Ouagadougou calling: Meningitis’ deaths in Burkina Faso top 800, arrives in capital city

At the end of March, the Burkinabé government had tallied 650 deaths due to meningitis throughout the country. The ministry of health has now listed the death toll at 800 out of more than 8,000 cases, says Agence France Press.

What’s worse, meningitis mortalities have been reported in Ouagadougou, the nation’s capital of somewhere around 1.3 million (depending on the day). The meningitis bacteria usually attacks the pharynx, and is usually transmitted through close contact through sneezing, coughing, sharing utensils or kissing, making those who live in close contact (like in Ouagadougou) or in crowded areas like markets (as in Ouagadougou) more susceptible.

However, the most affected areas are centered near Burkina Faso’s border with Cote d’Ivoire.

Here’s more on the disease that killed more than 1,300 Burkinabé last year.

Meningitis update...

Your Burkina Faso meningitis update, from the Times (of South Africa):

A meningitis epidemic has killed 441 people out of more than 4,000 cases reported in Burkina Faso since the start of January, the health ministry said today.

The outbreak is centred along the border with Ivory Coast, where 44 deaths had been reported by February 20, a day before the two countries announced a joint health programme to tackle the epidemic.

"Between January 1 and March 9, 2008, we have a total of 4,061 suspect cases of meningitis, including 441 deaths, a mortality rate of 10.85 percent," Ousmane Badolo, the ministry official in charge of epidemic disease surveillance told AFP.

Dr Badolo said that of 16 affected districts in Burkina Faso, the outbreak had reached epidemic levels in seven of them. The last official figures issued on March 2 reported 366 deaths out of 3,181 cases.

Soaring prices bring out protesters across Burkina Faso; General strike urged

I heard an estimate that 20,000 marched peacefully Saturday in Ouagadougou. I still have not heard about other cities.

One observer pointed out that the difference between Saturday’s marches and the violent protests from a few weeks back that sacked four cities in Burkina Faso could easily be summed up simple fact of their make up: Saturday’s marches were organized by unions and attended by working people; the previous riots were carried out by those without work. Make that young people without work.

From Agence France Presse:

"We call on workers to strike for 48 hours, from Wednesday April 8 to midnight April 9 throughout the country," said Tole Sagnon, secretary general of the main union, the General Confederation of Labour in Burkina (CGT-B).

The declaration signed by the leaders of six unions and some 15 independent organisations was read by Sagnon following a peaceful demonstration in Ouagadougou over high prices, corruption and fraud in one of the world's poorest countries.

Similar marches, conducted with the permission of authorities, were held in some six cities around the nation drawing tens of thousands of people to the streets, local residents told AFP.

"I'm demonstrating because the cost of living is too high. We do not want to attack the government... but everything is too expensive today.. people do not even have enough to eat," said Passeba Moyemga, a shoe salesman, who joined the protest march in the capital.

Some nice local color from Voice of America:

In the capital Ouagadougou, a group of students chanted in the ethnic Mossi language More, demanding government action to lower prices.

They reprised the song in French, singing there is nothing to eat anymore, no rice and no corn. They sang that they woke up early, and are standing in the streets, because they want change.

A journalist covering the event, Zoumana Wonogo, said police were at every major intersection, but the protest was well organized and peaceful.

Another journalist, who was taking part in the march, explained why it was necessary. "Life in Burkina Faso is very difficult. Goods are expensive. Government does not do anything to help citizens. It is why we decided to go on the road and to protest against this way of life in Burkina Faso," he said.

A freelance translator who makes about $200 a month said people in Burkina Faso feel the government bears responsibility for the situation. "It has to take appropriate measure to just help the people to get the goods and some services at acceptable prices. The trade unions are demanding an increase of salaries of the workers and to reduce the prices of goods on the market, and also to try to achieve good governance," he said.

Ouagadougou news: The courts are free! Demonstrators get plenty of time to contemplate how free they are!

While writing my little rant about the Millennium Challenge Corporation yesterday, I forgot to relay the news that a court in Ouagadougou has sentenced opposition party leader and rabble-rouser Nana Thibault to three years in prison for inciting the Feb. 28 riots that shut down Ouagadougou. He’s just one of 45 people who received jail sentences.

Thibault and the others can appeal. While the administration of Blaise Compaore has not really commented on the case – the courts are independent and out of the realm of control, people claim – the harsh sentence came as somewhat of a surprise (at least to me). The simpleton in me claims there’s always the idea that the government needs to make an example out of someone. Or, perhaps the state is opening the doors for a pardon of some sort. Or, perhaps they wanted to make a martyr.

(For those who care: Here is what the U.S. Dept. of State thinks about Burkina Faso’s alleged constitutionally independent court system.)

In other news, unions plan to hold a peaceful march tomorrow (Saturday, March 15).

From Agence France Presse:

A court in Burkina Faso has jailed 45 people, including an opposition politician, for between one and three years for protests over the cost of living, the state prosecutor said Wednesday.

A human rights group protested that not all of those charged had had access to a lawyer and an opposition lawmaker denounced the sentences as too severe.

The high court in Ouagadougou on Tuesday sentenced Thibault Nana, leader of the small opposition Democratic and Popular Rally (RDP) party, to three years in prison over the February 28 unrest, Issa Kindo told AFP.

The judges considered Nana to be the ringleader of demonstrations that led to vandalism in the capital and sentenced 44 other people who took part in the protests to a year's jail each, the prosecutor said.

They had all been accused of holding an illicit street demonstration and the destruction of public and private property, which led police initially to round up 184 people.

Decentralize this: If one takes away power from the federal government, where does it go?

“Decentralization is moving in full swing in Ghana,” writes journalist and researcher Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in the Accra Mail (via AllAfrica.com). “The practice, as a development venture, is to broaden the provision of public goods nation-wide by involving the citizenry in their progress.”

People have long talked about decentralization in Africa in many different government sectors: education, politics, budgeting and health. There are those who claim that Africa’s very centralized states are remnants from colonial times, where European powers had to build a formidable authority through government structures so a few people could rule over vast territory. Some will argue that these powerful federal systems felt right to the newly independent African leaders because pre-colonial Africa was mostly ruled by Kings and traditional leaders with near absolute power. I say that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

But let’s stay with generalizations, anyway. After Africa’s first generation of leaders was overthrown by military juntas, this new generation of dictators cultivated and maintained these highly centralized states. Centralization requires building a vast bureaucracy, making sure that power flows only from the capital to the provinces. But it also hands some power over to those little people who run the levers of this grand machine: the civil servants. Once the machine is embedded with this influence, it is hard to put a stop to it.

How it works elsewhere
Speaking to someone fluent in the health system in Burkina, centralization means keeping the power of budget allocation in Ouagadougou. When the little village health centers come up with their budget, they must first send it to the district level where it is weighed upon and then incorporated into the grander project. This is then sent up to the regional level, where its merits are again debated upon. Finally, it is sent to the national level, where people then decide where to dole out funds.

Staffing is another centralized activity. Unlike teachers, who can work around the country provided they understand different grade levels, health workers have developed different specialties depending on the region they work. Those in the south may understand river blindness, while those in the north may deal more with guinea worm (or whatever). However, these areas of expertise may prove irrelevant when a minister in Ouagadougou transfers the southern health professional to work in the far north.

There has been much chatter about decentralizing many government sectors, but my people claim it is still mostly talk. Centralization means the government holds a lot of cards, and it’s very hard for a bureaucracy to willingly pass this power down the line. In a more philosophical, political economy bent, what does this centralized system do to a government’s legitimacy for those at the local level? Is the government seen as a blind tyrant or a benevolent all-powerful force? Another question I’ve always had: What do local people think about their politically neutered local leaders? I understand even local préfets (governors) enjoy a bit of power (I’ve seen one put people in jail and another hold a lot of responsibility for a very important government project), but how much authority do they really have?

The Ghana plan
Let’s get back to Akosah-Sarpong’s piece about Ghana, where it appears decentralization will play into an election issue. If I get him correctly, unlike the bread-and-butter argument for political decentralization in Burkina Faso, Akosah-Sarpong favors using decentralization as a way to increase power not to politically created departments, but to the more historical (and cultural) districts and groups.

