Burkina Faso is right to regulate NGOs

On 15 April 2026, Burkina Faso’s ministry of territorial administration and mobility announced the dissolution of 118 NGOs and associations and banned their activities. Amnesty International called the move an attack on freedom of association. Al Jazeera reported that many of the organisations had worked in human rights and civil society spaces. Commentators framed the decision as another step away from democracy, as though NGOs in Africa have always functioned as neutral vessels of public good rather than instruments embedded in donor power, foreign reporting structures and soft political management.

That decision should stand at the beginning of any serious discussion about Burkina Faso under Ibrahim Traoré. The dispute concerns sovereignty. It concerns the right of an African state to determine which institutions operate inside its borders, which foreign networks shape civic space and which external actors gain moral authority over African suffering.

Burkina Faso has every right to examine NGOs, dissolve organisations that breach national law and prevent foreign-funded civic infrastructure from operating as a parallel political class. A liberation state must distinguish donor infrastructure from genuine popular organisation. It must regulate foreign-funded influence while building local participation through workers, farmers, women, youth, traditional communities, neighbourhood structures and national development forums.

Traoré’s rejection of liberal democracy belongs in that same frame. When he tells Burkina Faso to forget democracy, he forces Africa to confront one of the central frauds of the postcolonial order. The West exported liberal democracy to Africa through neocolonialism, donor discipline, military oversight and comprador brokerage. It delivered periodic voting inside economies captured by foreign capital, security systems shaped by imperial interests and political think tanks trained to sell dependency as democratic governance.

Burkina Faso bled under a political order that performed constitutionalism while foreign powers shaped its military architecture, foreign companies extracted its mineral wealth and local elites recited the vocabulary of sovereignty while surrendering its substance. The anxiety around Traoré’s statement exposes the intellectual poverty of African liberalism. Its defenders treat democracy as a sacred word rather than a historical formation. They speak of institutions while ignoring command over those institutions. They signal rights while avoiding ownership of gold, military training, debt terms, NGO funding, border policing and the external restraints imposed on states that refuse obedience.

France stationed troops in Burkina Faso through a military accord that allowed French forces to fight insurgents on Burkinabè territory. In January 2023, Burkina Faso ended that accord and stated that the country wanted to defend itself. Reuters reported that opponents of the French military presence had protested against France’s failure to tackle the insurgency spreading through the region. The chronology resists the liberal accusation. Burkina Faso forced France out after years of insurgent expansion under a Western-backed security framework. Russia entered later, after that framework had already lost credibility.

Commentators now shift blame to Russia and its advisers, as though Burkina Faso entered the crisis only when Moscow appeared on the scene. Russian personnel arrived in Burkina Faso in January 2024, a year after Burkinabè authorities ordered French troops out. The Russia line gives liberal commentators an alibi. It allows them to dodge the wreckage left by the old Western security architecture and recast every sovereign realignment as foreign contamination.

The centering of Russian advisers as an anti-democratic force reads as politically expedient and intellectually disingenuous. Liberal writers have developed a habit of presenting Russia as an anti-democratic autocracy, as though the word “Russia” itself settles every argument. This habit amounts to lazy journalism and recycled Russophobia. It exposes how little experience and critical engagement many contemporary commentators bring to African politics, liberation history and geopolitical affairs. Too many papers now saturate public debate with regurgitated Western lines, then present them as radical or rational analysis. The result embarrasses African journalism and reduces continental questions of sovereignty, security and resource control to Atlantic talking points.

Russia operates within a nationalist democratic tradition that places national independence, historical memory and strategic autonomy at the centre of statecraft. Its constitution defines the Russian Federation as a democratic federal rule-of-law state with a republican form of government. That fact should stop the automatic conversion of every Russian presence in Africa into proof of authoritarian infiltration.

