By Aly-Khan Satchu
Africa Confidential magazine [@Africa_Conf] wrote that President ‘Beau’ Blaise departed with the help of French special forces [who] thoughtfully provided a helicopter to whisk the ousted leader from the presidential palace at Kaysam to an airstrip at Fada N’Gouma, Eastern Burkina Faso. From there, another French aircraft flew him to the Ivorian capital, Yamoussoukro.
Thousands of protesters had thronged the streets of Ouagadougou and sacked buildings including Parliament. A group of young activists themselves the ‘Citizen’s Broom’, led by a rapper named Smockey, led the protests that culminated in the storming of parliament.
In a gesture similar to the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, or Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Beautiful Blaise Compaoré’s statue in Bobo-Dioulassou was also torn down.
The tipping point for this accelerated sequence of events was President Compaoré stacking parliament in order to extend the presidential term limit. There are plenty of African presidents who are seeking to pull off the same magic trick and events in Ouagadougou have surely put them on notice.
Martin Aglo, a law student from Benin, told Reuters: After the Arab Spring, this is the Black Spring.
During the Arab Spring [now in the bleak mid-Winter], nearly all commentators spoke of how this North African wildfire could not leap the Sahara and head to sub-Saharan Africa. The reasons were that the State [incumbents] had a monopoly on the tools of violence and would bring overwhelming force and violence to bear.
We need to ask ourselves; how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1,000, 10,000? This is another point: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent can’t go. Where that threshold lies will be discovered in the throes of the event.
Therefore, the preeminent point to note is that protests in Burkina Faso achieved escape velocity. Overthrowing incumbents is all about acceleration, momentum and speed best characterised by the German word ‘Blitzkrieg’.
Out of a population of 17 million people in Burkina Faso, over 60 per cent are aged between 17 and 24 years, according to the World Bank, and this is another point to note. The country’s youth flexed their muscles. What’s clear is that a very young, very informed and very connected African youth demographic [many characterise this as a ‘demographic dividend’] – which for Beautiful Blaise turned into a demographic terminator – is set to alter the existing equilibrium between the rulers and the subjects, and a re-balancing has begun.
Turning to the markets in Africa, the Nigerian naira and the All-Share index have been Ouagadougou-ed by the collapse in price of oil. Some of the recent weakness in Nairobi has been a Nigerian infection. However, for now we are an oil importer and therefore the infection will ebb away. On the matter of oil, I noted an article in the Wall Street Journal which reported that India’s ONGC Videsh is in deal talks with Tullow Oil.
According to the @WSJ Anil Bhandari, ONGC’s director of exploration said his staff met Tullow executives in London last week and they will continue their talks in coming days. Bhandari said Tullow executives told him that currently, they are not interested in selling the company, but they are willing to sell assets.
One can extrapolate that Tullow is looking to bail. There is a plenty of noise around the capital gains component for the oil and gas sector in sub-Sahara. The markets have moved big time, what looked like bankable and sweet spot projects do not look so sweet now. Policy making needs to be cognisant of this because it is always better to tax a profit than to tax nothing at all.