Though decentralization may be part of the emerging global development architecture, it is how it is implemented that differs from one local to another. This is informed by the local's history and culture, as the World Bank and other experts argue. That makes Ghana and the African region peculiar, for it is the only region where its development processes are dominated by foreign development paradigms to the detriment of its traditional values and histories. And the peculiarity tells the development troubles of Ghana.

Part of the solution is decentralization, as a way of involving the people in their development process by understanding their needs that are seen in their values based on their history and culture. But because of Ghana's colonial heritage and its peoples' culture much of the work of the decentralization process wheel around the mixing of Ghana's traditional values with those of its ex-colonial Western orthodox ones. The global development design is replete with this…

But this is where much of the challenges will come in a Ghana where policy-making and bureaucratization, for the past 51 years, despite its history and rich culture, has been one-track - more ex-colonial neo-liberal Western paradigms running the development show to the detriment of Ghana's traditional values.

Kufour is aware of this and reveals that the decentralization "transformation would require a new type of assembly members to comprehend both local and native issues that could give leadership and direction to the staff of the local government service in the district." And that may mean reading from the locals and mixing them with the global prosperity construction.

Meningitis deaths creep upward in Burkina Faso

From Agence-France Presse:

A meningitis outbreak in Burkina Faso has infected thousands of people, killing hundreds, in the past two months, the health ministry told the AFP Thursday.

"We have identified 3,181 suspected cases of meningitis from January 1 until March 2, 2008, of whom 366 have died," said Doctor Ousmane Badolo, head of epidemiology surveillance at the ministry of health.

Fourteen districts are affected, of which five have declared a state of epidemic. Two have been downgraded following vaccination campaigns.

Badolo said Burkina Faso had enough vaccines to cover all infected districts although needs could change if the outbreak worsens.

After protests in Burkina Faso, a wave of arrests and worries over human rights

The final tally is in: During the violent protests last week that shook Ouagadougou, the government of Burkina Faso said 184 people had been arrested. That amount surpasses the total of 100 arrests during protests a week before in the country’s second-largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso.

One of those detained in Ouagadougou was Nana Thibaut, the leader of a small opposition party, who originally organized the one-day protests against spiraling increases in the cost-of-living, where some goods have increased by nearly 65 percent since the beginning of 2008. Nana was accused of “sedition” for having called on the destruction of property, government spokesman Philipe Sawadogo said.

Ouagadougou’s protest began as a “dead ville day,” where businesses in all sectors were to shut in an attempt to close down the city. However, by mid-morning, the strike turned violent in parts of the city, where groups of 15 to 20 people began attacking businesses that remained open, government offices, cars and other symbols of power.

Protests over price increases and subsequent government inaction in Burkina Faso began a week before on Wednesday, February 20 in Bobo-Dioulasso and Ouahiguoya, where they also turned violent. The demonstrations then spread to the south-western city of Banfora. News accounts claim that the government daily newspaper Sidwaya reported that 29 people have already been sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 36 months stemming from the protests in Bobo.

Local human rights organizations have expressed worries that human rights violations were committed against some of those arrested during the demonstrations in Ouagadougou. From Inter Press Service:

"We were told a while ago that there would have been cases of torture amongst the persons detained after the damages of the 28th of February," said Chrizogome Zougmonré, president of the Burkinabé Movement for Human and People's Rights, a non-governmental organisation based in Ouagadougou.

"We have checked and it seems there were relatively serious abuses of certain detainees," he added. Zougmonré also said that he had started proceedings for paying a visit to the detainees.

The fears come despite Transport Minister and government spokesman Philippe Sawadogo's assurances that those detained would be treated fairly. "We will respect the rules of justice, which will follow its normal course," he said Monday, during a press briefing in Ouagadougou.

For their part, opposition groups are angered that certain detainees were imprisoned before being heard by a judge.

"The constitution gives rights to people; these must be respected under all circumstances, especially on the part of the state," said Philippe Ouédraogo, leader of the African Independence Party and head of the G14, which includes other opposition parties.

"What we must fear, today, is that because there were damages, the government is furious -- that the government no longer respects people's rights," he added.

Protests and power in Burkina Faso

“What am I going to do now?” is a common question asked by Burkinbé in times of trouble. Perhaps their child needs medicine. Perhaps they’ve been laid off. Perhaps they lost their moped to an accident. You wouldn’t think it was because vandals broke into their store and destroyed anything they couldn’t walk away with.

Such as the reality of the protests against skyrocketing prices that gripped the country in the past two weeks or so. As was pointed out in the fortnightly L’Evenement of Ouagadougou, what was to be a peaceful rally against government inaction against the ever-increasing grocery bills, turned violent and ugly in Bobo-Dioulasso, where demonstrators attacked what they considered symbols of power: gas stations, the mayor’s office and shops who remained opened past their designated closing time in accordance to the rules of the “dead ville.”

As a matter of fact, the mandatory closings weren’t well organized that morning (February 20) in Bobo, and it took a rumor that two children had been killed in a melee with the police sweeping through town to inflame passions and literally ignite the peripheral quartiers of the city. In some places, the paper says, the few policemen around were literally overrun by the demonstrators. When the police presence was stronger, demonstrators evaded them. By the time the authorities caught up to demonstrators, it was too late: the damage had been done; everything had been destroyed.

Which opposition movement?
What it seems, at least to me, is that the once fractured opposition in Burkina Faso, which has played bystanders to the country’s political process, has morphed into a second, more radical front: Les Jeunes Patriotes, created by former Blaise Compoare supporter Nana Thibuat. From his new perch, Thibaut ridicules the opposition for their cowardice and lack of an action plan to combat these rising prices.

For its part, the opposition claims that while it can complain about the fact the government is being run by outside forces – code words for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund – it does not actually govern, rendering its power pretty much moot. The few parties in parliament have slowly tried to gain power through the ballot box, Thibaut and his people have categorically decided to take power on the streets, mostly in messy ways. Read any summary of the demonstrations and you’ll learn of the high number of very young participants.

The important thing to understand is that the Jeunes Patriotes could be is a watershed, and potentially destabilizing, event in Burkina Faso. Whatever one thinks about the opposition here, they are mainly constitutionalists, dedicated to working through the political system to tie down some of Blaise Compoare’s power while providing a reliable political alternative to people. However, it appears that people ransacking shops and generally wreaking havoc are most likely not happy on the pace of change. Burkina’s opposition has always been accused of not paying enough attention to the pleas of regular people.

If these Jeunes Patriotes begin exercising more power – and less restraint – what would happen to the political dynamic? Would parts of society become more radicalized and begin demanding a fair share of the goods and power? Remember, one argument against massive change in Africa (if I may generalize) is that Africans themselves are too meek (or whatever) to make demands on their governments.

• “The power is going to be out for the next three days,” says the power company. (A reality here right now.) OK, thanks for letting us know. We’ll still be paying our bills.
• “I am tired. You have to come back tomorrow to get your ID card.” OK, what time, sir?
• “I want to change the constitution to run for a third term!” Well, I guess that’s sounds like a fine idea, Mr. President.

These are exaggerations, of course. But you get the point.

Les Jeunes Patriotes and you
For Thibaut using the term “Jeunes Patriotes” is very interesting. It was a term that last cropped up in Abidjan, headed by Charles Blé Goudé, an Ivorian who once fought for political control of the Cote d’Ivoire’s largest university (U of Cocody in Aibjdan) against northern political leader, and present Ivorian Prime Minister, Guillame Soro. Goudé and his Patriotes militants were a shady vigilante group that helped police run checkpoints near government buildings, fought against French troops in an October 2004 scuffle, rallied the masses at pro-government political rallies held in soccer stadiums that resembled rap concerts. They were mostly known for harassing and killing foreigners (including many Burkinabé) and were later implicated in numerous human rights violations and disappearances that Goudé had an UN-imposed travel ban imposed on him. He most likely took the group’s members from the mostly throwaway kids who ended up in Abidjan with some education, but without steady work and very diminishing possibilities for the future. Their anger stemmed from the fact that for generations the country had provided for not only Ivorians, but millions of foreigners who flocked their. Now, the parade had ended. Finally, they were most likely secretly funded by Simone Gbagbo, wife of (formally?) ultra-nationalist President of Cote d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo.