France, the United States and the European Union have long entered African political life through soldiers, consultants, debt instruments, foundations, media training, electoral funding and security doctrine. Their presence rarely receives the same suspicion. In the liberal conservative imaginary, Western troops arrive as stabilisers, American security partnerships as capacity building and European funding as democracy support. Russian advisers arrive and the same commentators suddenly express anxiety about external influence. Such commentary disciplines African states back into Western obedience while pretending to defend democracy.

Burkina Faso’s leadership has moved where many elected African governments refused to move. It revised its mining code, created the state mining company SOPAMIB, took control of industrial gold assets and announced plans to expand state control over foreign-owned mines. Reuters reported in April 2025 that Burkina Faso planned to take control of more foreign-owned industrial mines. In June 2025, Reuters reported that Burkina Faso completed the transfer of five gold mining assets to the state-owned miner.

These moves explain Traoré’s continental appeal. Many Africans see in Burkina Faso an attempt to recover command over resources that elected governments surrendered without ideological shame. They see a state trying to break the pattern in which African elites administer poverty while multinational capital extracts wealth from African soil. The Alliance of Sahel States strengthens that break. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have chosen regional alignment outside Ecowas control after years of pressure from institutions that protect the regional status quo more fiercely than they protect ordinary Africans. Western capitals call this Russian influence. African states call it strategic diversification after decades of French failure.

African liberation projects cannot ignore the danger that grows when the state concentrates armed power. This often signals Western-funded destabilisation politics. A government that speaks in the name of the people must answer to the people through concrete, organised and living political forms. Traoré’s government does just that. Yet liberal critics ask Africans to grieve political forms that at no time served them. Burkina Faso’s former party system never produced safety, food sovereignty, industrial capacity or territorial integrity. It produced electoral pluralism inside a dependent state that left its people hungry and impoverished. The presence of many parties cannot compensate for a state that lacks sovereign control over land, minerals, security and national development. South Africa’s GNU arrangement proves that malaise.

The same logic applies to NGOs. Their number and visibility do not prove democratic health. Africa has seen too many donor-funded organisations translate hunger, dispossession and war into photo shoots, reports, workshops, policy briefs and access to foreign embassies. The NGO form can serve communities. It can also professionalise dependency, displace mass politics and turn popular suffering into a career ladder for the bilingual elite. Burkina Faso’s move against 118 organisations must therefore be assessed through the history of donor power as well as the danger of state overreach.

The security crisis remains severe. Armed insurgents have killed thousands and displaced millions across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger over the past decade. Those figures require brutal political honesty. Liberal commentators use them as proof that anti-imperial politics cannot govern, yet they seldom apply the same standard to the Western-backed order that presided over the collapse.

Russia’s presence in Burkina Faso must be judged within the broader African struggle over strategic choice. Foreign partners should not escape African scrutiny. France failed inside a neocolonial security framework and lost legitimacy on Burkinabè soil. Russia entered a terrain already shaped by that failure and offered a state-facing alliance at a moment when Burkina Faso sought military autonomy, resource sovereignty and regional alignment outside Western supervision.

The West does not have a moral claim over African security. African states retain the right to choose partners according to their own historical interests. A multipolar world means nothing if African states must still ask Western permission before selecting allies, building armies, nationalising resources, regulating NGOs or rejecting political models that serve foreign capital more than African people.

Traoré’s utterances cut through the diplomatic haze as they exposed the raw nerve. Empire exported democracy to Africa as a management system. Local intermediaries administered it through structural adjustment, military dependence, resource extraction, NGO professionalisation and electoral rituals inside economies that comprador elites had already handed to foreign power.

Burkina Faso has every right to bury that model. It has every right to regulate foreign-funded civic infrastructure. It has every right to keep alliances that strengthen its hand against the forces that weakened it. Africa does not owe fidelity to the West’s preferred vocabulary and unearned moral sensibilities. It owes fidelity to its people, its land, its memory and its future.

Gillian Schutte is editor-in-chief of The Counterhegemon. She has an academic background in African politics, postmodern literature and semiotics. She is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.