A blunt warning that unsettles the official narrative
General Yacouba Isaac Zida has delivered a stinging judgment on the political theatre surrounding Captain Ibrahim Traoré and the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). His words leave little room for ambiguity: genuine sovereignty does not mean selecting which foreign power to depend on; it means building the capacity to depend on none. That formulation cuts through the rhetoric of the Burkinabè transition and exposes what he describes as a sovereigntist illusion.
Zida is not a neutral observer. He once led Burkina Faso’s transitional executive, was later stripped of his military rank for desertion, and now lives in exile. His own trajectory mirrors the contradictions of a Burkinabè military class that keeps circling the same cycle of instability and unfulfilled promises.
Ouagadougou’s rush toward Moscow
The regime in Ouagadougou has moved with frenetic speed toward Moscow, framing the shift as an anti-imperialist break. In practice, critics argue, it amounts to a crude renegotiation of the terms of submission. Behind populist slogans, the transitional government struggles to hide a chronic inability to construct real autonomy. The country remains bound by a fourfold external dependence.
Four chains that still hold Burkina Faso
- Military and doctrinal dependence: The ambition to create a national defence tool collapses when foreign instructors and paramilitaries are called in systematically. Aircraft, ammunition and light armoured vehicles are often presented as locally made, yet they are merely assembled on site, confirming full subordination to external supply chains.
- The humiliation of food dependence: Self-reliance rhetoric collides with hard facts. The media staging around Russian wheat donations, and repeated appeals for international humanitarian aid to feed displaced populations, show that the regime cannot even guarantee basic subsistence for its citizens.
- Financial and budgetary vulnerability: Unable to fund its own crisis budget through cleaned-up domestic resources, the military leadership turns to financial expedients and emergency loans from new geopolitical sponsors, mortgaging the economic future of coming generations.
- Technological and strategic deadlock: Whether the issue is agricultural inputs or energy equipment, the absence of an autonomous industrial base forces the country to beg beyond its borders for what it cannot produce.
The AES: a supranational slogan for internal failure
The haste to create a confederal army and supranational structures within the AES looks like a propagandistic flight forward. Two problems stand out.
Abandoning domestic emergencies
Claiming to merge regional sovereignties while national territory remains largely outside state control is strategic blindness. The absolute priority should be securing populations and consolidating basic institutions, not stacking up empty shells.
Staging legitimacy
Multiplying summits and fiery declarations serves mainly as a political shield to perpetuate unelected exception regimes, at the expense of rigorous and realistic planning.
Authentic sovereignty cannot be paraded
Real sovereignty is not displayed in military parades or in dependence on foreign grain shipments. By substituting Moscow’s patronage for Paris’s, Captain Traoré has not liberated Burkina Faso. He has simply changed its guardian.
