Close Menu
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    • NiMet Predicts Three-Day Rain, Thunderstorms Nationwide From Monday
    • Again Boko Haram Kills Nine In Borno, Governor Zulum Mourns
    • There Is Pain Behind That Smile. Just Do Your Bit – By Dr Hassan Gimba
    • What Can Nigeria Learn From China’s Electricity Revolution? – By Dr Dakuku Peterside
    • Amaechi: Nigerian Politicians And Doublespeak – By Kazeem Akintunde
    • Remembering ‘Watergate Scandal’ And Danger Of Crippling Opposition – By Martins Oloja
    • When Power Mongers Regroup: Inside The ADC Circus – By Temitope Ajayi
    • Kwankwaso: The Northern Titan Tinubu Needs For 2027 – By Lamara Garba Azare
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    NEWS POINT NIGERIANEWS POINT NIGERIA
    UBA 720X90
    • HOME
    • NEWS

      NiMet Predicts Three-Day Rain, Thunderstorms Nationwide From Monday

      July 7, 2025

      Again Boko Haram Kills Nine In Borno, Governor Zulum Mourns

      July 6, 2025

      I’m Going To Contest For President In 2027, Peter Obi Declares

      July 6, 2025

      FG Fines Multichoice N766m For Violating Data Protection Act

      July 6, 2025

      We Haven’t Received Any Court Reinstatement Order On Natasha – Senate

      July 6, 2025
    • COLUMN

      There Is Pain Behind That Smile. Just Do Your Bit – By Dr Hassan Gimba

      July 6, 2025

      What Can Nigeria Learn From China’s Electricity Revolution? – By Dr Dakuku Peterside

      July 6, 2025

      Amaechi: Nigerian Politicians And Doublespeak – By Kazeem Akintunde

      July 6, 2025

      Remembering ‘Watergate Scandal’ And Danger Of Crippling Opposition – By Martins Oloja

      July 6, 2025

      Don’t Kill Yourself Because He’s Cheating – By Funke Egbemode

      July 6, 2025
    • EDUCATION

      13 Countries Offering Free Or Low-Cost PhD Programmes For Non-Citizens

      January 25, 2025

      NECO: Abia, Imo Top Performing States In Two Years, Katsina, Zamfara Come Last

      October 3, 2024

      NBTE Accredits 17 Programmes At Federal Polytechnic Kabo

      August 20, 2024

      15 Most Expensive Universities In Nigeria

      May 19, 2024

      FULL LIST: Tinubu Appoints Former SGF Yayale, Ex-Governor Yuguda, Muhammad Abacha, Jega In Universities’ Governing Councils

      May 18, 2024
    • INTERNATIONAL

      Israeli Army Targets Gaza City With Heavy Strikes, Killing 39

      July 6, 2025

      French Intelligence Claims China Trying To Foil Global Sale Of Rafale Jets

      July 6, 2025

      Israel Sending Negotiating Team To Qatar For Gaza Ceasefire Talks

      July 6, 2025

      Texas Flood Kills 24 As Rescuers Search For Children Missing From Girls’ Camp

      July 6, 2025

      UN Says 613 Gaza Killings Recorded At Aid Sites, Near Humanitarian Convoys

      July 5, 2025
    • JUDICIARY

      FULL LIST: Judicial Council Recommends Appointment Of 11 Supreme Court Justices

      December 6, 2023

      Supreme Court: Judicial Council Screens 22 Nominees, Candidates Face DSS, Others

      November 29, 2023

      FULL LIST: Judicial Commission Nominates 22 Justices For Elevation To Supreme Court

      November 16, 2023

      Seven Key Issues Resolved By Seven Supreme Court Judges

      October 26, 2023

      FULL LIST: CJN To Swear In Falana’s Wife, 57 Others As SANs November 27

      October 12, 2023
    • POLITICS

      What Peter Obi May Lose If He Joins Coalition As VP Candidate

      May 25, 2025

      Atiku Moves To Unseat Wike’s Damagum As PDP Chairman, Backs Suswam As Replacement

      April 15, 2024

      Edo’s Senator Matthew Uroghide, Others Defect To APC

      April 13, 2024

      Finally, Wike Opens Up On Rift With Peter Odili

      April 2, 2024

      El-Rufa’i’s Debt Burden: APC Suspends Women Leader For Criticising Kaduna Gov

      March 31, 2024
    • SPORTS

      THROWBACK: How I Became Known As Dodo Mayana – Peter Rufai

      July 6, 2025

      Zubimendi Joined Gunners For £60m – How Arsenal Signed Arteta’s ‘Obsession’

