostoyevsky, Samuel Johnson, and of course George Orwell in his famous Nineteen Eighty Four. In his short novel of ideas, Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky, “Two plus two is no longer life but the beginning of death.”

    It is indeed a battle to the death from a man like Traore, who must secure his position by subterfuge, by living in the disguise of a hero. What they are exploiting is, as Ebenezer Obadare demonstrates in a recent piece for The Council of Foreign Relations, a cult of personality.

    They are exploiting the hunger for a hero who would transform their lives. That yearning for a hero makes them easy preys to adventurers in power.

    They are not only exploiting Russia. They are turning their fellow African leaders who run democracies as foes of their good fortune.

    Yet, for us, the danger signal is that the radicals among us who bow to his phony profile are not different from those who had a vigil at the Defence Headquarters over a year ago asking for military rule.

     They are not different from the underage kids in the North who never witnessed an army rule but asked soldiers to return. It is the bastardisation of the heroic concept.

    Hence in his play Galileo, Bertolt Brecht said: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” Need is the operative one. It implies mass surrender to fate. Such surrenders yield phonies with combat pullovers, red berets and sweetheart deals with Putin.