It’s a questionable decision for Burkinabé to use this term, but it most likely serves its purpose to those on the streets: We are not above taking the law into our hands. The Ivorian Jeunes Patriotes grew out of need to protect themselves during chaos and malaise that characterized Cote d’Ivoire. What would a similarly named operation say about Burkinabé politics?

To that question, my first impulse would be to say radicalization and balkanization, however miniscule, of society. It became somewhat apparent (if you squint) after the city calmed down that Burkina Faso’s slowly growing middle class is perceived to be the enemy of these angry masses. Perhaps it’s because those few members of the middle are not only viewed as possessing more (money, power, etc.) than those manning the barricades, but they are perceived to be more vulnerable than those enjoying real political power. (The second part may be more important than the first: People are mad, but they know they can’t strike back at those holding power.)

A moped gap?
A friend of mine had a theory that anyone in Ouagadougou who drove a moped should be described as middle class. Owning a moto means that one can afford such a purchase, which runs at least $700. A moto translates into freedom of movement. It allows people to live in one area of town and work in another (an important feature in Ouagadougou, the Houston of the Sahel.) You can visit family and friends with a moto. Mopeds are used for moving goods, also. It takes money to make money, the cliché goes, and a moto is the perfect starter kit.

Those out in the streets during the protests most likely don’t own many motos. I know many members of the informal sector, and very, very few of them have access to motorized transport. Informal workers can never earn bank credit, keeping the purchase out of reach. (Most salaried Burkinabés are in for at least one or two loans for different items like schools and motos and house expansions. They get under this because there future is secure because it’s very difficult to fire a salaried worker.)

Most people work, however, in the informal sector. Life may not be so financially secure, but these people for years had devised ways of getting by on very limited funds. Their plans also go awry when an emergency comes around, like the aforementioned health issue or the result of a crime (a major factor why most Burkinabé support vigilante justice.) Last year’s price increases appeared to create more of a migraine than anything else. This year, with prices still rising, most people rang the bell on emergency.

Full speed to the riot, captain
Let’s go back to the reasons for the riots, then. There’s the age-old debate that revolutions actually start when times are good and economic opportunities are growing. Perhaps this small period of destabilization in Burkina is due to that. For some people, life is definitely getting better. The economy is growing; business is up; people are building houses and large buildings in every corner of town; the number of fancy new cars on the streets is unbelievable.

But those at the bottom rungs can only watch this go by, like the shiny cars and their mocking passengers Nana Thibuat talked about last week. When those on the bottom see their future evaporate while that jerk night door is clearly doing better, perhaps it is time to do something.

Part of the problems here may be the country’s stunted political culture. Burkina Faso’s riots were overshadowed by the more violent and larger demonstrations in Cameroon. However, at least one political scientist pointed out a number of similarities between the two countries: They are both French colonies with long-serving rulers who each have a distaste for truly participative government; they have been mostly stable in a sea of relative chaos; each are facing concerns that the government is out of touch with the problems of everyday people.

Most likely underlying Cameroon’s anger is that fact that President Paul Biya, in power since Ronal Reagan was calling the contras of Nicaragua “freedom fighters,” has proposed changing the constitution to provide him a third term. Blaise Compaore, who just celebrated his 20^th anniversary in power, won’t have to make that decision for awhile as he’s been given one more chance to run for a five-year term, in 2010. People in Cameroon read the writing on the wall. What about those in Burkina?

Here is the list of complaints against the country and the government that arose after the demonstrations. The reasons were long and telling, not only for their breadth but also their depth.

Of course, you can’t ignore the high prices around the world in 2007 and the skyrocketing prices of 2008, which affect everybody, but disproportionally concerns those on the bottom rung. Without dear prices (as the Economist would say), nobody takes to the streets for anything other than celebrating a wedding.

Here are some others:

• Overreach of the police and military in their tactics against protesters;
• The adoption of a market economy during the creation of a new constitution in 1991;
• Bad governance, which wastes human and financial resources;
• The feeble political opposition and civil society to bring these issues into check;
• Trust between citizens and government institutions have eroded;
• The World Bank and IMF make most political decisions;
• Privatization programs have lead to layoffs;
• Stagnation of salaries;
• The government only cares about the noveau riche.

It’s an incomplete list, of course. One thing to worry about here is overreacting, says the guy who has already penned 1,700 melodramatic words. Since I’ve lived in Burkina Faso, Ouaga and Bobo and other cities have witnessed demonstrations about every year, year-and-a-half. It’s part of the process in a country where politics are so opaque: Maybe demonstrators do it to let some steam out; maybe to settle some scores; maybe for valid political reasons. There’s always a lot of head scratching in the press afterward, and maybe the government makes some deals with the unions, but the anger always seems to dissipate. (Of course, maybe I don’t know where the anger goes.) Things return to calm for a long while, and then the place inexplicably blows up again.

Perhaps we’ll return to that period of calm. But, there’s more than a few indicators to say this unease may remain: Worldwide food and oil prices are certainly out of the government’s control, and they’ll be high for at least the next few months. This will continue to exert pressure on everybody. In the end, it’s up to Burkina’s government to provide at least a little bit of support for those willing to take to the streets. You have to wonder, though, how much of a rock and hard place are these ministers between?

The day after: Strawberries, 750 FCFA a kilo!

I went back to my city and the destruction was gone.

I finally made it downtown late this morning. Other than the presence of a bit – but not too much – more police and military than expected, the city looked pretty much the same. In fact, my guest claimed how cleaned it looked, especially compared to Accra. The women who clean this town at night must have been out in full force.

Traffic seemed a bit heavier and shops busier as people were either 1) taking care of things they couldn’t do yesterday; or, 2) know something I don’t know about what will happen during the next few days.

Of course, I didn’t go out to any of the outlying neighborhoods where the destruction was even worse. I’ll say that while the city takes care of downtown, it can often let the other neighborhoods languish as a sort of punishment meted out against the hooligans from the area most likely responsible for the destruction.

Rumour Ville
A couple rumors to catch up on. There was a death yesterday, the result of two competing groups of thugs fighting over some turf. One group had been hired by a local mayor to provide security and the other group had been doing some rampaging around the neighborhood. Words were exchanged, it seems, and things devolved from there. Anyway, just a rumor – but the idea that a mayor must outsource security may say something about the worth of elected officials in the eyes of the government, who had stationed police and military around the city in front of important business (like gas stations) and other public offices.

Someone told me that if word gets out that the police abused some of the 200 people who had been arrested; they will start protesting against them. This is in opposition against the minister of security’s speech last night commending the work of the police. The front page of one newspaper showed a soldier grabbing a young protester; a second picture showed another being pushed down in the back of a truck by a bunch of riot police. Let’s just say he has a look of fear on his face. It’s hard to tell if there is another person already lying in the bed of the truck.

One group that may think of striking: Students. A majority of the demonstrators appeared to be young, and they may have been the targets of police brutality. Even if not, the students are much better organized than most other groups. And, at 16,17, 18, who didn’t mind a day off from school?

I talked to some street toughs who wash windows at a busy corner. After evading the question of what they did yesterday, it seems they had their fair share of destruction. They said demonstrators, in fact, did come to this part of town (I think they were talking about themselves), but I did not see any massive destruction. I promised them lunch for more answers. (Don’t tell my journalists union back home that I pay for information.)

It seems that retaliations ran high against businesses that did remain open in defiance against “dead ville” orders. One cellular kiosk was literally picked up and thrown into a busy street and then set on fire.

Naive statement of the day comes from the Associated Press: "It's very sad, because I did not expect destruction and vandalism," said Thibault Nana, the head of a small political party, the Popular Call for Democracy, which organized the demonstration to protest the high cost of living. "But as I always say, it doesn't take much to make a hungry man crazy." (Note to AP: The city Bobo-Dioulasso contains two hyphenated words. Think Czecho-Slovakia.)

