Read the full English translation of Traoré’s speech below this article
…we must be the flame that must illuminate the minds of other Africans to take the path of revolution so that together we can give new breath to our Africa, see Africa shine in this world that seeks to always plunge us into darkness.
Thousands of people across Burkina Faso are mobilizing in the streets to commemorate the First Anniversary of the Progressive Popular Revolution (RPP). On April 1, Captain Ibrahim Traoré presided over a flag-raising ceremony at the Palace of Koulouba which included the launch of the National Days of Patriotic Engagement and Citizen Participation (JEPPC).
President Traoré delivered a stirring speech that expanded on the role of Burkina Faso’s social, political, and economic transformation. Rooted in affirming the Burkinabé peoples’ will to develop independent of oppressing forces and towards stability, peace and justice in the homeland. Grounding this political will are the contours – outlined by Traoré – to shape Burkina Faso’s destiny by transforming oneself to become a revolutionary:
- First, the revolutionary is one who loves his homeland and loves peoples, yearning for peace and justice…
- Second, a revolutionary must seek knowledge…The revolutionary seeks knowledge because it is through knowledge that we revolutionize our lives.
- Finally, the revolutionary is the one who remains firm against the people or leaders who seek to oppress him. The revolutionary firmly opposes the oppressor.
Traoré’s speech parallels many famous speeches given by the country’s former revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, who led the August 1983 national liberation struggle against French colonialism. Not only did Traoré’s speech speak to charting forward a revolutionary path for Burkinabè people, it also grounded the First Anniversary of the RPP in the spirit and principles of Pan-Africanism and internationalism. In the coming days, President Traoré will reveal a new “Revolution Manifesto” that outlines the strategic vision of the Progressive Popular Revolution.
A Burkina Faso built on progressive internal development, peace and security
When the September 2022 coup – led by Captain Ibrahimm Traoré – occurred, it deposed Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who had seized power in a coup d’etat in January that very same year. Damiba’s brief tenure was marked by a 23% increase in violence from jihadist militias, while also failing to fulfill promises made under his leadership after ousting former President Roch Kaboré. The former overthrown President Kaboré had ruled Burkina Faso since 2015 as the beneficiary of a mass insurrection that began in October 2014 against Blaise Compaoré – traitor of the revolution and successor following Thomas Sankara’s assassination in 1987.
Under Sankara’s revolutionary government from 1983 until his assassination in 1987, social programs were implemented leading to a reduction in infant mortality rates, increased literacy rates, and the vaccination of more than 2 million children against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever. Millions of trees were planted to tackle desertification and practices such as female genital mutilation were outlawed. Following Sankara’s assassination, all of the social gains of the revolution were reversed. At the time of Damiba’s ouster, the UN reported 18 million people in the Sahel were on ‘the brink of starvation’. The World Bank indicated 42% of people in Burkina Faso lived in poverty.
Since the popularly-backed coup of 2022, President Traoré has fought to define Burkina Faso’s national programme, which has a distinctly anti-imperialist orientation. Burkina Faso, through the confederation known as the Alliance of the Sahel States (AES), have made significant strides to kick out and completely reject French and Western political and military influence across the Sahel. Concrete moves were made to sever military ties with France between 2020 and 2024, dealing a blow to French colonial domination in the region.
With the expulsion of French troops from the country, it is worth noting that under Traoré’s government, the national army was strengthened to promote independent resolutions to the security crisis. The national army has been able to regain control of nearly 75% of the territory at the end of 2025.
In March of this year, Burkina Faso launched a 64 billion-dollar National Development Plan (NDP) spanning roughly from 2026 to 2030 which is one of the largest economic programs laid out in the Sahel. The NDP will utilize two-thirds of money raised domestically from revenue generated by state-owned enterprises and citizen shareholding programs. Effectively, reclaiming the country’s natural resources as sovereign and sustainably reconstructing Burkina Faso’s economy to meet the needs of every citizen. The 5-year plan creates a model built on self-reliance over external funding sources that historically indebted the nation.
Four key priorities of the NDP are security and social cohesion, governance reform, human capital development, and expanded infrastructure. The process of program-budgeting will involve a wide swath of popular, democratic participation for the Burkinabè people to determine how to most effectively utilize funding across the key priorities.
