BURKINA FASO       Institutional Situation

  This section has been updated by Mr Boubacar Issa Abdourhamane,
a doctorate student at the CEAN, IEP – Montesquieu University of Bordeaux

Democratic Process

In contrast with several other African countries, the democratic process underway in Burkina Faso has historical roots that go back a long way. Admittedly, the First Republic from 1960 to 1966 was distinguished by its presidentialist regime led by Maurice Yaméogo and based on a single party - the Volta Democratic Union-African Democratic Rally (UDV-RDA). From 1966 to 1970, the country then lived under an exceptional regime run by Lieutenant-Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana. But on 14 June 1970, a new Constitution was adopted by referendum creating a “rationalised” parliamentary regime with, however, the military keeping its grip on power. Open general elections (with 7 parties standing) were organised in December 1970, for the first time since 1959. They were won by the former single party with 37 seats, the remaining 20 seats being shared between three other formations. The parliamentary majority, however, was deeply divided, and the work of parliament and the government was paralysed by fighting between factions at a time when a terrible drought was hitting the country. On the pretext of the divisions of the political class, the exasperation of public opinion and the deleterious social and political atmosphere in the country, the army interrupted the democratic process by putting an end to the presidential regime of the Second Republic in February 1974.
This time, the army strengthened its hold on power and attempted to make its position a durable one by proposing the idea of a single party, the National Movement for Renewal (Mouvement National pour le Renouveau – MNR). There were immediate protests and, faced with the fierce opposition of civil society, the army had to retreat from its position and promise a return to normal constitutional life. After much consultation with the various social forces, a constitutional referendum approved a new Constitution on 27 November 1977 and thus laid the foundations for the Third Republic. The organic law of 25 May 1979 created a three-party system. Official recognition was granted only to the three parties that were best placed after the election of April 1978. These were the former single party, the UDV-RDA, the UNDD (National Union for the Defence of Democracy – Union Nationale pour la Défense de la Démocratie) and the UPV (Volta Progress Union – Union Progressiste Voltaïque). In violation of the Constitution, however, the parties that had won a few seats but were not among the top three, were not dissolved. Worse, some even sat in the Assembly and the government. The presidential elections were held in May 1978 and were won by General Lamizana in what was a close-run battle because, for the first time in Sub-Saharan Africa, an outgoing president needed a second round to be elected, in this case against Mr Macaire Ouéraogo of the UNDD.
Parliamentary life remained very agitated because of the almost even split between majority and opposition, but an increase in corruption among the ruling elite, flagrant violation of the Constitution, rivalry between factions and the deterioration of the social climate, marked by strikes, brought about the fall of the Third Republic on 25 November 1980. It was the first openly military putsch in Upper Volta and paved the way for a whole series of other military coups d’état. This one was by and large well received and the first steps of the Military Recovery Committee for National Progress (Comité Militaire de Redressement pour le Progrès National - CMRPN) were much appreciated, although disappointment was soon to set in. The population, which had got used to the liberalism of the Lamizana period, could not stand the authoritarianism of the new regime and its quashing of public liberties, particularly union freedom. A disparate coalition of older and younger officers profited from the unpopularity of the regime to organise a military coup d’état on 7 November 1982.
The new government, called the Council for the Salvation of the People (Conseil du Salut du Peuple - CSP), promised to re-establish normal constitutional life within two years. The creation of a two-headed system led to a conflict of authority between Captain Sankara, the Prime Minister with his revolutionary tendencies on the one hand, and the Head of State, Doctor-Commander J. B. Ouédraogo, supported by the so-called conservative forces on the other. The crisis was temporarily resolved on 17 May 1983 with the arrest of the Prime Minister. The return of the army to its barracks and the writing up of a new Constitution were decided by the Head of State.
But the so-called progressive faction of the CSP that had been eased out of power took its revenge through a military coup d’état on 4 August 1983. A revolutionary project to favour the peasant populations was developed by the new regime, the National Council of the Revolution (Conseil National de la Révolution - CNR). Unlike the previous governments, this one did not talk about returning power to civilian hands. A coup d’état took place on 15 October 1987, culminating in the assassination of Sankara and several of his companions and a strategic reorientation of the Burkina Faso revolution.
This happened after the coup d’état of 15 October 1987. Presenting it as a movement of rectification, the new President gradually put an end to the revolution and applied a policy of openness to civil society and hitherto stigmatised social categories. With the loss of international credit of Marxist references and a rise in domestic demands for democracy, the regime abandoned its Marxist orientations and implemented a process of democratisation over which it succeeded in keeping control. A new Constitution was adopted by referendum on 2 June 1991. The opposition, grouped together in a Coordination of Democratic Forces (Coordination des Forces Démocratiques - CFD), tried to destabilise the regime by demanding that a sovereign national conference be convened. The authorities refused this demand, but did manage to divide the opposition by announcing that a forum of reconciliation would be held. After the failure of this forum, the opposition boycotted the presidential elections of December 1991, leaving the incumbent president as the only candidate. He was elected with 86.1% of the vote, with a turnout of 24%.
In May 1992 the general elections were organised. The divided opposition took a thrashing, with the presidential party, the ODP-MT (Organisation for Democracy and Progress - Labour Movement / Organisation pour la Démocratie et le Progrès – Mouvement du Travail) winning 78 of the 107 seats in the Assembly. The opposition complained of many irregularities, but the Supreme Court did not annul any of the results.
Following the crushing victory of his party, President Compaoré developed a strategy of legitimisation and sought to firmly establish his political domination by dividing his opponents and by co-opting some of them in what he sought to present as a consensual democracy. The result was a decline of the Burkina Faso opposition. Since the boycott of the presidential election of 1991 and despite their chances of putting the outgoing president in difficulty, the opposition has gone through a period of crisis with its failures in the general elections of 1992 and the municipal elections of 1995. They hoped to find a second wind in the general elections of 1997, but in vain. The presidential party won 101 of the 111 seats in the National Assembly. And in the presidential elections of 15 November 1998, President Campaoré was re-elected in the first round of a vote boycotted by part of the opposition, despite the creation of an Independent National Electoral Committee (Commission Electorale Nationale Indépendante - CENI).
Despite their imperfections, these elections were both the sign that the democratic process was taking root and the sign of the domination of the current regime. From this point of view, these elections are profoundly ambivalent in that the very scale of the success of the presidential party makes the hypothesis of short or medium term political alternation improbable. Despite this dominance, the government in place was surprised by the wave of political discontent that followed the assassination by members of the President’s personal guard of a journalist investigating the murder of an employee of the President. The Collective Against Impunity, composed of organisations from civil society, political parties and unions, demanded measures to open up political life. In response to this intense pressure, a new government led by Ernest Yonli was formed in November 2000 and four opposition parties, including the Alliance for Democracy (Alliance pour la Démocratie) and the Federation of Herman Yaméogo were given posts in it. The government promised to deal diligently with the pending legal dossiers. Part of the opposition, called the “Group of 14 February”, refused to take part in this open government.