For some reason, it should be said that Nana supported Blaise Compaore during the 2005 elections. It should also be noted he was on the radio yesterday exhorting people to come out and demonstrate against high prices. Well aware of the damage caused around the country by last week’s riots, Nana defended those actions by stating hungry people can do crazy things while being mocked by others driving by in gleaming vehicles.

As the country’s political parties met yesterday to hash out an agreement to bring down prices, Ouagadougou’s Mayor Simon Compoare was manning the barricades. A photo in the local paper showed the city’s diminutive mayor with a cell phone in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other, surrounded by security police and presumably barking out orders. When a pair of local reporters approached him for a quote, he barked: It will have to be later, I don’t have the time.

It provided an interesting contrast between a somewhat distressed Compaore out on the streets and a meeting that look like it could have taken place at some Disney World hotel.

The governmental meeting – and the photo of Simon – showed to me the divide between those in power (including those standing next to men with guns) and those without power seemed about as insurmountable as could be in its present iteration. For all the bluster from the opposition about how the government had done nothing but watch prices rise these past few months, where were other parties and their ideas even two weeks ago. Even after last week’s riots, ideas were scarce. Like administrators, they only jumped during a time of crisis. Is that what we would call exhibiting good leadership?

Dateline Ouagadougou: From "dead ville" to riot central

Update: Please see updates on the ongoing riots below

The military is out on the street. The government has closed the schools. Ouagadougou is under orders to be a “dead ville,” meaning all shops will be closed, except, oddly enough, the boutique across the street from our house. “If I see a crowd coming, I’ll close up,” the proprietor said.

Traffic is out, but not its normal chaotic flavor. At 10 am, the markets were mostly shuttered, and I’ve been told that downtown is completely dead. This is all in anticipation of a large demonstration called for today regarding the skyrocketing prices that have afflicted the country during the first two months of 2008.

Last week, demonstrations against high prices turned ugly as demonstrators burned tires, ransacked offices and looted gas stations in Bobo-Dioulasso, Ouahigouya, and Banfora. (In Banfora, vandals also destroyed a statue dedicated to the work and wealth of women.)

One political party, in an attempt to keep pressure on the government, called a “dead ville” for Ouagadougou today, one week after the violent demonstrations in secondary cities. The press is full of accounts of people complaining the government has done nothing but watch prices skyrocket – by as much as 30 percent for some items – since the beginning of the year. Yesterday, February 27, multiple government ministers met the press in an attempt to diffuse the anger around the country and head-off a massive demonstration in Ouagadougou today. They pointed out that food prices around the world have increased, and claimed that Burkina Faso was the first country to offer solutions. With their hands firmly planted on their backs, the ministers announced a three-month suspension of customs duties on powdered milk, rice, sugar, salt and pastas. Also, Made in Burkina products like oil and sugar will also have its taxes repealed. The government admitted the whole program will cost the state 3 billion CFA (roughly $6.6 million).

As I pointed out before, one of the reasons for the sharp increase in prices is government program to crack down on the allegedly wholesale corruption of customs officers who take bribes from large food distributors instead of charging import taxes on their goods. Once that racket was halted, the government claimed, merchants had no choice but paying the import duties, and thus, passing the new higher prices onto their customers. The press, salivating for the names of merchants caught red-handed avoiding bribing customs officers, were greeted with the semi-lame excuse that 155 people had been questioned by police but nothing else was presently forthcoming. (One observer claimed that he would be surprised if even one commercant, much less a crooked customs agent, would see the inside of a prison cell for their flagrant rejection of the law.)

As last week’s demonstrations slowly faded from view, a different debate swept through the press: How the government’s new tax structure has amplified the already peoples’ worsening economic situation. It must be said that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have long complained about the sloppy tax structure in Burkina, which foists much burden on the country’s few formal businesses while largely ignoring personal income taxes.

In 2006, the World Bank Private Sector Unit investigated the (many) complaints of Burkina’s business class and came away with this:

Tax rates as well as tax regulations are among the important concerns for formal companies’ managers (for about 76 percent of formal firms). The tax system is indeed focused on the collection of tax revenues from a limited tax base; in practice, a small number of formal firms and remains cumbersome.

For a poor government like Burkina Faso, which runs heavy spending deficits (and hopes to make up the differences through loans and grants) and heavy trade deficits, the IMF has long argued the state needs to reform the tax structure and begin bringing in more revenue.

This is from the IMF’s consultation with the country in January, which took place January 15.

Ongoing structural reforms include steps to improve revenue performance. Domestic revenues are still low by regional standards, and measures focus on improving tax compliance and broadening the tax base. Reforms to improve tax administration include the computerization of the large taxpayer office, the removal of exemptions, and the streamlining of the tax code. The strengthening of public financial management is another focus of the authorities' reform program. In other areas, structural reforms are aimed at reducing constraints to the business environment, reduce corruption and improve international competitiveness…

…In this connection, timely implementation of revenue administration and comprehensive tax policy measures will be crucial. Directors therefore welcomed the focus on revenue-raising reforms in 2008 and encouraged early adoption of the planned tax policy reform. Directors also recommended against contracting new non-concessional borrowing, and stressed that the authorities should seek new assistance in the form of grants wherever possible.

The details of this new tax structure, at least by reading the media, still remains fuzzy to me. There are those who are complaining the new taxes are inherently regressive and intentionally set to benefit the country’s nouveau riche, a group firmly in President Blaise Compaore’s camp. From a list provided through an anti-tax letter published in a local daily, street vendors must now pay taxes and bars have seen their fees increased; electricity taxes have also gone up; and license and license plate taxes, apparently shelved since the mid-1980s, are now back on the table.

What all this does only complicates matters, says the detractors, as new taxes, mixed in with already high prices and government neglect only hurts the common person.

Check out the map, which is the best I could find.

Update:Demonstrators started gathering at the Stade du 4 Aout (Sector 9 on the map) around 11 am and began making their way downtown. A friend told me he saw a few foreigners’ cars totaled. Another witness claims that demonstrators were seen in Patte-d’Oie (Sector 30), basically on the other end of town.

Another source claims that once the demonstrators hit Cité Ans III (Sector 11), the police responded with teargas, calming the situation. (I think I have confirmation of tear gas.)

Update: U.S. government has closed its offices effective 11:15 or so. (They were probably the only people opened.

Just heard from friend that downtown is now quite hot. I guess I won’t be going to the airport.

Took a short tour around the neighborhood – no amount of violence will affect my daughter’s playdates – and things are very quiet. Barely any traffic on the street. The boutique in front remains open, as does the carpenters next door.

Update: A friend said one can see parts of the city on fire from the roof of a four-storey building in our neighborhood. I can't confirm this.

Also, friend called another friend from downtown, where things are now pretty hot.

Update: A friend in Dapoya (Sector 12) says things are calm. He, however, was speaking from a closed bar. It says something that this bar is closed.

Someone I know just returned from Kwame N'Krumah, the heart of the downtown restaurant and upscale business district and said things are quite hot. People are throwing rocks and burning tires. It's home to many restaurants, some of them foreign-owned. Let's hope everyone has protection for their windows.

Update: It's eerily calm on this end of town, even more so than your regular lunch-time siesta. My friend’s plane has just arrived and being a true coward, sent a Burkinabé to pick her up. With the targeting of foreigners, I didn’t want to take any chances. That being said, he’s driving our car, which has IT plates, basically telling everyone a foreigner owns the car. Let’s hope he’s fine. My friend, on the other hand, may be in for quite a shock on her first trip to Ouagadougou.

Update: Report from someone in the know: “We don’t know anything other than it is pretty hot around the city.” Chauffe, basically French for hot, is what people use here to describe (in this case) violent actions.

No news is good news: There have been no confirmed reports of rioting in other parts of the country.

Update: Downtown has been clear of demonstrators. Only the security services can be seen right now as everyone else has gone home.