Burkina Faso: The Land of Upright People
The First Anniversary speech marks a qualitative shift in the political project of the popular government: a return to the spark that ignited the popular will of Burkina Faso across the country to become self-determining and sovereign. The revolutionary history of Burkina Faso is alive in the political programme of Traoré’s government and in the minds of everyday people inside the country. The internal structural shifts within the country are paired necessarily with the ideological motivation for the masses of people to reimagine how they transform themselves to become the revolutionary that will maintain the revolutionary project that is beginning to unfold.
The popularity of Traoré’s government 4 years later is a testament to what the Burkinabè people have yearned for since the assassination of Sankara. The people of Burkina Faso and the African continent as a whole desire security, peace, and development on their own terms. Despite an unstable international situation, the Burkinabè people and the Progressive Popular Revolution look towards the future with revolutionary optimism.
With national liberation, the ‘stars first began to shine in the heavens of our homeland’, Sankara said at the UN, as they realised the need for ‘revolution, the eternal struggle against all domination’. ‘We want to democratise our society’, he continued, ‘to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future’. – Thomas Sankara, 1984 UN speech
Image: Supporters greet Ibrahim Traoré (20 March 2025)
One Year of the RPP Proclamation – Speech by Captain Ibrahim Traoré
Hello comrades.
It has been exactly one year, to the day, since we proclaimed the Popular and Progressive Revolution right here. This took place during the days of patriotic engagement. This year, God willed that we celebrate this proclamation during those same days of patriotic engagement.
Admittedly, last year’s theme was about order and discipline. This year, the theme is more focused on local consumption. But in any case, order and discipline remain the foundation and the strength of a revolution. No revolution succeeds in disorder, anarchy, and indiscipline.
The revolution is more than a necessity. It is an imperative necessity for us. No nation, especially the least developed in Africa, can claim to set itself on the path to development except through revolution. That is why I say that the revolution is an imperative necessity for us, and some people will ask questions: What is the revolution? Especially our Popular and Progressive Revolution.
Indeed, for over a year now, many people have made efforts to teach the ideology, to convey the ideology, but we have decided to produce a manifesto that will be available in the coming days, in which the broad outlines of our revolution concerning several social areas of our homeland are inscribed.
But beyond all this, the revolutionary is someone who must have several qualities. He is not the perfect man, but he must have many qualities. I will dwell on three great qualities that a revolutionary must have.
First, the revolutionary is one who loves his homeland and loves peoples, yearning for peace and justice. To love your homeland, you must love all those who live with you. Since you are not isolated in a forest or a desert, all alone, without any human being next to you, you must, in your behavior, in your language, through your actions, preach love around you, around your community, and especially with your compatriots. Beyond all that, you must love all the peoples of the world and yearn for peace and justice. Whoever speaks of love around oneself necessarily cultivates solidarity, mutual aid, and peace. These are values that a revolutionary must embody.
Second, a revolutionary must seek knowledge. An ignorant person cannot be a revolutionary. Someone who stagnates, who is narrow-minded, cannot be a revolutionary. The revolutionary seeks knowledge because it is through knowledge that we revolutionize our lives. The revolutionary must seek to know history, know his roots, know his forefathers, his ancestors, where they come from, what was the interaction between his ancestors and the rest of the world. The revolutionary must coldly analyze the present, the actions and behaviors of all the peoples of the world, of the world’s leaders. He must analyze the present well and understand how he must behave in the future.
That is why I often say that the revolutionary is the one who seeks to know history, who cross-references historical data with the present to be able to project himself into the future. As long as you do not have this capacity to seek knowledge of your identity, your sources, your roots, to coldly analyze the present without emotion, you will not be able to project yourself into the future because you will never understand the world.
The revolutionary is the one who seeks all types of knowledge. Through what we do every day, what we eat, we should seek to have scientific knowledge to reproduce what others may have already sought and found, or seek to create in order to participate in the life of our nation, to facilitate the lives of our citizens, our fellow citizens. So, no matter what, a revolutionary must seek knowledge. Whether it is ideological, political, philosophical, whether it is scientific knowledge, the revolutionary in any case must not be an ignoramus.
