Burkina Faso by Ernest Harsch

Author:Ernest Harsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHANGE IMPOSSIBLE?

For several years during the turbulence following Zongo’s assassination, Compaoré and the CDP seemed to be on the defensive, first conceding the possibility of major reforms in the political system and then losing ground in the 2002 legislative election. For the radical opposition parties, the situation appeared somewhat more hopeful than it had since the start of the Fourth Republic. They optimistically named their electoral pact for the 2005 presidential election “Alternance 2005,” using the common French term for a political alteration or shift from one regime to another. But Compaoré’s confident decision to run for re-election and the resurgence of the CDP’s power more generally spread disillusionment. Both among Burkinabè political activists and domestic and foreign academics, the Compaoré system appeared more unassailable than ever. A sense of fatalism set in. That pessimism was reflected in the title of a 2006 issue of the leading French African affairs journal Politique africaine: “Burkina Faso: l’alternance impossible.” While understandable, that view stemmed from a narrow focus on the main state institutions and formal electoral process. While many of the contributors to Politique africaine were well aware of the contradictions in Compaoré’s system and the vibrancy of those currents not caught up in its patronage net, the persistence of Compaoré’s dominance nevertheless contributed a static outlook to most analyses at the time.

The next chapters of this book (obviously benefiting from hindsight) concentrate on how the seemingly solid pillars of Compaoré’s system came under challenge from wider social and political trends. Economic change, especially the traumatic pursuit of market liberalization, generated new social grievances. State elites, less certain of their tenure, became increasingly predatory, focusing more on their own self-enrichment than on supplying their patronage distribution channels. As the state itself became larger and more institutionalized, its capacity as a state—rather than as a collection of informal networks of patronage and coercion—also grew stronger. In the process, some actors within the state moved away from personalist practices and became increasingly professional in conduct and outlook, reducing their links to the dominant patronage networks.

Finally, popular grievances adjusted their focus more directly on the state itself. Rather than operating as clients appealing for assistance from some high-level patron, more people acted as citizens, taking their claims straight to the central state authorities or to local government representatives. As Tilly noted in relation to the rise of more centralized states out of Europe’s old systems of royal and aristocratic patronage, increasingly diverse sectors of the population made “demands that the state offer rewards or mete out punishments.”75 In the wider system, the main framework for bargaining shifted from within patron‒client networks to broader arenas of social and political struggle, with collective claim-making on the rise and growing numbers of citizens becoming actively integrated into public politics.76 Ultimately, political change ceased to be an impossibility in Burkina Faso, but became the reality.

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