Latest news with #IbrahimTraore
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Burkina Faso military ruler abolishes electoral commission
Burkina Faso's military rulers have disbanded the country's electoral commission calling it a waste of money. The interior ministry will handle elections in the future, state-run RTB TV reported. Since seizing power in September 2022, the coup leaders have initiated sweeping reforms, including the postponement of elections which would lead to a return to civilian rule. A nationwide vote was due last year, but the junta extended the period of transition to democracy until July 2029, allowing leader Capt Ibrahim Traoré to remain in power and free to contest the next presidential election. The AFP news agency quotes Territorial Administration Minister Emile Zerbo as saying that the electoral commission was "subsidised" with around $870,000 (£650,000) a year. Abolishing the commission would "reinforce our sovereign control on the electoral process and at the same time limit foreign influences", he added. How an al-Qaeda offshoot became one of Africa's deadliest militant groups Why Burkina Faso's junta leader has captured hearts around the world How 'blood gold' is fuelling conflict in West Africa After coming to power three years ago amid criticism that the civilian authorities were failing to deal with a growing Islamist insurgency, the military leaders have rejected the assistance of former colonial power France in favour of Russia. Rights groups have since accused the army of targeting civilians in its attempt to quash the militants, as well as suppressing political activity and the freedom of expression. There are also question marks over the effectiveness of the military operation. In the first half of 2025, jihadist group JNIM said it had carried out over 280 attacks in Burkina Faso – double the number for the same period in 2024, according to data verified by the BBC. Additional reporting by BBC Monitoring and David Bamford. You may also be interested in: Burkina Faso outcry over 'conscription used to punish junta critics' Capt Ibrahim Traoré: From shy schoolboy to military leader Why France faces so much anger in West Africa Why young Africans are celebrating military takeovers Go to for more news from the African continent. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica BBC Africa podcasts Focus on Africa This Is Africa
BBC News
5 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Burkina Faso's military rulers abolish electoral commission
Burkina Faso's military rulers have disbanded the country's electoral commission calling it a waste of interior ministry will handle elections in the future, state-run RTB TV seizing power in September 2022, the coup leaders have initiated sweeping reforms, including the postponement of elections which would lead to a return to civilian rule.A nationwide vote was due last year, but the junta extended the period of transition to democracy until July 2029, allowing leader Capt Ibrahim Traoré to remain in power and free to contest the next presidential election. The AFP news agency quotes Territorial Administration Minister Emile Zerbo as saying that the electoral commission was "subsidised" with around $870,000 (£650,000) a the commission would "reinforce our sovereign control on the electoral process and at the same time limit foreign influences", he added. How an al-Qaeda offshoot became one of Africa's deadliest militant groupsWhy Burkina Faso's junta leader has captured hearts around the worldHow 'blood gold' is fuelling conflict in West Africa After coming to power three years ago amid criticism that the civilian authorities were failing to deal with a growing Islamist insurgency, the military leaders have rejected the assistance of former colonial power France in favour of groups have since accused the army of targeting civilians in its attempt to quash the militants, as well as suppressing political activity and the freedom of are also question marks over the effectiveness of the military operation. In the first half of 2025, jihadist group JNIM said it had carried out over 280 attacks in Burkina Faso – double the number for the same period in 2024, according to data verified by the reporting by BBC Monitoring and David Bamford. Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
CTV News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Fake AI videos of R. Kelly, pope spread cult of Burkina junta chief