If you are a seller of glasses or you wear glasses, as a revolutionary, you should therefore think about manufacturing these glasses here. If you wear imported shoes, as a revolutionary, you must find the shoemakers and all those who sell these shoes so that we can create them here. If you are a revolutionary and you carry a weapon, you must, no matter what, seek to manufacture the weapon here. That is the revolutionary spirit.
Finally, the revolutionary is the one who remains firm against the people or leaders who seek to oppress him. The revolutionary firmly opposes the oppressor. He firmly opposes the one who seeks to dominate. He opposes imperialism. The revolutionary opposes the one who does not love his homeland. The revolutionary cannot love a traitor. That is a reality. And the revolutionary fights these imperialists and these traitors first and foremost through the power of ideas, the power of arguments. And how to have the power of ideas and arguments? It is through the knowledge that he seeks and acquires before moving on to any other form of combat.
Being a revolutionary is not an easy thing. It is not proclaimed. It is through your behavior and your actions that others will define you as a revolutionary. A revolutionary does not dwell on superficial subjects without seeking to know, to understand before speaking out. Knee-jerk reactions are not revolutionary. Emotional reactions to certain subjects are not revolutionary. It is a state of mind that must lead us to emerge from our underdevelopment, change our lives, improve our living conditions, and participate in improving the living conditions of all those who live around us whom we claim to love.
Everywhere we must seek to make the revolution in the image of our fighting forces, who are revolutionary.
Since the beginning, we had been approached by several armies to help us with fighters in this relentless fight against terrorism. But due to our intrinsic values, we said no: we will fight as Burkinabè. By the way, I salute all those friends of Burkina Faso who were willing to help us in this fight. But through this revolutionary capacity of our fighting forces, we decided to fight as Burkinabè, and today we are winning the bet. The fighting forces are evolving well on the ground, reconquering the lands that were the enemy’s sanctuaries. We see them fleeing with their families, but we told these enemies at the end of the year that the message has changed: flee Burkina Faso or die. No forest will be a hiding place. The forests will be furnaces for them.
Those who persist in staying on Burkinabè soil, wanting to kill Burkinabè people, will have only one fate. We will fight them. For the smarter ones who still hear me, it is time to lay down their weapons and flee Burkina Faso, or else they should expect to cross swords with our armed forces, who will crush them. We are evolving well, and every single day, we advance. We are reconquering the ground gradually, and in several zones we are at our borders and we have settled there.
Let everyone in the administration, in all spheres, be revolutionary like our fighting forces. In your daily ways of doing things, you must bring new ideas that must innovate. If you continue to do what we have been doing for decades and you expect a new result, then you are crazy, as someone would say. Change your methods, revolutionize your lives, revolutionize your ways of doing things, propose new ideas. That is how we will succeed in the bet of our development.
Stay away from all those who want to discourage you. Stay away from all those who do not love this homeland, who do not believe in this homeland, and be careful and especially be wary of these individuals. “Slaves in the head.” They are generally traitors, demotivating, lazy. Stay away from these individuals. Be revolutionaries. Be revolutionaries every day and everywhere you are, in everything you do. Innovate. Bring something new for the well-being of your community, of that which you love the most — that is, your Burkinabè compatriots — and also participate, out of love, for the well-being of all peoples and yearning for peace and justice.
Because I said it: the revolutionary will fight oppressive peoples; he will fight all those who seek to dominate us. Be proud to be those who write the history of the revolution of Burkina Faso in an Africa plunged into the dark fate of democracy imported by these imperialists. And we must be the flame that must illuminate the minds of other Africans to take the path of revolution so that together we can give new breath to our Africa, see Africa shine in this world that seeks to always plunge us into darkness.
I therefore wish you a very good start to the quarter, and above all, may this quarter be even more revolutionary than the last quarter, and may the current year be more revolutionary than the past year.
Good luck to all. May God bless our homeland. May God bless our fighting forces on the ground and protect them in their exhilarating mission of reconquering our national territory.
Long live our national armed forces. Long live Burkina Faso, homeland or death. We shall prevail!
—