      July 6, 2025

      Best Of African Women’s Football On Display As WAFCON Kicks Off

      July 6, 2025

      Mbappe Scores As Real Madrid Beat Dortmund To Set-Up PSG Semi-Final

      July 6, 2025

      Super Eagles’ Captain, Ahmed Musa Named General Manager Of Kano Pillars

      July 5, 2025
    • MORE
      • AFRICA
      • ANALYSIS
      • BUSINESS
      • ENTERTAINMENT
      • FEATURED
      • LENS SPEAK
      • INFO – TECH
      • INTERVIEW
      • NIGERIA DECIDES
      • OPINION
      • Personality Profile
      • Picture of the month
      • Science
      • Special Project
      • Videos
      • Weekend Sports
    NEWS POINT NIGERIANEWS POINT NIGERIA
    UBA 720X90
    Home - How To Crown An Impostor – By Azu Ishiekwene

    How To Crown An Impostor – By Azu Ishiekwene

    By Azubuike IshiekweneMay 16, 2025
    Azu

    BURKINABE leader Ibrahim Traore is acting like a rock star. It’s not entirely his fault. He’s receiving a lot of help from dozens of social media users, especially TikTokers, who are desperate to anoint him as the best thing to come out of Burkina Faso since Thomas Sankara.

    Traore must be enjoying it, because even though he is pretending, he knows he’s not Sankara. He is an opportunist, happy to capitalise on the current frustration in his country and the Sahel for his benefit.

    A recent report by The Africa Report summarised Traore’s fictional character. “In dozens of viral TikTok edits, Traore leads imaginary armies, topples Western empires and is hailed as the ‘new Thomas Sankara.’ The captions, bold and uncompromising, include ‘Africa’s Messiah!’ ‘The People’s Captain!’ and ‘France Must Fall.’”

    UBA

    Traorephytes even invent videos of Rihanna and R Kelly (imprisoned since 2021) serenading the Burkinabe leader with hit songs!

    Fairytale
    If he were an elected president, Traore would have served three years of his first term. When he overthrew the government of President Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba in September 2022 due to the rise in Islamic insurgency, and announced himself as head of the new Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (PMSR), he promised to hand over power back to civilians in two years – that was in 2024. He hasn’t said a word about any possible new date since, and if you have seen him recently, you would know why.

    WIDGET ADS

    Apart from the adulation he has enjoyed as a social media fairytale, and dressing the part in stylish fatigues and matching neck scarves, berets, and boots, he has also talked the part.

    He rallied support by giving speeches – not as many or as eloquently as he has been credited with – against Western imperialism and colonialism, vowing to create conditions at home to stem youth migration and tackle insurgency. Traore has portrayed himself as the new face of the African Renaissance. But talk is cheap.

    Thomas Sankara African Leadership Prize

    Traore And The Other Delinquents
    He has been in good company. The turmoil in West and Central Africa, which began in Chad, Mali, and Guinea, and later spread to Niger, has disrupted security and trade in the subregion, rupturing the 49-year-old Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Burkina Faso experienced two coups in a single year. After breaking out of ECOWAS, Traore and his fellow delinquents in the Sahel have pursued a singular mission of cutting off the noses of their Sahelian francophone ties to spite the faces of French business and political interests.

    To be fair, it’s a moment of reckoning for decades of brazen French insensitivity, compounded by President Emmanuel Macron’s lack of charity when he described the relationship between France and Francophone West Africa as “part of a civilising obligation.” Which was self-interested nonsense.

    Nigerian TAX Reform - Federal Goverment

    Trouble Speaking French
    France has accumulated a notoriously poor record on the continent that it can hardly be proud of. In Niger, for example, Tom Burgis writes in his book, The Looting Machine, that French state-owned atomic energy group Areva’s profit from uranium is twice Niger’s GDP. The shameful French footprint is the same in Burkina Faso and throughout the region.

    Fourteen Francophone countries, including the troubled ones – Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Chad – hold 50 percent of their reserves in the French Treasury. This arrangement has been widely criticised, but if shame is in the French dictionary, it doesn’t exist in the Macron version.