Bookkeeping update: The U.S. embassy claims that disturbances were reported in Dapoya and Baskuy, Tampouy and Goungin Nord. These, most likely, have calmed down. A friend reported that he saw people burning tires in faraway Somgande where one of the city's mayors has a house. Those people have also dispersed.

Update: A different friend in the know said that rioters still at Patte d'Oie area and Goughin. Downtown and Kwame N'Krumah area seem to be calm. A different person said there is a lot of debris around.

Update: Things appear to be considerably calmer this afternoon. Demonstrators were still going at it in Gounghin, but I've heard that they have dispersed. I've also learned that roving bands of bandits are still being seen around town, ready to wreak havoc. I don't know how true this is or how many bands we are talking about. Traffic is very light.

Update: Call this anecdote “Escape into Ouagadougou.” A story just came in from someone who was attempting to return to town around noon or 12 :30 pm. The group came in on the Ouahigouya road – between Sector 20 and 21– but immediately after passing the toll booth, saw “a mass of black smoke in front of us…and ahead of us was a bunch of tires people were burning.” The group decided to turn around and circumvent the city to the north and attempt to enter from a different direction. However, they were also stopped by burning tires in the middle of road. They finally entered on a dirt road where tires were burning, but gingerly drove through them. “There were lots of people standing around, but I didn’t see any violence or anything.” Near one of the barrages – due north of Dapoya – there was a large post blocking the road. The group also passed a group of soldiers protecting an office of a neighborhood mayors from any violence. After dropping the group off, the driver attempted to circumvent town on the beltway called “route circulaire” past Dassasgo and Wemtenga, but was eventually blocked by rioters. Eventually, and this is third-hand, he made his way to Gounghin where he ran into other demonstrators.

Update: Lost somewhere in this coverage is how the riot’s affect on local businesses. For those with a “formal” business, one worries about property and stock damage, of course. More than a few people this week expressed fears that if demonstrations were to hit Ouagadougou, bandits and thieves could enter stores and houses during the day. That’s certainly a problem, but we won’t know about for a few days. Secondly, business owners of all stripes have to worry about sales lost due to being closed. I just spoke to a friend in small business and he told me everyone was going back to work tomorrow, Friday. Think of it as demonstration etiquette: we’ll give people one day to vent frustrations, but then we’ve got to get back to work. This is especially true for those others in the informal sector – the phone card vendors, the water pushers, the manual laborers – who don’t get paid if they don’t work.

Update: Check out this story from Afrik.com. BurkinaMom also has a post up.

Update: Some final thoughts. Watched Burkina's nightly news program and was rewarded with 30 seconds or so of footage of violence downtown. It consisted mostly of CRS police in full gear walking slowly and waving guns and a few bystanders trying to figure out how they were going to cross the road. We also were rewarded with a lecture from the Minister of Security. He harangued the more than 200 who were arrested and scolded the others who spent the day causing so much damage and ignoring police orders. For the police services, he had nothing but good words and thanked them for a job well done. A member or two of the opposition made an appearance, also. They were shown sitting down and discussing a solution to the problem of high prices. One idea from the opposition: Price ceilings on staple goods. I wonder how the World Bank will go for that. Finally, people who left their houses tonight reported the city appeared normal, at least in our pretty quiet neighborhood. Bars were full. Roads were busy. After a day stuck at home, it was time to spend some quality time with friends. Just like the holidays.

So far, a (somewhat) quiet year in the Meningitis belt

From China View:

Africa is so far experiencing much lower levels of meningitis cases, compared with those of the same period last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported Friday.

Preliminary reports from 13 countries indicated 2,312 cases, including 324 deaths, during the first six weeks of this year in the belt, which stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia.

The number of cases dropped 29 percent from the figure last year, when 3,274 cases, including 413 deaths, had been reported.

However, major outbreaks have still been reported in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Togo have all reported cases of the highly contagious disease.

But it is not enough to reach epidemic levels. And there have been no cases so far in Cameroon or Chad, WHO said.

According to notes from the World Health Organization, Burkina Faso leads all other countries with 1,422 cases of meningitis and 204 deaths. This represents more than 60 percent of all cases on the continent.

Price protests: As goes Bobo-Dioulasso, so goes the country?

As I hunkered down for a few days of work, Burkina Faso has seemingly flown off the handle. Protests turned violent (as they often do here) in both Bobo-Dioulasso, the country’s second city, and Ouahigouya, where my wife was caught in the fun of burning tires and rock throwing. (She had a hide in somebody’s house for an hour.) Thursday protests continued there (with a 100 arrests), but to a lesser extent than Wednesday, and also spread to Banfora, in Southwestern part of the country not far from the Ivorian border and Sya (see correction) where protesters ransacked the mayor’s office.

Ouagadougou was supposed to “get hot” Wednesday, also, but the strike was called off because, as someone told me, a vendor had been killed early that morning in Bobo for refusing to accept the strike and shutter his store. I don’t know if that really why he was killed, but killed he was (although I’ve seen no confirmation).

The strikers are protesting the high prices for nearly every good and food staple. (When international media wrote stories about rising prices around the world last year, they always mentioned a food riot in Burkina Faso; a happening I never heard of or could prove. I guess now they have their food riots.)

The mostly hesitant, but occasionally confident daily press is full of photos of the damage: protesters really let loose in Bobo at the offices of customs officials. Although there are no photos available, I heard four gas stations had been burned in Bobo (petrol has faced major price increases). At my gas station yesterday – I was preparing for the chance they’d be shuttered in town this weekend – I spoke to a few workers who seemed a little nonplussed by the whole thing. I asked why nobody seemed to be protesting in usually very political Ouagadougou.

“That’s because people in Ouagadougou think things through,” one told me, with the approving nods of his co-workers. “People in Bobo don’t reflect on such things.”

Of course, in the paper today is an interview with a member of the group heading the protests, who said in fact people will be shutting Ouagadougou down on the 28^th. Today, Friday, Burkina Mom reports that police are all over town, something I didn’t see last night when I was out.

The stated reason behind are the protests is clear, but the real reason is vague. (In Burkina Faso, peoples’ political actions are affected by many, many underlying factors.) The press reports that some food stuffs have gone up by as much 65 percent this year alone: soap, oil, sugar and rice. But why? Some blame a new government tax, which it strongly denies. Others claim that the new reforming Prime Minister has struck down much of the culture of bribes that the customs agents had set up with larger food merchants and grocery distributors. These larger firms, the rumor goes, kept their prices low by sidestepping customs duty by providing customs officials with “donations.” Now, with these businesses obliged to pay regular customs tax when their goods enter the country, their goods have naturally increased overnight. (Import duties are especially troublesome in a country where nothing much is made, but an important part of government revenue.)

Prices on goods have been increasing for the past year, so the question, of course, is why are these protests now so violent? In today’s paper, one letter writer speculates that perhaps the customs agents are stirring things up to destabilize the Prime Minister in the eyes’ of others. Or, perhaps the opposition is finally understanding the plight of the common person and trying to make the government look malevolent? Finally, another letter writer connects the dots and makes today’s most wild assertion: Kenya was also once seen as a stable country. Is Burkina Faso heading down that path? There’s a fine line between crazy and prescient.

Wait and see.

The rules of the road: Another senseless death in Ouagadougou

Yesterday, I drove over a pool of blood. The dark maroon river spread out on Le Boulevard de Charles de Gaulle, the busiest thoroughfare on the eastern side of Ouagadougou. The blood was dry, but I know it was there because I was sitting at a macquis – a bar serving food – with a few friends two Saturday nights back. It was about 12:30 am and while the Rose du Desert was starting to wind down, the four-lane boulevard road and accompanying bike lanes was packed with motos and cars heading out to night clubs or carrying people home.

A man driving what I think was a small P-50 moto most likely passed our table and climbed the small hill to reach the intersection of Charles de Gaulle. From there he most likely traversed the piste cyclable – the bike lane – and drove directly into the inbound car lane. I’ll surmise he didn’t bother to look left. I know that because as the moto was in the middle of the two inbound lanes, a large, blue Hilux pickup truck struck it, bringing the evening’s reverie to an end.

