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The president of Burkina Faso has been overthrown by a group of soldiers in the third military coup in west Africa in eight months.
A soldier, surrounded by a dozen armed troops, said on national TV on Monday evening that they had detained President Roch Kaboré, suspended the constitution, dissolved the government and national assembly and closed the country’s borders. The announcement came the day after heavy gunfire was reported near the presidential residence and at a number of military barracks in the landlocked country.
The soldier said Kaboré was unable to lead in the face of challenges including a jihadist insurgency that has left thousands dead and millions displaced. Al-Qaeda and Isis-linked groups have in just a few years taken over wide swaths of Burkina Faso.
“The country is cracking under the tremendous stress jihadist insurgents have been placing on it for several years,” said Michael Shurkin, an ex-CIA intelligence analyst and director of global programs at Dakar-based consultancy 14 North Strategies. “Neither its government nor its security forces are up to the enormous challenges the country faces and the population seems to be casting about for new solutions.”
Kaboré had earlier called on the soldiers to lay down their arms. His party said in a statement that he had survived an assassination attempt and that a mutiny had quickly become a coup.
“Our nation is going through difficult times,” he said wrote on Twitter. “We must safeguard our democratic gains at this very moment. . . It is through dialogue and listening that we must resolve our contradictions. ”
The unrest comes after Kaboré’s administration banned mass anti-government protests triggered by spiralling instability. On Sunday, the government denied there was a coup, imposed an 8 pm-5am curfew and cut mobile internet access, which most Burkinabe use, while protesters set fire to the ruling party’s headquarters.
A soldier asks people to disperse as they gather outside an army camp in Ouagadougou © Vincent Bado / Reuters
The disturbances in Burkina Faso followed successful coups in Guinea, where soldiers removed president Alpha Condé in September after he pursued an extra-constitutional third term, and in Mali, where a group of colonels first seized power in August 2020. Militaries seized power in Sudan in October and in Chad last year after the death of President Idriss Déby.
The ruling junta in Mali at first installed a civilian-led government, with coup leader Colonel Assimi Goïta acting as vice-president, and promised a swift return to democracy. But last May, Goïta ousted the interim government and installed himself as president; the junta has now said the transition to regular elections could take until December 2025.
Sanctions imposed by regional political and economic body Ecowas have only boosted the junta’s popularity in Mali and have not damped the frustrations of ordinary people. Many are sick of the violence that has spread across the region since jihadis first seized the north of the country in 2012.
No country has suffered as swift or as brutal a fall as Burkina Faso, which was once seen as a paragon of stability in the region. The number of internally displaced people in the country has risen 18-fold in three years to 1.6m as of last week, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Over the past two years, the violence has been increasingly concentrated on the country’s thousands of artisanal gold mines, where jihadis – keen for lucrative sources of funding – have perpetrated massacres, levied taxes on miners and taken full control of mining operations.
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