(Ouagadougou) The government of Burkina Faso resigned Wednesday evening, after several demonstrations by the population denouncing its inability to fight against the recurring jihadist attacks which mourn this West African country every week.
Christophe Joseph Dabiré, Prime Minister of Burkina Faso, presented a letter of resignation to President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré on Wednesday who accepted it.
“The functions of Prime Minister of Mr. Dabiré are terminated”, declared on public television the secretary general of the government, Stéphane Wenceslas Sanou, reading a presidential decree.
The resignation of the Prime Minister automatically entails that of the government, according to the law in Burkina Faso.
In accordance with the texts, “the members of the outgoing government ensure the dispatch of the current affairs of the ministerial departments until the formation of a new government”, specified Mr. Sanou.
“I invite the Burkinabè, as a whole, to mobilize, to support the president of Faso and the new executive that will be put in place. I remain convinced that it is through unity of action that we will be able to meet the challenges facing our country and our people ”, declared Mr. Dabiré on his Facebook page.
For several weeks, anger had been mounting against the executive.
On November 9, the opposition notably demanded “urgent measures” in the face of “the deterioration of the security situation”, within a month.
And on November 27, hundreds of demonstrators descended on the capital Ouagadougou to denounce the “inability” of the government to counter the jihadist violence that is hitting the country.
Spiral of violence
Civil society organizations demanded on this occasion the departure of the Head of State. About ten people including a child and two journalists were injured in the dispersal of these steps.
The power in place is confronted with the fed up of the population in the face of the jihadist attacks which strike the country every week. They have killed around 2,000 people and displaced 1.4 million since 2015.
The attack on November 14 on a gendarmerie detachment in Inata (north), one of the deadliest against the security forces, shocked the country: at least 57 people, including 53 gendarmes, were killed by armed jihadists.
Two weeks before the attack, the gendarmes of Inata had alerted the staff to their precarious situation, saying they lacked food and fed themselves thanks to poaching.
Burkina Faso has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of violence attributed to jihadist armed groups, affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.
Attacks targeting civilians and soldiers are increasingly frequent and the vast majority concentrated in the north and east of the country.
At the end of November, President Kaboré announced new measures, stressing “the need to constitute, at the government level, a closer and more united team”.
The Burkinabè president also announced the launch next week of a “clean hands operation, to empty all pending corruption files and clarify all the cases which pollute the daily lives of Burkinabè enamored of good governance and democracy”.
In office since January 2019, Prime Minister Christophe Dabiré, former commissioner in charge of trade, competition and cooperation of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (Uemoa), was reappointed in January 2021, after the re-election of Mr. Kaboré for his second and last term.
Mr. Kaboré was elected in November 2015, a year after his predecessor Blaise Compaoré, in power since 1987, was chased into the streets for wanting to modify the Constitution in order to remain in his post.
But the new president was confronted as soon as he took office with a gradual deterioration of the security situation in the country which has so far not been able to be stopped.