At the sound of the crash, everyone immediately looked up and simultaneously gasped. I swear I saw sparks flying from the Hilux before it screeched to a stop. The driver of the pickup could not have been traveling fast because his breaking distance wasn’t anymore than, I guess, 50 feet. He jumped out of the car with a cellphone in hand and ran towards the victim.

One of the men at my table was once an EMT in the U.S. and said he should go up and be available for the mobylette driver. Along with everyone else, we stood up immediately to see him laying face down in the road in the cut of the medium strip. I noticed that the impact had separated his moto in two: its front tire lay motionless in the middle of the inbound land. The rest of the moto, I guess, remained attached to the front of the blue Hilux. Regardless, it was out of sight.

The crowd gathered fast, and from my companions’ vantage point, the driver was clearly deceased. “The back of his head was what we call ‘separated,’” he later told me, making a cutting motion in the back of his head. “It’s very common with accidents like these.”

I watched from afar as someone standing next to the body nudged it to see if he would move. “He probably didn’t want to do that,” my friend later told me, still thinking the driver could have a neck injury. “But I guess it didn’t matter. You can’t hurt him anymore.”

Although I didn’t wait around for the paramedics, I know he was dead. His blood stain in the road I drove over only set that home.

I’ve lived in Ouagadougou long enough to feel a certain pity about such things. Not compassion for the dead man – for him I only have anger. It’s the driver of the pickup truck I am sorry for. I remember thinking as I walked home that night: how is this man ever going to sleep again?

I don’t think of myself as a cold person, but there was no reason, not one, for the moto driver to be anywhere near those car lanes. Actually, there was one explanation: he didn’t look. Some days, when I am more generous and understanding, I do think it’s kind of cute to watch the two million motos of Ouagadougou driving around on all sides of your car at all speeds, zipping in and out of traffic, running stop lights and generally having complete disregard for the rules of the road. If you can learn to drive here, you can drive anywhere, I often tell my guests.

But, when these moto drivers – and we are not only speaking of teenagers on a joy rides – take their lives into their own hands, they also place it directly into ours. And that’s not fair. Auto and truck drivers become ultimately responsible for their safety. It’s us who have to live with the consequences of their actions, not only legally – for West African justice often deems that those who can pay for the damages are at fault – but morally and emotionally.

A similar incident happened to a Burkinabé friend in broad daylight a few years back. Six months later he still couldn’t sleep – not without replaying the image of this moto driver slamming into his truck. (In this case, the moto driver took a left turn without bothering to check traffic.) It affected my friend’s work, because he wasn’t allowed to drive the company truck for a year.

My guess is the pickup driver will never forget the image of the man blindly crossing the road in his diminutive motorcycle.

A foreign friend a long time ago said to me – as we were following a semi truck using both lanes down another of Ouagadougou’s boulevards – that road safety is a product of development. Burkina Faso will never become a developed nation, he huffed, until people can learn to respect the basic rules of the road. I shrugged it off as road rage after a long day. By hogging both lanes, the semi driver was clearly being a jerk.

But my foreign friend was right. Driving is a responsibility, and Ouagadougou’s winner-take-all system of road rules only keeps people in the hospital and families visiting cemeteries. I’ll be harsh here: For such a naturally mellow people, too many Burkinabé drive with a ferocious aggressiveness and a complete disregard for others once they get behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle.

One complaint many foreigners of all stripes – development people, missionaries, travelers – share about West Africans is that few of them ever accept responsibility for their actions. I often tell these complainers they don’t know the right people or point out the fact that many foreigners don’t accept responsibility either. You know what: They are right in this case. Until Ouagadougou’s drivers of underdeveloped decision making skills can accept personal responsibility – and understand their choices affect other people – this country isn’t going anywhere.

Raelians plan to open women's hospital

The Raelians, who actually do have a very small, but passionate following in Burkina Faso, plan to open a hospital that will allow women who went through genital cutting to have their clitoris reconstructed.

From Wired:

Surgeries to "reverse" this kind of genital cutting have become fairly common in Europe as African immigrants become more westernized. However, [Paris-based OB-Gyn Pierre] Foldes is currently the only doctor who attempts to go the extra step, not just dividing the sewn-together skin, but also constructing a new clitoris.

"It's not terribly invasive," [Marci] Bowers says. She explains that the surgeon first removes the scar tissue, and then looks for what the cutting procedure left behind. The clitoris, Bowers says, "is almost like a snail. Most of it is curled up behind the pubic bone, but there's one tip pointed out, and that's the clitoris. So you're first exposing the remaining stump of the clitoris, and then bringing it forward with some suturing."

Foldes performs the surgeries for free and in addition to his regular hospital work, Bowers says, and she expects to do the same. She plans to start seeing patients at her Colorado offices, and will fly to Burkina Faso for a month of surgeries as soon as the Raelians get the hospital built. She doesn't mind donating her time to the cause, and has also donated some money to help with the hospital: "This is building karma," she says.

While construction of what the Raelians call "the pleasure hospital" has been delayed, [Spokeswomen of Raelian project Clitoraid, Lara] Terstenjak insists the building will rise within the next year. The group says it has bought a piece of land in a suburb of Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso's second-largest city.

Red in the face: Ghana again threatens boycott of Burkina Faso’s tomatoes over GMO claims

After members of the Ghana Tomato Traders Association once again alleged that some Burkinabé farmers are illegally exporting GMO-enhanced tomatoes into the country, the Ghana’s government has threatened to ban the its northern neighbor from delivering any more of the bright red vegetables, Ghanaian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Burkina Faso’s tomatoes enter the Ghanaian market between four and five months a year, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, whose research shows that Ghanaians prefer Burkina tomatoes to local varieties.

“The threat to ban the importation was issued at a sitting of the Judicial Committee of the Ghana Traditional Council, Commodity Online reported. “There could be a looming tomatoes crisis if a threat to ban the importation of tomatoes was effected.”

Like Ghana, farmers and scientists in Burkina Faso experiment with various forms of biotechnology and GMO crops. However, Ghana does not experiment on tomatoes, while Burkina Faso does.

Here is what FAO claims are Burkina Faso’s experiments on tomatoes:

Abbreviation for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. An immunoassay, i.e. an antibody-based technique for the diagnosis of the presence and quantity of specific molecules in a mixed sample. It combines the specificity of an immunoglobulin with the detectability of an enzyme-generated coloured product. In one form, the primary antibody (specific to the test protein) is adsorbed onto a solid substrate, and a known amount of the sample is added; all the antigen in the sample is bound by the antibody. A second antibody (conjugated with an enzyme) specific for a second site on the test protein is added; and the enzyme generates a colour change in the presence of a substrate reagent.

It's 2008: Do you know where your virulent malaria strain is?

Does anybody remember malaria? Of course they do. The scourge that kills hundreds of thousands each year; the disease that dampens African economies; the mosquito-born illness that drives once-bright and precocious infants into dullards. As somebody said, it’s the hot disease of the new millennium. (Move over, AIDS & TB and maybe ebola.)

File this under: Keeping your optimism in check. Twice in the past fortnight we’ve brought news of scientists – African scientists, thank you – making breakthroughs in the fight against the mosquito-born malady that is malaria. First, the Malian trials against malaria, reported to you here.

And now we’re proud to announce a group of researchers from Burkina Faso have been cooking up a concoction to fight malaria in small children. In a paper published in the open-access but peer-reviewed Nutrition Journal, these scientists found that a mixture of vitamin A and zinc could play a synergistic role for reducing the risk of many infections, including malaria.

How do they know? A double-blind placebo-controlled trial of a single dose of vitamin A with a daily zinc supplement was given to children between the ages of six and 72 months. The vitamin A was given as a single dose (200,000 IU) and the children received 10 mg of zinc six days a week for a period of six months.

What did they learn? A “significant decrease” of 34 percent in the prevelance of malaria for those children who received the supplement. For those placebo takers, the rate dropped 3.5 percent. Researchers also found that those given supplements experienced a 30.2 percent reduction in malaria cases. It also took these kids longer to fall ill from malaria than those receiving the supplement. And, for those who became ill, the supplement group had 22 percent fewer episodes of fever than those in placebo group.