    It is this background of despair and frustration, especially among the continent’s youths, that has fostered fairytale messiahs like Traore, who have managed to replace French hegemony with a mix of fussy state control and Russian suzerainty, with the Chinese just around the corner.

    National Orientation Agency Page UP
    National Orientation Agency - Down

    If It’s Not Sankara…
    Traoré is not Sankara, a fact that may be lost on Burkina Faso’s predominantly young population, as well as millennials and Gen Zs across the continent, whose forlorn search for role models tempts them to canonise an impostor. Of course, both are soldiers, similar in age and rank and usurpers of constitutional rule. But that’s where the similarity ends.

    Like the demagogues before him, Traore and significant sections of the military and political elite from Maurice Yameogo to Blaise Compaore have been complicit in the misery of their citizens, feeding them instead on a diet of pseudo-ideological jingoism and Western bashing, but offering no genuine alternative. Africa – anglophone, francophone, or lusophone – shares a similar heritage of exploitation; a few of its people, especially the political elite after independence, collaborated with the colonialists to compound the problem.

    Hard To Beat
    Where Traore is trading French hegemony for Russian control, for example, Sankara offered something different. In Burkina Faso: A History of Power, Protest and Revolution, Ernest Harsch said of Sankara, “In a conscious effort at nation-building, the revolutionary government also promoted a new national identity…that revolutionary project succeeded in altering the contours of the state and social and political life.”

    Whereas Sankara attempted to forge a proudly African identity, deepening regional integration among ECOWAS countries, Traoré and his cohorts have, by exiting, put at risk the estimated $596.42 billion in trade within the community, excluding informal trade among citizens, which constitutes 30 per cent of the transactions, not to mention the impact on regional collaboration on security.

    Sankara pursued radical economic self-sufficiency, agrarian reform, and social justice by outlawing female genital mutilation and promoting women’s rights. He rejected foreign aid, regardless of its source, even if it came without strings attached, something that Traore would be happy to overlook if it came from Russia.

    What Matters
    I get it. With jihadists controlling about 40 percent of the country’s territory (it’s the most terrorised country), and climate shocks compounding its misery, the challenges are as different as are the times. That is why what Traore needs now is not clout-chasing or AI propaganda by Russian-backed Wagner, but sober-minded commitment to turn around the fortunes of his country, one step at a time.

    For three years, Traore’s stock has risen amid algorithmic populism expressed in languages he neither understands nor speaks, with minimal institutional reforms, if any, and no prospects or commitment to return the country to civilian rule.

    “His rhetoric,” The Africa Report said, “still falls short of real, measurable improvements in security and civic freedoms. There’s a gap between his message and the reality on the ground, something that will ultimately test his legitimacy and legacy.”

    That’s not what the netizens want to hear. But in the end, that’s what matters.

    • Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

    Azu Ishiekwene's Column Ibrahim Traore TikTokers
    Share. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp LinkedIn Telegram Email

    Related Posts

    There Is Pain Behind That Smile. Just Do Your Bit – By Dr Hassan Gimba

    July 6, 2025

    What Can Nigeria Learn From China’s Electricity Revolution? – By Dr Dakuku Peterside

    July 6, 2025

    Amaechi: Nigerian Politicians And Doublespeak – By Kazeem Akintunde

    July 6, 2025

    Remembering ‘Watergate Scandal’ And Danger Of Crippling Opposition – By Martins Oloja

    July 6, 2025
    Add A Comment
    Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

    Latest Posts

    NiMet Predicts Three-Day Rain, Thunderstorms Nationwide From Monday

    July 7, 2025

    Again Boko Haram Kills Nine In Borno, Governor Zulum Mourns

    July 6, 2025

    There Is Pain Behind That Smile. Just Do Your Bit – By Dr Hassan Gimba

    July 6, 2025

    What Can Nigeria Learn From China’s Electricity Revolution? – By Dr Dakuku Peterside

    July 6, 2025

    Amaechi: Nigerian Politicians And Doublespeak – By Kazeem Akintunde

    July 6, 2025
    Advertisement
    WIDGET ADS
    News Point NG
    © 2025 NEWS POINT NIGERIA Developed by ENGRMKS & CO.
    • Home
    • About us
    • Disclaimer
    • Our Advert Rates
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

    Join Us On WhatsApp