Political Institutions

The constitution promulgated on 11 June 1991 formally founded a semi-presidential regime with a Prime Minister responsible before the National Assembly which could be dissolved by the President of the Republic. In reality, however, the system is a Presidential one, due to the existence of a dominant party and in so far as the President can dismiss the Prime Minister at will. Executive power is in the hands of the President of Faso, elected by direct universal suffrage for 5 years and eligible for re-election once, since the modification of the Constitution made by the National Assembly in April 2000.

The Parliament comprises two chambers, but power is shared very unequally, since the National Assembly has a monopoly on legislative power. As far as the second chamber, called the House of Representatives, is concerned, it has merely consultative powers. There is however, debate about the nature of these powers. The status of the second Chamber may therefore evolve. For the time being, it is composed of representatives of the different groups in civil society (unions, common-law and religious authorities, associations etc.)

In terms of checks on the constitutional validity of the laws and of electoral disputes, it is the Constitutional Chamber, composed of ten members appointed for a single term of nine years that is competent. Cases can be referred to it only in specific cases and is not directly accessible to the citizen in the street. Its decisions are not subject to appeal.

There is also an Economic and Social Council made up of representatives of the main socio-professional categories. Its role is to give its opinion on projected laws, orders or decrees that are referred to it. The post of Ombudsman of Faso was also created in May 1996.

