Pushed out Sunday, October 2 by Captain Traoré, the head of the ruling junta in Burkina Faso, Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba, resigned. After this umpteenth coup, violence increased, particularly against the French embassy. For Vincent Hugeux, journalist, essayist, teacher at SciencesPo, guest Monday October 3 on franceinfo, “we see” in Burkina Faso in “inexorable and inevitable decline of French influence and presence in sub-Saharan Africa”.
franceinfo: Is it a strategic country in the war in the Sahel?
Vincent Hugeux : Of course, there is a contingent estimated at 400 men, special forces whose vocation is to train, to train their Burkinabe brothers in arms in a base which is located about thirty kilometers from the capital, Ouagadougou. If this element of the device were to be withdrawn hastily after the previous withdrawal of the Malian side of the Barkhane device, it would be in a way a new episode in a soap opera which could be titled the inexorable and inevitable decline of the influence and the French presence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Over the putschs, the links with France are disintegrating. Is it a loss of influence?
We have just had a fairly unprecedented textbook case, that is to say double-trigger putschs, first in Mali in 2020-2021, then now in Burkina Faso, eight months apart. . The legitimate obsession of the African populations, namely an improvement of the security situation for the moment, has not found its answer. There is a double paradox with respect to this sequence. It is nevertheless when the influence of Paris on its former African colonies is weakest that the rejection proves to be the most virulent.
We hear about the plundering of African resources. It is effectively a colonial backlog which has never really been cleared. But today, foreign trade and French investment in Africa represent less than 5%.
Vincent Hugeuxat franceinfo
Most of these investments are directed towards English-speaking African countries, therefore outside the pre-square. The second paradox, even more unusual than the previous one, is that we are turning to Russia on the spearhead side, local opinions amply exploited by local and foreign actors, at a precise moment when the army of Holy Russia wipes and connects the stinging setbacks on the Ukrainian front. One cannot say, I witnessed it on the ground, that this famous Wagner force, these mercenaries subservient to the Kremlin, showed great bravery in the fight against the jihadists. They shone more in predation and in exactions than in the reflux of the threat of the madmen of Allah.
France failed to seduce the Burkinabe population?
What I have been able to measure in the course of my reports is the intense perplexity of Africans who tell you: “How is it that the fifth or sixth army in the world, with all its technological supremacy, its satellites, its fighters, is incapable of annihilating a band of jihadists?”. So it’s not that simple because jihadism has become much more professional. He opposes conventional weapons with a completely new and new conflictuality, with a perfect knowledge of the terrain, small isolated groups, etc. But this has created fertile ground for the dissemination of absolutely delusional theses which, in particular, impute to France not only a form of leniency vis-à-vis the jihadists, but accuse it of having outright armed, equipped and financed the today’s killers.