How does it work? Vitamin A is essential for the normal functioning of the body’s immune system. However, for the body to metabolize it better, zinc is an essential ingredient. Scientists from places like Papua New Guinea, Peru and Ghana have found that either vitamin A or zinc may protect infants from malaria. The Burkinabé science team decided to test the two elements working together.

The bottom line: These results suggest, the researchers are at pains to point out, that vitamin A plus a zinc supplement reduces the risk of fever and clinical episodes of malaria among small children.

Researchers did not say what the parents of children in the placebo group thought of the results.

Community policing in Burkina Faso

"Of the 350 counties that comprise Burkina, there are at least 160 that have absolutely no security infrastructure," writes QuophyBlogeur in a post translated for Global Voices Online.

Burkina Faso’s government set aside funds for a community policing effort in 1998, but a lack of training and information derailed the project. A new policy was reborn in 2003 and is now getting underway. In principal, relevant security services are supposed to integrate with local communities to better understand their “security needs while the local populations are now to be involved in the prevention of crime and disruptions of public order.”

From Global Voices Online:

What can the Local Committees of Security really do? By confining them to the simple role of “prevention,” don't we run the risk of transforming them into demonic circles of denouncements or militias in the service of paranoid gurus who see enemies all around? These questions deserve to be asked, especially in a sociopolitical context where it is visibly difficult to undo the defense mechanisms of the church of politics. Will the Minister of Security have the room to help the CLS [Local Committees of Security] avoid some of the legacies of the CDR — the famous Committees of Defense of the Revolution–that continue to haunt some?

Of course, money appears to be the problem.

Jennifer Brea, who translated the piece for Global Voices Online, notes that community policing is one of those issues that will never pique the interest of a foreign correspondent writing for a big daily, but it is very important for ordinary people and their communities. I’d also say that this discussion says a great deal about peoples' priorities in Burkina Faso.

In the name of full disclosure, I am also involved in Global Voices Online.

Victoria's Secret, improving women's living standards everywhere, purchases organic cotton from Burkina Faso

File this under: Just in time for Valentine's Day.

From Agence France Presse:

The famed US women's wear chain Victoria's Secret last July signed a deal for the delivery this year of 600 tonnes of organic cotton, with the first shipment sent out on December 24.

"They came to us, wanting biological cotton for women's lingerie," recalled Athanase Yara of Burkina Faso's national union of cotton producers, the UNPCB.

He said the arrangement would contribute to "sustained (economic) development."

"It enables women to improve their standard of living, to care for and educate their children. They (the women) are among the most vulnerable segments of the population."

More than half the producers of organically grown cotton in Burkina Faso are women, according to Georg Felber, local coordinator of a cotton project sponsored by Helvetas, a Swiss association promoting international cooperation.

"This is not a fluke or a fad but a genuine trend followed by the big companies."

It is not known whether cheesy Victoria’s Secret catalogs would be made by paper from cotton fiber.

The story points out that organic cotton output in Burkina Faso has increased nearly 10-fold in three seasons since farmers produced 350 tons of it in 2006.

A muder in Burkina Faso raises all kinds of difficult questions

Murder makes an interesting topic. It’s almost too late to pass of this as local news, but murder, murder always makes for an interesting topic. Queue ominous choral music. Allude to overtones of money, power and the universal need to better oneself. This also may be a story about race and the place foreigners occupy in West Africa. But at the bottom, I'll argue, this tale most likely concerns ideas about the rich impeding the economic growth of the poor.

It was nearly two weeks ago when the corpse of Idrissa Ouedraogo, a money changer who plied his trade in front of the airport, was found in his house. His friends and colleagues noted that had been with a Lebanese who had apparently wanted to change around $50,000.

Shortly after finding the body, the authorities discovered that the Lebanese and his driver had fled in his boss’ car for Cote d’Ivoire, which is where he lived eight months prior to moving to Ouagadougou. In fact, he had an Ivorian passport and an Ivorian wife with an eight month old baby. He apparently told border guards that he was borrowing his boss’ car to take his sick baby to a hospital in Abidjan, where he could get better treatment because of his Ivorian nationality.

As the news circulated through town, the small Lebanese community of roughly 800 held two overriding fears. First, they worried over the act of the new member of their community, who would not fare well if he was caught in Burkina Faso. Secondly, this class of merchants and businessmen who were part of a Diaspora long installed in West Africa feared for their safety and security of their businesses if the local population were to inflict retribution for the murder of their compatriot. Community and political leaders immediately relayed messages down to Lebanese in Abidjan as Burkinabé authorities relayed notices to Interpol.

This proved to be too late. The Lebanese escaped from Abidjan on a Royal Air Maroc flight, yet he was also missed by the authorities in Casablanca. By the time the law caught up with him, he had arrived in Beirut.

By decree of the government, the press didn’t publish much information regarding the crime, especially the name or origin of the perpetrator. Since the body was not found until Friday morning, the newspapers were out of the game until their Monday editions came out. The radio and television – where most people receive their news – were mostly silent on the matter. Of course, this may have helped fuel the rumor mill, wrote another blogger in Burkina.

Lebanese shopkeepers in Ouagadougou closed up their shops on Friday afternoon. Until Tuesday morning they remained shuttered.

Lessons from another murder
When the press came back online involving the crime early next week, their argument for silence was a healthy fear of retribution. It was not the first time a perceived rich and power business entity would feel the wrath of people who felt justice had been cheated. It was not much less than a year ago when another murder, or set of murders, shook Ouagadougou.

As I recall, two men called upon Modibo Maiga, main owner of Kundé bars, chain in Ouagadougou known for their loud music, dancing and all-night festivities, to purchase his truck. The two took the truck out for a test drive, and their friends never saw them again. A few days later, their bodies were found in a reservoir near the edge of town. They had been decapitated, and I believe their sex organs were removed. The city was shocked – not only because of the murders, but their brutality. I remember driving through town and trying to turn left as the funeral procession arrived. I must have waited 15 minutes before attempting to take another route.

Rumors flew that it was black magic that attracted so many people to the Kunde bars – not the more earth-bound system of cold beer, loud music and dance girls. To keep the bars full every day and night, Kunde’s owners had to pay their debts to the spirits through these ritual killings. As someone who has lived in Burkina Faso pointed out to me, black magic is common here, but it never appears to be a force of good. It is used to harm people.

The number, and anger, of these mourners soon grew. The subtext, of course, is money and power. The chain of bars have made Kunde’s owners rich and acquainted them with those in power. Most Ouagalais understand that this recipe means a pardon would be forthcoming for these crimes. The crowd that began gathering at the original Kunde bars had other plans. All told, more than half of the chains 33 bars were burnt down, but not before their interiors were looted. One Kunde employee was killed. A crowd then took revenge on the home of Modibo Maiga, lighting it on fire and blocking the fire trucks from arriving on the scene.

The leaders of the Kunde bar were taken into custody for what the police called “protection.” And a few days later, they appeared at a press conference exclaiming their innocence. They had been cleared by the police, and would now help the victims’ families properly mourn the dead. Even with the destruction of more than 20 of their bars. (Many reopened within the month; some never would.)

The idea of vigilante justice is nothing new to Burkina Faso. The press patted itself on the back with the knowledge they may have stopped groups rampaging through Lebanese stores over the murder of Idrissa. That’s because more so even than the owners of the Kunde, the Lebanese are seen by most as rich merchants and business owners. But they are also seen as being mostly foreign, which can translates into appearing above the law.

A history lesson
Since their arrival in West Africa at the tail end of the 19^th century, it has been hard for the Lebanese to not be seen as being separate and above the law. The continent was under colonial rule then, and it was French authorities who re-routed Lebanese stopping in Marseilles on the way to immigrating to Brazil and the U.S. Some of the passengers did not have enough fare to reach the Western Hemisphere; others could not pass U.S. health tests. The French simply routed their boats to Dakar, by then the French capital of West Africa. These immigrants had left behind abject poverty in Lebanon, Michael Crowder in West Africa Under Colonial Rule explains, and decided that facing difficulties in West Africa made more sense than returning home empty handed.