Legal System

In April 2000, the Parliament of Burkina Faso adopted a revision of the Constitution that established the division of the Supreme Court, initially composed of four chambers (Administrative, Constitutional, Judicial and Accounts) into four separate entities: Court of Cassation, Council of State, Court of Auditors and Constitutional Council. Judicial power was placed in the hands of the judges. Throughout Burkina Faso, it is exercised by the jurisdictions of the judicial and the administrative branches. The Constitution states the independence of the legal authorities, but there have been many transgressions of this principle due to the militant attitudes of certain judges and pressures from those in power. As well as this, the High Council of the Judiciary that is supposed to ensure the independence of the judges is presided over by the Head of State. The Constitution also allows for a High Court of Justice before which the President and the members of the government can be called to answer for acts qualified as crimes or offences committed in the exercise of their functions. However, this court was only fully established on 4 June 1998, seven years after the adoption of the Constitution.

Decentralisation and Devolution

Decentralisation in Burkina is governed both by the Constitution and the programmes of structural and institutional adjustment of the economy and the State, the latter having settled in the past for mere devolution. In June 1993, five laws redefined the territorial organisation of Burkina Faso. They created decentralised, local authorities in the provinces and communes. In November 1993, the National Decentralisation Commission was created with the principal mission of putting forward guidelines concerning decentralisation and covering the terms of involvement of all the political, administrative, economic and technical components of decentralisation. To date, decentralisation has become operational only in the so-called fully-operational communes which are administered by mayors appointed by municipal councils elected by direct universal suffrage. The municipal elections took place on 15 February 1995. Turnout was high, around 70%. Twenty-six of the thirty-three communes at stake were won by the party of the President, and notably those of the capital Ouagadougou. In 1996, fifteen new provinces were created, bringing the total number to forty-five and the number of fully-operational communes to 48, since the capitals of the provinces are, by law, fully operational communes.

The last municipal elections organised on 24 September 2000 saw turnout of 68.4%, with 5,145 candidates representing 45 political formations. The victory of the Congress for Democracy and Progress (Congrès pour la Démocratie et le Progrès – CDP), the party in power, was overwhelming: it won 43 communes out of the forty-nine in the country. Some opposition parties chose to boycott this vote.

Two technical instruments were created within the framework of decentralisation with the objective of creating 500 communes by 2010: the Communal Management and Development Support Department (Service d’Appui à la Gestion et au Développement Communal – SAGEDECOM) and the Commune Start-Up Fund (Fonds de Démarrage des Communes – FODECOM). There is also an Association of the Mayors of Burkina Faso (AMBF). In recent times, decentralisation has been based on laws 041, 042 and 043/98/AN of 06 August 1998 governing respectively the organisation of local administration, the organisation and workings of the local authorities and the schedule for decentralisation. These texts, and in particular law 043, state that the transfer of competence and the required resources must be in force within five years of the law being adopted.

Political Parties

Article 13 of the Constitution guarantees multypartyism and Burkina Faso does indeed have a large number of parties: 67 parties were officially registered in 1992. By 28 January 1997, the number of officially registered parties had gone down to 46 with the political scene undergoing major reorganisation in February 1996. The Presidential party ODP-MT merged with about ten political parties to form the Congress for Democracy and Progress (Congrès pour la Démocratie et le Progrès - CDP), which rivals with the PDP (Parti pour la Démocratie et le Progrès) to be the social-democratic reference in the country. The latter party absorbed four political formations that were not represented in the Assembly and has thus remained the main force of opposition. The ADF (Alliance for Democracy and the Federation – Alliance pour la Démocratie et la Fédération) was also joined by about ten political formations. This reorganisation took place a few months before the general elections of May 1997. The main political forces standing were: the CDP, which strengthened its position with 88 members of parliament, the PDP, the second group in parliament with 9 members and the ADF and RDA, which formed a nine-member parliamentary group.

At the end of 1997, four parties were represented in the Assembly, compared with nine at the beginning of its term of office and out of the 27 that took part in the election of May 1992. Only 13 of them took part in the elections of 11 May 1997 and only 4 of them won seats. The Burkina Faso National Assembly now has only three parliamentary groups of widely varying strength: the majority CDP group (101 seats), the PDP (6 seats) and the ADF/RDA (4) with the latter two parties merging in May 1998. generally speaking, the opposition parties have difficulty establishing themselves firmly on the political scene, not so much because of obstacles placed in their way by those in power as due to their weakness in terms of human and material resources and financing, not to forget their lack of unity.