R. Kelly turns to exit during a hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court building, in Chicago, Sept. 17, 2019. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune via AP) Abidjan, Ivory Coast -- If you believe the viral videos online, R. Kelly and Pope Leo XIV agree on one thing -- that Burkina Faso's junta chief, Captain Ibrahim Traore, is a fantastic leader. The images are AI-generated propaganda, part of what experts have called a vast disinformation campaign spreading the 'personality cult' of the west African country's strongman. Beyonce and Justin Bieber are among the other celebrities to have their faces and voices altered through artificial intelligence to shower praise on Traore. In one video, attributed to R&B star R. Kelly, the lyrics praise Traore, who seized power in a 2022 coup: 'for the love of his people, he risked it all... bullets fly but he don't fall... he's fighting for peace in his motherland.' Kelly is serving a 30-year-prison sentence in the United States, yet the song generated by artificial intelligence has been viewed more than two million times since it came out in May. The images have been widely shared on west African social media. It follows a wave of coups not only in Burkina Faso but also in Mali, Niger and Guinea, while the region is further destabilised by jihadist attacks. 'These are influence and disinformation campaigns aimed at extending the personality cult surrounding Captain Traore to Burkina Faso's English-speaking neighbours,' said an American researcher who spoke on condition of anonymity. Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore speaks in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, May 10, 2025. (Angelos Tzortzinis/Pool Photo via AP) Restoring control After seizing power in a coup in September 2022, Traore pledged to quickly restore control in Burkina Faso, which has been plagued by violence from jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Three years later, jihadist attacks have continued, causing thousands more deaths, and have even intensified in recent months. Several officers accused of attempting to stage a coup have been arrested and comments attributed to then head of US Africa Command General Michael Langley, accusing Traore of using the country's gold reserves for personal protection, sparked anger and protests. Around that time, a series of videos exalting Traore started mushrooming on social media. 'Information manipulation has become a lever for retaining power and legitimizing the junta's presence,' said a Burkinabe specialist in strategic communication, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. 'Digital army' Viral campaigns mixing propaganda and AI-generated content have been shared by activists and English-speaking influencers, notably to denounce Langley and glorify Traore. While some are riding the wave for their own financial gain, others are working for the junta's cyber propaganda entity called Rapid Communication Intervention Battalions (BIR-C), the Burkinabe source said. 'They truly operate like a digital army,' the source said, adding it was led by US-based activist Ibrahima Maiga, ruling out any 'direct links with foreign Russian influence.' But the group's anti-imperialist narrative, 'presenting Captain Traore as the one who will save Burkina and Africa from Western neocolonialism... suits Russia, which amplifies it in turn,' the source said. Russian connections But the American researcher noted 'some reports have established Russian connections in the recent surge of these disinformation operations', particularly in campaigns targeting Ghana and Nigeria. 'Destabilising the Nigerian government would have significant regional effects,' he warned. Nigerian journalist Philip Obaji, who specialises in Russian influence operations, agreed, adding that 'media in Burkina and Togo have accepted money from agents linked to Russia to relay these campaigns'. Meanwhile, Burkina's junta has expelled international press that had been working in the country, while local outlets self-censor in fear of arrest and deployment to the front lines against jihadists -- already a fate for some journalists. While the Burkinabe diaspora has attempted to fight back against the pro-junta narrative, including promoting jihadists' attack claims, commenting on or sharing posts is considered glorifying terrorism, punishable by one to five years imprisonment.