In fact, the opposite happened. Their fortunes quickly took off. Unlike European merchants in West Africa, Lebanese were willing to live at a level even below local standards. The Lebanese were content with living with lower profit margins, which allowed them to sell their wares at prices below their competitors. They hired family members, paying them little and keeping overhead low. They returned most profits to the business. Learning African languages were not above them. Nor was haggling. What truly set them apart was credit. Through other Lebanese family members, one could get credit to set themselves up in business.

Their numbers quickly grew. In French West Africa, a census counted 28 Lebanese in 1897; three years later, there were 276. At the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, 1,100 Lebanese were counted. By the end of the 1920s, Lebanese virtually ran all the retail and middleman trade throughout much of West Africa. Africans were relegated to traditional trades, like kola nuts, cattle and dried fish. Otherwise they merely became producers in their own economy. Europeans moved on to the large import-export houses and some colonial set asides.

By independence, Lebanese traders and businessmen were firmly established everywhere in West Africa. I know a Lebanese man born 40 years ago in Dakar whose father, he tells me, opened the first candy factory in West Africa. He makes soap in Burkina and plastic bags in Cote d’Ivoire. Who knows what his sons will do. If they want, they’ll have access to a pool of credit much deeper than 99 out of 100 entrepreneurial Africans. This lack of credit is perceived as the major stumbling block for Africans to expand their business ventures. As Crowder points out, the difference in credit is not only due to perceived and real riches of Lebanese, but also to nuances of African culture. “The African was bound by his extended family so that profits which would be ploughed back by the Lebanese to his business would have to be spent on a cousin, a wedding, a funeral, a baptismal ceremony.”

In the mind of some Africans, the Lebanese now held the position vacated by former European colonial masters. Instead of running political lives as the Europeans did, the Lebanese controlled the commercial and economic lives of Africans. They also hired Africans, and as this blogger points out, they are seen as being very strict. In some communities this lead to hostility. This could stem from the impotence Africans feel in the face of this growing economic power.

At least to one observer this power meant Lebanese were in cahoots with often corrupt African leaders, who understood how tied Lebanese businesses interests were to the rest of the region. As a side note, a Burkinabé friend says he has a bet with his friends, asking them to call him when they spot a Lebanese in a local gas station. He’s convinced the Lebanese are surreptitiously importing gas into the country without paying import duties – in full knowledge of those in power – depriving the state of much needed financial resources and providing cheaper gas for their people.

From Lansana Gberie in A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone:

For well over a century in West Africa the Lebanese have failed (or rather refused) to integrate into their host societies, concentrating almost wholly on trading. A large number of the more successful continued to maintain close ties to the politics of the Middle East, a reality that only compounds their image in much of West Africa as exploitative and corrupt. Lacking serious local political ties, the Lebanese in West Africa have over the decades since independence shown no scruples about working with unsavory political and other groups as long as money can be made. It is therefore not surprising a number of key Lebanese figures in the region were implicated in the ‘conflict’ diamond trade with the RUF.

Back to Ouagadougou
The reason for Lebanese closing their businesses were two fold: to keep the crowds from attacking their employees and their stock; and to show proper respect for the dead. When shops reopened Tuesday, Lebanese owners unfailingly told the press how they unquestionably closed their doors for the weekend, at a time when they did their best business, citing their “enormous” loss to profits. The leader of the Lebanese community quickly pointed out that the killer was not a real member of the Burkinabé Lebanese community; rather, he was portrayed as being merely a somebody who came up here a few months ago from Cote d’Ivoire to help manage a shop. For its part, the Lebanese Consul will pay the victim’s family $225 a month for five years. They have also engaged the services of two lawyers, one for the prosecution and one for the defense, for the capital trial, which will take place in Beirut because the two countries don’t share an extradition treaty. (Even if they did, the Consul candidly admitted that it was doubtful the government of Lebanon would extradite a “compatriot”) Two members of the victim’s family will also travel to witness the travel

As the press duly noted, not as much as a harsh word was spoken towards a Lebanese in the days after the murder. Not to their faces at least. Some observers have detected a grumbling undercurrent, not only against Lebanese but towards all foreigners who appear to live above the law. I’ll argue that economics plays a much larger role than any xenophobia creeping into Burkinabé culture.

The economic differences between foreigners and locals are apparent with anyone with working eyes. Should it be this drastic, however? Burkina Faso is staring down the barrel of nearly seven years of economic growth. More than the Lebanese and a few connected locals should be profiting from this. Yet people aren’t. Even as huge mansions go up and fancy BMWs and Mercedes 4x4s start to clog the streets.

Of course, finding a pathway to economic growth isn’t the responsibility of the Lebanese. The next time a splashy murder like this comes about, however, they may have wished their Burkinabé partners in government did a little more for the common person.

Teenage pregnancy, unwanted babies and abortion in Burkina Faso

There’s a rise in teenage pregnancies in Burkina Faso, says IRIN, where as many as 500 unmarried teenage girls per year are becoming pregnant and often feel compelled to abandon their newborn babies.

The story paints a picture of niave girls moving with their families from the countryside to the big city, where sex norms are much more fluid. Shelters for pregnant single girls are full; and orphanages now overflow with abandoned babies.

The abortion issue
However, this information appears to be somewhat inconsistent with a 2003 study that estimated nearly 8,000 women undergo a clandestine abortion each year in Ouagadougou alone. The study, conducted by Demographic Research and Study Unit, or UERD, found that most of these women go to private clinics that perform abortion services after hours; others go to traditional healers and some purchase legal, yet dangerous drugs off the streets from unlicensed street venders.

I remember talking to these researchers a few years back, and Georges Guiella from UERD said that women with money can bribe their way into a clinic for an after-hours procedure. It is often common for a group of high school girls to gather up money to pay for a friend’s procedure, which cost (at least in 2004) between $50 and $100. For those who don’t have access to that kind of money, they often go to traditional healers who can make a concoction from leaves and tree bark that will kill the fertilized egg. For those who do not want to go this route, they can always purchase something off the street or a heavy dose of the anti-malarial medicine Nivaquine.

What is most worrisome to researchers and health workers is that teenage girls – most often between the ages of 15 and 19 – appear to make up the largest group of those looking for an abortion. These young girls are also the most likely to use the most dangerous methods to have the abortion.

The UERD study estimated that nearly 60 percent of women undergoing Ouagadougou’s clandestine abortions end up needed some form of medical care. Twenty years ago, the government set up a program to treat women needing healthcare from complications resulting from clandestine abortions. The problem, researchers and medical workers say, lies with women who relied on traditional healers and unlicensed vendors for their procedure. Dr. Blandine Thiéba from the country’s main hospital told me that these methods can often lead to infection, internal bleeding and other health complications. If left untreated, serious cases could lead to sterility, and as UERD found, sometimes death. (The UERD study estimated 28 deaths per year from clandestine abortions, which I found to be a little low.)

A worldwide phenomenon
In a report by the Alan Guttmacher Foundation, 210 million women throughout the world discover they are pregnant. Around 15 of every 100 of those women have a miscarriage. And, 22 percent of the world’s pregnant women terminate their pregnancy by a form of abortion. That adds up to 46 million women worldwide having an abortion each year, and nearly half of these procedures take place in countries where it is restricted or illegal. In Africa, more than 5 million women each year have an abortion, where it is oftentimes restricted throughout the continent. However, Africa is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s illegal abortions. Burkina Faso allows abortion for instances of rape and to protect the mother’s physical health.

The reasons for wanting abortion are universal: health issues of the child or the mother; economic concerns or any number of conflicts with the father. Also, for young unmarried teenagers everywhere, becoming pregnant bears a huge social burden.

In Africa, nearly 8 out of 10 sexually active women do not use a method of birth control. According to the Government of Burkina Faso, 22 percent of never-married Burkinabé women between the ages of 15 to 44 are sexually active. Of these women, 63 percent do not use contraception. For married women the same age, nearly 20 percent of those who “do not want a child soon” do not use contraception. All this adds up for the government of Burkina Faso to believe that almost one-quarter of all births are unplanned.