Burkina Faso: President Kabore accepts Prime minister's govt resignation

Burkina Faso's government resigned Wednesday night after several protests by the population denouncing its inability to fight recurrent jihadist attacks that plague the West African country every week.

Christophe Joseph Dabiré, Burkina's Prime Minister, submitted a letter of resignation to President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré on Wednesday, who accepted it.

"It is put an end to the functions of Prime Minister of Mr. Dabiré," said on public television the secretary general of the government, Stephane Wenceslas Sanou, reading a presidential decree.

The resignation of the Prime Minister automatically entails the resignation of the government, according to Burkina Faso law.

In accordance with the law, "the members of the outgoing government are responsible for the day-to-day running of the ministerial departments until a new government is formed," said Sanou.

"I invite all Burkinabè to mobilize to support the President of Faso and the new executive that will be put in place. I remain convinced that it is in unity of action that we will be able to meet the challenges facing our country and our people," Dabiré said on his Facebook page.

For several weeks, anger has been building against the executive branch.

On November 9, the opposition demanded "urgent measures" to address the "deteriorating security situation" within a month.

And on November 27, hundreds of demonstrators descended on the capital Ouagadougou to denounce the "inability" of the government to counter the jihadist violence that has struck the country.

- Spiral of violence -

Civil society organizations demanded the departure of the head of state. A dozen people including a child and two journalists were injured in the dispersal of these marches.

The current government is faced with the frustration of the population in the face of the jihadist attacks that strike the country every week. They have killed about 2,000 people and displaced 1.4 million since 2015.

The November 14 attack on a gendarmerie detachment in Inata (north), one of the deadliest against security forces, shocked the country: at least 57 people, including 53 gendarmes, were killed by armed jihadists.

Two weeks before the attack, the gendarmes of Inata had alerted headquarters to their precarious situation, saying they were running out of food and getting by on poaching.

Burkina Faso has been caught in a spiral of violence since 2015, attributed to armed jihadist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.

Attacks targeting civilians and the military are increasingly frequent and largely concentrated in the north and east of the country.

At the end of November, President Kaboré announced new measures, stressing "the need to form a tighter and more cohesive government team.

The Burkinabe president also announced the launch next week of an "operation clean hands, to empty all pending corruption files and clear up all the cases that pollute the daily lives of Burkinabe who love good governance and democracy.

In office since January 2019, Prime Minister Christophe Dabiré, a former commissioner in charge of trade, competition and cooperation of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (Uemoa), had been reappointed in January 2021, after Mr. Kaboré's re-election for his second and last term.

Kaboré was elected in November 2015, a year after his predecessor Blaise Compaoré, in power since 1987, was ousted by the street for seeking to amend the constitution to keep his job.

But the new president has been confronted since he took office with a gradual deterioration of the security situation in the country, which has not yet been halted.