IOL News
6 days ago
- Politics
- IOL News
Traoré's Revolution versus South Africa's Death Project
Burkina Faso's junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traore attends a meeting. Image: Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP In Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré shows the world what it means when an African people refuse to kneel before empire. He has expelled French military forces, reclaimed foreign mining contracts, and redirected national resources toward housing, healthcare, education, and food sovereignty. Sovereignty is not symbolic. It is control over land, minerals, water, and the architecture of daily survival. His politics are not shaped for donor applause or international approval. There is no hiding behind human rights frameworks or soft-focus governance talk. It is the seizure of power and resources back into African hands. In South Africa, the trajectory moves through an entirely different landscape. This is not simply a matter of corruption or failed governance. What unfolds before us, under the weight of the so-called Government of National Unity, is the multi-pronged roll-out of a corporate and state-driven war on African life, African collectivism, African revolutionary possibility. Mass unemployment, dispossession, the collapse of public health, the erosion of education, militarised policing in the townships, the criminalisation of Black masculinity, systemic violence against women and children, vigilante terror, and the suffocating normalisation of African poverty form the architecture of this war. Circling around it are the donor-funded NGO campaigns, the media spectacles, the safety and social cohesion projects, the curated dialogues, the public rituals of 'reform' designed to seduce people into believing the system is repairing itself. But this system is not repairing. It is evolving. It is refining. It is perfecting its capacity for devastation. The mining-industrial complex is its central engine. Multinational corporations, ANC elites, DA neoliberals, white monopoly capital, comprador classes – each holds its place in the circuitry. African minerals are ripped from the earth by the destruction of Black labour and Black communities. These minerals flow outward, become weapons, electronics, luxury goods, industrial tools, then return to the continent as commodities priced beyond African control. African economies are locked as suppliers, locked as dependent consumers, locked out of ownership. The ANC operates as a broker between capital and the people, using the worn-out language of struggle to contain revolt while smoothing the way for foreign and local elite profits. The DA offers up a streamlined neoliberalism, promising efficiency to investors. These are not rival projects. They are two faces of the same extractive order. Black-on-Black violence is treated as an inevitable pathology, but it is not accidental. It is actively produced and inflamed to keep the population fragmented. Township disorder, ethnic tensions, factionalised politics, so-called xenophobic attacks pull public attention away from the mineral contracts, the land transfers, the capital flows. They become the ground on which militarised policing expands, where repression becomes ordinary, where state force in Black life is made common sense. Mining companies extract. Political elites contain. Media channels flood the public with images of chaos. Communities beg for order. The security apparatus swells. Investors relax. This is not dysfunction. This is design. The deepest violence is that the poor, the working class, and the Black middle class are swept into supporting the very system consuming them. Survival in untransformed spaces produces the desperate belief that safety comes through harder policing, tougher leadership, and stricter state control. There is no political party, no police general, no NGO or donor agency committed to protecting the African poor from the system that profits from their dispossession. They exist to protect the elite. Steve Biko wrote that the wealth of a country must ultimately be enjoyed by the people whose labour has created it, and that only on this basis can a just system be built. Without land, without mineral sovereignty, without water and food security, without collective control over the means of survival, there is no justice. There is only punishment, repression, and a deepening spectacle of containment dressed up as governance. When militarised crackdowns sweep through township streets, when extrajudicial killings dominate headlines, when clean-up operations leave death scattered in their aftermath, it is the poor who carry the weight. The spectacle is for the wealthy, for middle-class nerves, for investor confidence. For the poor, it escalates the risk of becoming the target, the casualty, the forgotten. The conditions tearing at South Africa's majority – mass unemployment, forced removals, gangsterism seeded by economic hopelessness, relentless insecurity – will never be addressed through trigger-happy authoritarianism. Uniformed raids, televised arrests, and open killing on the streets do not touch the core devastation. Only a revolutionary project like Traoré's – a project that fights for sovereignty, reclaims land and resources, breaks the stranglehold of foreign and local elites, and turns dignity into redistribution – carries the force to cut into the root. The tragedy is not only that the resource-deprived and exhausted poor are sacrificed for the security of the elite. It is that they are drawn into cheering for it, pulled into the fantasy that the war crushing them is being waged on their behalf. This is the final cruelty of the neoliberal state: to transform the oppressed into spectators