General Yacouba Isaac Zida has delivered a stinging verdict on the political theatre staged by Captain Ibrahim Traoré within the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). In his blunt assessment, true sovereignty is not about picking which foreign power to lean on — it is about building the capacity to lean on no one at all. Zida, a former transitional head of state stripped of his military rank for desertion and now living in exile, is himself a living illustration of the contradictions and drift that plague Burkina Faso’s military class, a group seemingly unable to break free from the endless cycle of instability and broken promises.

The rush toward Moscow: a renegotiated form of submission

Ouagadougou’s frantic haste to throw itself into Moscow’s embrace under the banner of an “anti-imperialist break” amounts to nothing more than a crude renegotiation of the terms of subservience. Behind the populist slogans, the transitional government struggles to hide a chronic inability to construct genuine autonomy, keeping the country trapped in a fourfold external dependency.

Military and doctrinal reliance

The ambition to build a national defence apparatus collapses in the face of systematic reliance on foreign instructors and paramilitary personnel. The supply of aerial platforms, ammunition and light armoured vehicles — often falsely presented as “locally manufactured” when they are merely assembled on site — confirms a total subordination to external logistics chains.

The humiliation of food dependency

Self-sufficiency rhetoric crashes hard against reality. The media spectacle surrounding the reception of Russian wheat donations, or the repeated appeals for international humanitarian aid to feed displaced populations, demonstrates that the regime cannot even guarantee the basic subsistence of its own citizens.

Financial and budgetary vulnerability

Unable to fund its own crisis budget through sound internal resources, the military leadership resorts to financial stopgaps and emergency loans contracted from new geopolitical sponsors, mortgaging the economic future of coming generations.

Technological and strategic deadlock

Whether it concerns agricultural inputs or energy equipment, the absence of an autonomous industrial base condemns the country to beg beyond its borders for what it cannot produce itself.

The AES: a supranational slogan to conceal domestic failure

The headlong rush to create a confederal army and supranational structures within the AES is a propagandistic flight forward.

Surrender in the face of domestic emergencies

Claiming to merge regional sovereignties while the national territory remains largely outside state control is strategic blindness. The absolute priority should be securing populations and consolidating basic institutions, not stacking up empty shells.

Staging legitimacy

The multiplication of summits and fiery declarations serves above all as a political shield to perpetuate unelected regimes of exception, at the expense of rigorous and realistic planning.

Authentic sovereignty is not displayed in military parades or in dependence on foreign grain handouts. By substituting Moscow’s patronage for Paris’s, Captain Traoré has not liberated Burkina Faso: he has simply changed its guardian.