Olowokandi

This is simply the truth. The military in Burkina Faso possesses a far more sophisticated ideological grounding compared to the Nigerian Army, all thanks to the enduring legacy of Thomas Sankara. Sankara was a Marxist who sought to use military statecraft to liberate his people. Even though his project was ultimately cut short and the colonial institutions in Burkina Faso remained intact and breathing, he succeeded in planting an ideological seed from which Captain Ibrahim Traore germinated decades later. To be fair, Traore is nowhere near Sankara's status yet. His administration is still gobbling up imperial loans from Western financial institutions and even facilitating medical imperialism against his own people on behalf of Washington. However, I remain cautiously bullish on his administration. I hope that at the right time, he will transition from a military dictatorship into a true dictatorship of the proletariat and completely dismantle the colonial structures, including the very colonial army to which he belongs. The problem is that most Nigerians who look at Burkina Faso and start celebrating, praying for a similar coup to happen here, completely fail to comprehend the massive ideological divergence between Burkinabe military doctrines and those of Nigeria. I continue to ask myself why there is this bizarre fetishization of coups in Nigeria. We have had several military coups in our history, all of which were advertised as necessary interventions to end corruption and bring salvation to the masses. Instead, the result was always the exact same: the military elite simply became the new political bourgeoisie, amassing fleets of luxury cars, securing massive estates, and signing off lucrative oil blocks to their cronies. The Nigerian military never possessed any concrete economic blueprints on how to leverage our fertile lands to feed our people or industrialize the nation. Instead, they descended into an abyss of 13th-century primitivism. Their grand economic strategy was deploying armed soldiers into local markets to whip and brutalize petty traders, forcing them to sell goods at artificially lowered state prices to "fight inflation." Predictably, this primitive price control triggered artificial scarcity, spiked inflation even further, and rightfully made the working masses despise the military leadership strata. By all logistical and tactical metrics, the Nigerian Army may be better equipped and heavily funded compared to Burkina Faso, but ideologically speaking, they are worlds apart. This is why I still do not understand why our people fail to recognize this glaring difference. Today, the older generation in Burkina Faso continues to revere and celebrate Sankara. But if you mention military coups to our parents here in Nigeria, they will sternly warn you never to pray for one, because honestly speaking, every single one of them ended in catastrophic failure and institutional ruin. These are obvious, historically verifiable facts. Yet, whenever I point them out, they accuse me of being a sophisticated psy-op.🤷