Africa’s failed vision: The story of Thomas Sankara - 2

The history of Thomas Sankara as the President of Burkina Faso is dominated by policies that were oriented towards fighting corruption, reforestation, averting famine, making education and health real priorities, as well as women emancipation. In this part of the narrative on Sankara, we look at his endeavours to bring change to his country during his brief four-year rule from 1983 to 1887.

Thomas Sankara served a four-year-term pursuing his vision for the liberation of people from the neo-colonial mind-set. He once had this to say: “...We have to work at decolonising our mentality and achieving happiness within the limits of sacrifice we should be willing to make. We have to recondition our people to accept themselves as they are, to not be ashamed of their real situation, to be satisfied with it, to glory in it...”

With a desire to dramatically change his country, Sankara was ready to do things out of the ordinary as he would testify in 1985: “…You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from non-conformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future…”

Economic independence

Sankara’s audacity to transform his country led him to undertaking diverse programmes aimed at attaining economic independence.

In 1984, he nationalised all land and mineral wealth; abolished the rural poll tax was and ensued that at least 2.5 million children were immunised against meningitis, yellow fever and measles in 15 days.

A year later, in 1985, Sankara suspended all domestic rents and a massive public housing construction programme was put in place. In the same year, 1985, a campaign to plant 10 million trees to slow the Sahara’s advance was launched.

More so, his high-ranking civil servants and military officers were required to give one month’s salary, while other civil servants gave half theirs to help fund social development projects.

Not only that, President Sankara also ordered every village to construct a dispensary and a community school. In 1986, an UN-assisted prevention programme brought river blindness under control in Burkina Faso; and by 1987, over 350 communities schools were built by the villagers with their own effort.

Apart from these outstanding revolutionary activities, Sankara lived a meek life as he had a monthly salary of only $450 and his most valuable assets were one car, four bicycles, three guitars, one fridge and one freezer. He forbid his portrait to be hung in public places, as other African leaders do, and when asked by the media why he would not want his portrait in public places he said: “…There are seven million Thomas Sankara’s…”

But as time passed Sankara’s rule increasingly became oppressive. However, his anti-imperialist and pan-African sentiments also grew.

Although he posed as a pan-African revolutionist his behaviour became autocratic and brutal to the people he considered anti-revolutionary. Sankara’s controversial audacity to achieve his radical transformation of society increasingly exerted pressure on him to adopt a more totalitarian approach in a desperate bid to maintain control over the nation.

He banned opposition political parties, trampled on a free press and gagged trade unions, which he believed were bend on standing in his way to achieving his dream. There was no parliament; he controlled the Judiciary and used it to prosecute, in popular tribunals, those he thought were corrupt officials, alleged counter-revolutionaries and lazy civil servants.

His style of leadership antagonised the interests of many groups, including the small, powerful Burkinabé middle class, tribal leaders whom he stripped of the long-held traditional rights and a large section of the business fraternity. This brought him into vicious confrontation with the large part of Burkinabé people; including neighboring countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia as well as Western countries.