Captain Thomas Sankara was born on December 21, 1949 in Yako. Many years after his assassination on October 15, 1987, he remains for many the most popular of African leaders. Even generations who did not know him consider him as such.
There is no question of succumbing to the temptation to believe in the perfect President. No more than the many burlesque montages and ill-crafted quibbles that tried to make him an idealist with crazy ideas.
The former President of Burkina Faso, during the revolutionary period from 1983 to 1987, was more than a soldier. He disturbed by his intelligence and his language of truth, knew how to be in tune with the deep aspirations of his people who recognized themselves in him as their spokesperson.
Beyond Burkina, many citizens of African countries saw him as the President they would have liked to have had.
The strength of "Thom-Sank" or the "captain-people" as he was affectionately called lay in what would be called the "courage to say and intelligence to do" in the interests of the people, and that what let it happen.
His speech of October 4, 1984 before the General Assembly of the United Nations remains relevant. A single passage suffices to sum up the man and his work, when he says:
"We chose to risk new paths to be happier. We have chosen to implement new techniques. We have chosen to seek forms of organization better suited to our civilization, abruptly and definitively rejecting all sorts of external diktats, in order to create the conditions for a dignity commensurate with our ambitions. Refuse the state of survival, loosen the pressures, free our countryside from medieval immobility or regression, democratize our society, open minds to a universe of collective responsibility to dare to invent the future. Break and rebuild the administration, through another image of the civil servant, immerse our army in the people through productive work and constantly remind them that without patriotic training, a soldier is only a potential criminal. This is our political program. In terms of economic management, we learn to live simply, to accept and impose austerity on ourselves in order to be able to achieve great designs".
With Thomas Sankara, it was not just fine speeches. He simply lived like the people and did not plunder state resources. Quite the contrary. He wanted to bring the Burkinabè to respect the public good, to work hard, to consume first the products of their work, to rely on themselves, to be proud and confident.
Obviously, what he wanted for his people did not go down well inside and outside Burkina Faso. Despite the warnings, he insisted on paying with his life to bequeath to all of Africa the imperative and unavoidable need to dare to invent, if indeed Africa wants to build its own development. The question is still relevant.
By Marcus Boni Teiga
