When General Yacouba Isaac Zida declared bluntly that “true sovereignty does not consist in choosing whom to depend on, but in giving oneself the means to depend on no one,” he exposed the political deception being advanced by Captain Ibrahim Traoré within the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). A former head of the transitional executive who was struck off the army rolls for desertion and now lives in exile, Zida himself embodies the paradoxes and excesses of a Burkinabè military class that struggles to break free from the vicious cycle of instability and unfulfilled promises.
The frantic rush toward Moscow
The Ouagadougou regime’s frenetic eagerness to throw itself into Moscow’s arms under the banner of an “anti-imperialist rupture” amounts to a crude renegotiation of the terms of submission. Behind the populist slogans, the transitional government barely conceals its chronic inability to build genuine autonomy, keeping the country locked in a fourfold external dependence.
Military and doctrinal dependence
The ambition to create a national defence tool collapses in the face of systematic reliance on foreign instructors and paramilitaries. The supply of aerial vectors, ammunition and light armoured vehicles — often wrongly presented as “locally manufactured” when in fact they are merely assembled on site — confirms total subordination to external logistics chains.
The humiliation of food dependence
The rhetoric of self-reliance crashes headlong into the facts. 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 the basic subsistence of its citizens.
Financial and budgetary vulnerability
Unable to finance its own crisis budget through sound internal resources, the military authorities fall back on financial expedients and emergency loans contracted from new geopolitical sponsors, mortgaging the economic future of generations to come.
A technological and strategic dead end
Whether it is the supply of agricultural inputs or energy equipment, the absence of an autonomous industrial fabric condemns the country to beg beyond its borders for what it is incapable of producing.
The AES: a supranational slogan to mask internal collapse
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 the 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
The multiplication of summits and fiery declarations serves above all as a political shield to perpetuate unelected regimes of exception, 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 liberated Burkina Faso: he has simply changed its guardian.
