General Yacouba Isaac Zida has delivered a blunt verdict on the political theater surrounding Captain Ibrahim Traoré within the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). True sovereignty, Zida argues, is not about picking which foreign power to lean on — it is about building the capacity to lean on no one at all. Coming from a former transitional head of state who was stripped of his military rank for desertion and now lives in exile, the statement carries its own bitter irony: Zida himself embodies the contradictions of a Burkinabè military class that keeps circling the same cycle of instability and broken promises.
The rush toward Moscow and the rebranding of dependence
Ouagadougou’s frantic eagerness to fall into Moscow’s arms under the banner of an “anti-imperialist break” amounts to little more than a crude renegotiation of the terms of submission. Behind the populist slogans, the transitional government struggles to hide a chronic inability to build genuine autonomy, keeping the country locked inside a fourfold external dependence.
- Military and doctrinal dependence: The ambition of creating a national defense tool collapses in the face of systematic reliance on foreign instructors and paramilitaries. Supplies of aerial vectors, ammunition and light armored vehicles — often wrongly presented as “made locally” when they are merely assembled on site — confirm total subordination to external logistics chains.
- The humiliation of food dependence: Self-reliance rhetoric crashes hard against reality. The media staging around the reception of Russian wheat donations, or the repeated appeals for international humanitarian aid to feed displaced populations, show that the regime cannot even guarantee its citizens’ basic subsistence.
- Financial and budgetary vulnerability: Unable to fund its own crisis budget through cleaned-up domestic resources, the military leadership resorts to financial expedients and emergency loans from new geopolitical sponsors, mortgaging the economic future of coming generations.
- Technological and strategic deadlock: Whether it is agricultural inputs or energy equipment, the absence of an autonomous industrial base condemns the country to beg beyond its borders for what it cannot produce itself.
The AES: a supranational slogan masking internal failure
The haste to create a confederal army and supranational structures within the AES amounts to a propagandistic flight forward.
Surrendering to domestic emergencies
Claiming to merge regional sovereignties while large parts of the national territory remain outside state control is strategic blindness. The absolute priority should be securing populations and consolidating basic institutions — not stacking up empty shells.
Staging legitimacy
The multiplication of summits and fiery declarations serves above all as a political shield to perpetuate unelected exceptional regimes, at the expense of rigorous, realistic planning.
Authentic sovereignty is not displayed in military parades or in dependence on foreign grain handouts. By substituting Moscow’s patronage for Paris’s, Captain Traoré has not set Burkina Faso free — he has simply changed its guardian.
