A Nationalist Impulse?
Just a few months after a long-lasting and corrupt government was swept from power, in March of this year (2015), in Burkina Faso, the country’s transitional minister of mining and energy suspended a major mining contract with Pan African Minerals at Tambao, forcing the company to stop operations there. Missing from most press explanations as to why the suspension order was issued was the growing local opposition to Pan African Minerals’ practices.
On Feb. 17, 2015, a march in protest was initiated by people in the vicinity of Markoye, the town closest to the mine, seeking Tambao mine operation stoppage until further notice. More than 3,000 local people participated. They opposed the company’s environmental practices (explosions, dust) as well as the fact that the company had reneged on its promise to employ at least fifty locals in the work there and to involve the local community more in the mines’ plans. They demanded that the operations of the mine be completely shut down until these issues were resolved.
The Feb. 17 protest was under the leadership of the region’s youth, JUDECOM, or Jeunesse Unie pour le Développement de la Commune de Markoye (Youth United for Markoye Development), a local social action group that has won the support of many. More than 3,000 people participated in the demonstration which resulted in some property damage to the mine. The mine management fled. From all appearances, it was primarily in response to this local mass action that the new transitional government of Burkina Faso decided to suspend the mine’s operations.
Then, just a week ago, on Dec. 18, the suspension was lifted. It is not clear how many of the local concerns were addressed and/or corrected by either the Burkina Faso government or Pan African Minerals. A new government, the result of recent elections, headed up by the country’s new president Roch Marc Christian Kabore, is to be installed on Dec. 29, and this might have been a key factor in the reversal. No doubt the temporary suspension played well with the country’s current wave of nationalist fervor which swept long-time ruler and close ally to France, Blaise Compaoré, from power.
Was the suspension a part of a new wave of economic nationalism suggesting that the post-Blaise Compaoré Burkina Faso government was about to take tighter control of the country’s resource production, mined overwhelmingly by foreign mining companies? Or was it something a bit more cynical on the part of the country’s transitional minister of mining and energy? Was the new energy minister just showing that he now is the “new boy on the block” who needs to be wined, dined, and otherwise well-greased in exchange for mining contracts as others had been before him? If so, it would not be the first time that a new African political leadership, and especially its minister of mining and energy, was bought off, lured by foreign bank accounts, European shopping sprees, and some of the world’s finest and highest-paid prostitutes.
Time will tell but the turnaround is rather curious.[1]
While the changes at the top are real and the result of a national movement to sweep Blaise Compaoré and his clique of minions from power, it remains to be seen just how much these political developments will translate into the economic and social sphere. Burkina Faso remains, despite Compaoré’s departure, very much within a French economic sphere of influence and one in which the United States, through AFRICOM, which has a major intelligence gathering station in Ouagadougou, has growing influence. Foreign corporate penetration of the economy remains extensive. Not to denigrate the genuinely democratic wave that has swept the country—it is refreshing and wholesome—but still one must ask: how much “elbow room” for new economic initiatives, relevant to the country’s future well-being, will take place in this environment?
Whatever the political changes bring, Burkino Faso also remains a land-locked, drought-ridden, terribly poor country characterized by extreme economic and social hardships that most Americans would find inconceivable. Ranked among the ten poorest countries in the world for decades, it has been unable to climb out of the poverty that plagues it, this despite considerable natural resource wealth. Almost the entire population—more than 80 percent—lives below the poverty line with an unemployment rate hovering around 65 percent. Nearly 45 percent live on less than $1 a day. Ranked 184 of 187 countries on the Human Development Index in 2013, with a 65 percent Muslim population, Burkina Faso also ranks among the lowest educationally with the lowest literacy rate in the world—under 20 percent.
It’s a classically peripheral economy,[2] its productivity based largely upon the export of two products: cotton and gold—both activities rely heavily on child labor. An estimated 1.25 million children under 14—some as young as five—are active workers. Many are forced to work up to 18-hour days, seven days a week. Children working in the cotton industry are exposed to chemicals and pesticides, while those in the gold mining industry must break rocks, carry heavy loads, and work with dangerous chemicals such as mercury.
The Tambao Manganese Mine
So after a period of nine months, the Tambao mine is reopening.[3] An order lifting the suspension was released by by Boubacar Ba, the country’s transitional minister of mining and energy. Run by Pan African Minerals,[4] a unit of the holding company, the London-based Timis Corporation, according to the Burkina Faso government, the activities of the Tambao mine[5] were suspended in March. The Tambao mine produces some of the world’s highest-quality manganese. According to Ba, the original suspension order was a result of the company’s failure to carry out promised social and economic improvements in exchange for a twenty-year lease to mine Manganese there. No mention in any of the government statements was made concerning the Feb. 17 angry demonstration at the mine, although almost certainly this was not just a “contributing” factor to the suspension, but the main factor. The main owner of the Timis Corporation is Frank Timis, the Romanian-Australian resource tycoon.
At the time of the original agreement between Pan African Minerals and Burkina Faso, now deposed President Blaise Compaoré was still in power. In the tradition of that master scoundrel metals/commodities trader, Marc Rich, it appears that Frank Timis was introduced to the president through the former’s friendship with Compaoré’s wife, Chantal Compaoré, who, at least according to one source received rather large financial rewards for her lobbying efforts. As a part of the agreement, Pan African Minerals had committed to building a railroad line from the Tambao mining area to the capital, Ouagadougou.