Trades Unions

There have always been several unions in post-colonial Burkina Faso and the unions have, historically, played an important role. They have been the spearheads of civil society and have represented a real political counter-weight to make power more balanced. Several governments in the course of the first three Republics fell at their hands. They came out of the revolutionary period greatly weakened, however, and have been trying to reconstruct their forces in the face of regime that has sought to neutralise them buy other means, notably corruption. In this way, the trade union scene in Burkina Faso is becoming increasingly bipolarised with, on the one hand, a group of unions (called the group of 13) who prefer to dialogue with the government and are suspected of playing its game and, on the other, the so-called revolutionary unions which are firmly hostile to the economic and political management of the government, are more inclined to go on strike than to discuss and are suspected of being a form of unavowed political opposition. The CGT-B (Confédération Générale du Travail du Burkina), the country’s largest union, is the leader of this radical tendency. It is constantly denouncing corruption, violations of human rights and public liberties, impunity, assassinations, police errors, the hegemony of the party in power, the shortcomings of the administration etc. It is in this context that the government had laws adopted that restrict the right to strike or to demonstrate on public thoroughfares. We should also note union activism in the school and student populations, mainly led by National Students’ Association of Burkina Faso (Association Nationale des Etudiants Burkinabé - ANEB). Their protests against government measures relating to the grants led to the academic year 2000 being invalidated.

Human Rights

The transition to democracy was marked by intimidation and exactions visible through terrorist attacks and the assassination of opponents. With the adoption of the Constitution in 1991 and the establishment of the institutions of the Fourth Republic, the situation in terms of human rights improved and there have been no political prisoners since 1992. Civil rights movements, however, are constantly denouncing the impunity of the dignitaries of the regime, police errors, torture, disappearances and extra-judiciary executions of delinquents and of ex-members of the presidential guard. On 13 December 1998, Norbert Zongo, the chief editor of the weekly L’Indépendant, was assassinated while carrying out an investigation into murder in the entourage of the brother of the Chief of State. Since then, the country has been shaken by protest campaigns and accusations of violations of human rights. To reduce tension, the Military Tribunal of Ouagadougou pronounced sentences of ten to twenty years imprisonment against soldiers from the Presidential Security Regiment. However, those supposed to have been responsible for the assassination of Norbert Zongo have not yet been heard by a judge, despite having been named by an independent enquiry. This continues to cause disturbances in the political climate of the country and to create tension between the authorities and the organisations in civil society that fight against this impunity.
The Burkina Faso Movement of Human and Peoples’ Rights (Mouvement Burkinabé des Droits de l’Homme et des Peuples – MBDHP) is one of the leading organisations in the civil society of the country when it comes to taking a stand on the situation in terms of human rights. Its President, Halidou Ouédraogo is also the President of the Inter-African Union of Human Rights which includes many NGO’s from almost all the African States and has a contract with Burkina Faso where it has its headquarters. However, the movement complains of a lack of support from the State and that some of its militants suffer from intimidation.

Media

The Code de l’Information was adopted in 1992 and revised in 1993. Private radio stations and press have been booming in Burkina Faso since the beginning of the democratic proves. The State controls one daily, one weekly, and one monthly paper, edited by les Editions Sidwaya, a national television station and one national radio station with local and regional stations. Officially, the private printed press comprises three daily papers (L’Observateur-Paalga, Le Pays, Le Journal du Soir), seven weeklies (L’Indépendant, critical in its opinions and the satirical Le Journal du Jeudi etc), ten monthly and three quarterly publications. The private audio-visual sector includes around thirty radio stations, all on FM, most of which are community stations. Radio France Internationale can be received on the FM band in Ouagadougou and in Bobo-Dioulasso. For lack of an agreement with the State, Voice of America and the BBC were forbidden to broadcast their programmes on FM via existing stations. We should also note the profusion of satellite dishes, especially in the capital, which are used to receive foreign television programmes.

Most of the private publications and radio stations have financial and material difficulties that expose them to the risk of becoming dependent on the political authorities, on financial backers or of disappearing. The lack of professionalism of presenters and journalists is also patent, especially as the status of journalists is not codified. The information handled by the media is often dealt with without any critical approach. It is generally institutional and the State has firm control over its media. According to the League for the Defence of Press Freedom, there is a degree of liberty of the press in Burkina Faso, but there are also serious obstacles to this freedom being extended, in particular the repressive legal arsenal that can be used against the press and the lack of independence of the Conseil Supérieur de l’Information which has, in the past, suspended popular radio programmes for being critical. The declared opinion of the President of the Society of Private Editors is that the journalists censor themselves for fear of the authorities.