of their own suppression, applauding as the spectacle moves forward, until the moment the weapons shift and the streets erupt and the false skin of protection is torn away. Marikana was not an episode. It became the template. It became the blueprint for how to discipline the Black working class the moment it threatens to interrupt extraction. The public is taught to demand more policing, more militarisation, more containment. The true architects of dispossession – the mining bosses, the landowners, the financiers, the global firms – remain protected. And Marikana never ended. It rolls out over many landscapes and locations in the brutal killing of the poor. South Africa is not crumbling. It is functioning precisely as designed. Global capital flows through it with surgical precision, co-opting popular figures, funding intelligence-linked NGOs, saturating media space with distraction, and keeping the pipelines of extraction unbroken. As a white South African, I have been inside academia, media, and the NGO world, witnessing firsthand how whiteness operates – how it slips easily into human rights language, donor discourse, and faux social justice branding. The human rights and NGO industrial complex is not a space of care. It is camouflage. It is capture. It is part of the machinery that feeds on African dispossession while performing the language of solidarity, protection, and benevolence. It is the shield that pacifies, the soft cover that allows the most brutal devastations to proceed without interruption. It functions as a carefully engineered buffer zone against the inevitable explosion of Black rage. This, I have come to name for what it is – not humane, not beneficial, but a cold, deliberate, knowing evil. And it is why I know with clarity that no commission, no election, no imported model will transform this system designed to preserve the wealth and power of the privileged while managing, containing, and brutalising the poor. Only full-scale revolution will alter the material and ontological condition of the majority. Only the radical reclaiming of what has been stolen will break the cycle. Today, perhaps, a South African Traoré has been born. Perhaps she or he is a child now, waiting to emerge. But liberation will not come from one leader alone. The people of South Africa will rise. They will cast off foreign capital, expel comprador elites, break white monopoly power, dismantle intelligence-embedded NGOs, strip donor gatekeepers of legitimacy, and unseat the local managers of empire. The future will be reclaimed by African hands because behind this orchestrated roll-out of Black-on-Black violence, the collective spirit of the ancestors continues to whisper that the work of liberation can no longer be postponed. That whisper is already thickening, already gathering at the edges of the present, and soon it will break into a scream that will shatter a system that has no intention of yielding, no intention of returning what has been stolen, no intention of loving or respecting the people to whom this land belongs. It will take everything until it is forced to stop. And that force is rising. Ibrahim Traoré's revolutionary stance in Burkina Faso challenges the status quo, while South Africa grapples with systemic injustices and the struggle for true sovereignty. Image: IOL *Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
Russia Today
19-06-2025
- Business
- Russia Today
Russia signs nuclear energy deal with African state
Russia and Burkina Faso have formalized a deal to expand peaceful nuclear energy cooperation, including joint projects in radiation technologies and the training of specialists from the West African country. The agreement was signed on Thursday by Alexey Likhachev, CEO of Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom, and Burkina Faso's Energy Minister Yacouba Zabré Gouba on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). 'The signing of this Agreement marks an important milestone in strengthening the partnership between Russia and Burkina Faso,' Likhachev stated, according to a Rosatom press release. 'We are ready to provide advanced technologies and expert support to implement joint projects aimed at sustainable development and enhancing the region's energy security,' he added. According to the statement, the new pact builds on a roadmap signed in March last year between Rosatom and Burkina Faso's Ministry of Energy during the ATOMEXPO forum in Sochi. Key areas of cooperation outlined in the document include the development of Burkina Faso's nuclear infrastructure in line with international standards, regulation of nuclear and radiation safety, and the use of radioisotopes in industry, medicine, and agriculture. Moscow and Ouagadougou have been engaged in nuclear cooperation since 2023, following a request by Burkina Faso's interim leader, Ibrahim Traore, to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the second Russia–Africa Summit in St. Petersburg. Last year, Rosatom representatives visited Burkina Faso to discuss plans for constructing a nuclear power plant in one of the world's least electrified countries. The Sahel state had earlier signed an agreement with the Russian firm in October 2024 to build the facility. NovaWind – the wind energy division of Rosatom – is also working with the government of neighboring Mali to build a 200-megawatt (MW) solar power plant near the capital, Bamako. Last year, NovaWind's director, Grigory Nazarov, said the $217 million facility would boost the country's electricity production by 10%. Apart from striking its latest deal on peaceful nuclear cooperation with Burkina Faso, Moscow also announced last week the approval of similar agreements with Mali, which have yet to be formalized.
