Flight of Blaise Compaore

I forgive today’s African youths for not launching a major celebration. Most of them were either not born or were too young to know what happened on October 15, 1987. Nor did they care to read about it.African men and women of my age will not forget Blaise Compaore in a hurry. He was the […]

I forgive today’s African youths for not launching a major celebration. Most of them were either not born or were too young to know what happened on October 15, 1987. Nor did they care to read about it.
African men and women of my age will not forget Blaise Compaore in a hurry. He was the tragedy, the shame and the treachery that sent soldiers on that day to shoot his friend, colleague and Burkinabe head of state Captain Thomas Sankara. There was gloom all over Africa that day. Then French President Francois Mitterrand described the assassination as “a terrible waste.” To remind you of what the event represented to my generation of Africans, Sankara attended an ECOWAS summit in Abuja two months before his murder. As soon as he arrived at the meeting’s venue, the Nigerian crowd of spectators went wild with shouts of “Sankara! Sankara!” News reports at the time said all the other West African rulers, including the host, were embarrassed by the reception that Sankara got from Nigerian youths. Afterwards, none of them wanted the young, vibrant, fiery and very radical Burkinabe leader to visit his domain.
In some ways, my generation was luckier than today’s youths. Though we had neither internet nor smart phones, we had in the 1970s and 1980s several very rich pan-African magazines such as Africa [published by Ralph Uwechue], Africa Now [published by Peter Enahoro], New African, Drum, West Africa [later owned by Daily Times of Nigeria], Africa Today as well as South. In addition there was also African Concord and African Guardian. Each one of them had very detailed stories about political, economic, social and cultural happenings in individual African countries. As a result, we became familiar in a very detailed way with all major happenings in every African country. These days I think only the BBC Focus on Africa upholds this tradition.
When I heard about Blaise Compaore’s flight, I thought of the many other African rulers that took flight in similar fashion after many years of misruling their countries. A recent case was the Tunisian President Zine Abidine ibn Ali who fled Tunis in 2011 at the onset of the so-called Arab Spring. Luckily his well appointed Villa was by the Mediterranean coast, which made his flight easy.
Before Ali, another ruler that fled was Sierra Leone’s President Joseph Saidu Momoh, the former Army commander who took over from long time ruler President Siaka Stevens in 1985. Momoh fled in 1992 when young officers led by Captain Valentine Strasser went to complain about the way he was handling the war against rebels in Sierra Leone’s mineral-rich east. The rebels were supported by Liberian president Charles Taylor. Now, Taylor was the man who led the invasion of Liberia in 1990 which led to a terrible civil war and the ousting of the atrocious dictator Samuel Kanyon Doe. Reports at the time said Taylor was trained in Libya and he launched the invasion from Burkina Faso with Blaise Compaore’s help.
Taylor himself fled to Nigeria in 2003 following a deal made by President Obasanjo and South African President Thabo Mbeki to evade his capture by rebels. After three years’ comfortable exile in Calabar he took flight again towards the Chadian border, was apprehended by immigration officials and ended up at The Hague, facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. I asked the feisty Obasanjo during an interview in 2003 why Nigeria became a haven for failed dictators. Before Taylor arrived, Chadian Head of State General Felix Malloum took refuge in Lagos in 1979. He had overthrown Chadian President Ngarta Tombalbaye in 1975, only to be chased out by rebels supported by Muammar Gaddafi. Maloum was succeeded by the Transitional Government of National Unity [GUNT] led by Goukouni Oueddei.  Oueddei also took flight in 1982 when rebel leader Hissene Habre closed in on him. Eight years later, Habre also took flight to Senegal when his army commander General Idris Deby turned on him.
The same year in 1991 when General Mohamed Farah Aideed closed in on Somali President Siad Barre, he fled Mogadishu and took refuge in Lagos. A year earlier, Liberian rebel leader Yormie Johnson, the man who caught and executed Samuel Doe, was offered asylum in Lagos. Before all those men, Sudanese President Gafar el-Numeiry took flight to Egypt in 1985 when the army led by General Swar al-Dhahab closed in on him. Dhahab later handed over to Prime Minister Sadiq el-Mahdi.
Before Numeiry, there was Idi Amin. Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, alias “Big Daddy” and “Conqueror of the British Empire” was a forceful presence on the African scene in the 1970s. Westerners despised Idi Amin, alleging that he killed hundreds of people. All over Africa however, youths loved Idi Amin because of his imposing presence, his anti-colonialist rhetoric, his expelling Asian traders from his country, his dribbling the British Government with a threat to enter the UK despite being refused a visa, his offer to lead the African High Command to liberate Rhodesia and South Africa and his being carried on the shoulders of four White men, what he called “The Whiteman’s burden.”
In 1979 Idi Amin quarrelled with his neighbor, the saintly Tanzanian President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. Amin then said that Uganda and Tanzania should not go to war because of that quarrel, that since it was between Nyerere and himself, the two of them should step into a boxing ring and settle scores. Now, twenty years earlier, then Sergeant Idi Amin had been crowned the military heavyweight boxing champion of colonial East Africa. Newsweek Magazine said at the time that “the slightly built Nyerere wisely refused” Idi Amin’s offer. Not entirely; a rebel army that Nyerere supported soon swept into Kampala and sent Idi Amin fleeing first to Libya and then on to Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death eleven years ago.
Jean Bedel Salim Ahmed Bokassa, “Emperor” of the Central African Empire [i.e. Republic], also took flight in 1979 when his cousin David Dacko staged a comeback to power. Bokassa fled leaving behind his horse-drawn golden carriage as well as the imported French horses that pulled it through Bangui’s dusty streets during his 1976 “coronation.” Bokassa was a sergeant in the French colonial army and he dreamed of following the trajectory of Napoleon Bonaparte, the 19th century French soldier who rose to become emperor of France.  Probably the grandest of all African fleeing into exiles was Mobutu Sese Seko’s in 1997. With Joseph Kabila’s rebel forces closing in on Kinshasa, Mobutu fled to his inaccessible jungle palace at Gbadolite in Zaire’s north. From there he went to Morocco and then on to the French Riviera, where he died of cancer.
That so many despotic and sit-tight African rulers eventually took the flight path shouldn’t surprise anyone considering what happened to the ones that stayed behind. Such as Liberia’s President William Tolbert, who was shot by Master Sergeant Doe in 1980; all his ministers were lined up at the beach and shot. The Liberians only borrowed a leaf from Ghana where, in 1979, Flight Lt J.J. Rawlings lined up and shot three ex-rulers—General Afrifa, Colonel Ignatius Acheampong and Lt Gen Fred Akuffo. Even the Ghanaians had borrowed a leaf from Ethiopia. In 1974, rebel soldiers arrested and incarcerated Emperor Haile Selassie. Then they rounded up and shot 60 top officials of the government including the prime minister and the crown prince. Lt General Aman Andom, who led the new regime, was shot a few months later by Lt Col Mengistu Haile Mariam, who then ruled with an iron fist until 1991 when Ethiopian and Eritrean rebels closed in on Addis Ababa. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe and still lives on a farm there.
So, fleeing by a despot is an honoured African tradition. For now, let us drink a toast to the fall of Blaise Compaore, the man who assassinated the African Dream.