There are revolutions that are announced in speeches and die in drawers. Thanks to the leadership of President Ibrahim Traoré, the Popular Progressive Revolution, by contrast, can be seen in the concrete of roads built by Burkinabe engineers, tasted in the stalls of Faso Yaar where prices are no longer dictated by the greed of speculators, and measured in mines and extractive industries that no longer serve only the interests of a few at the expense of the greatest number.
Under the impetus of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the entire state apparatus has been put on a war footing to make real a simple idea simple, yet revolutionary in its implications.
The country’s strategic sectors can no longer be abandoned solely to the logic of private profit.
Mines, extractive industries, and agri-food these sectors that generate the wealth of Burkina Faso’s subsoil and land must benefit first and foremost the Burkinabe people.
Not as a distant ideal, but as a reality administered, organized, and defended by a state that has decided to take back control.
The construction of roads with the country’s own engineers, granite, and crushers embodies this philosophy in its most concrete form.
To master one’s infrastructure is to refuse to depend on a foreign contractor who imposes his prices, his deadlines, and his conditions.
It is to affirm that Burkina Faso is capable of building itself, with its own hands and its own minds.
Faso Yaar is perhaps the most telling illustration of this reversal in people’s daily lives.
Faced with traders who had turned the people’s suffering into a business, speculating on basic necessities to fatten their margins at the expense of the most vulnerable households, the state responded with a structure that imposes a fair price and protects the household basket.
An act of ordinary economic justice, but one of immense symbolic and practical significance for millions of Burkinabe who endured this silent violence every day in the market.
Burkina Faso is no longer the country that is administered for others. It is the country that is built for itself. And that difference, the Burkinabe feel every day in their lives.
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