By Fidelis Ikengwa

476 in favour. 11 against. 75 abstentions. Let history record this moment: A legislature convened in Strasbourg has presumed to castigate a sovereign African nation it neither governs, nor defends, nor sustains, nor represents.

This is not an earnest defence of democracy. This is neo-colonial presumption garbed in parliamentary decorum.

The European Parliament must observe the limits of its jurisdiction. Burkina Faso resides not within Europe’s cartography, nor within the European Union’s confederation, nor within the ambit of a Member of the European Parliament’s mandate. Its government answers solely to 23 million Burkinabè who, after a decade of unrelenting terror, elected to recalibrate their security architecture. Honour that sovereign calculus, or concede that this resolution is motivated less by principle than by a waning lust for influence.

The conduct of France vitiates any moral claim. For ten interminable years, French forces occupied the Sahel. The consequence was not pacification or the metastasis of terror networks, but an escalation of civilian slaughter and a security landscape so catastrophic that Burkina Faso demanded your departure. You forfeited the war on the terrain. Do not compound that humiliation by forfeiting propriety in Brussels.

Six decades of meddlesome interference must cease. Though formal colonialism concluded over sixty years ago, Europe and its Western cohorts have assiduously refused to grant Africa the dignity of self-determination. Whenever visionary leaders arise—leaders who prioritise national interest over vassalage—you orchestrate campaigns of calumny, economic strangulation, and covert subversion to delegitimise and depose them. Conversely, you repose in complacent comfort with feckless leaders who abase themselves to foreign patronage.

You arrive beneath the sanctimonious banner of “assistance” and “development aid”, whilst surreptitiously expropriating Africa’s mineral wealth and strategic resources. Simply put, you are discomfited by the audacious resolve of this young Burkinabè leader, who, like the slain Muammar Gaddafi, is painstakingly charting a new course for his people. Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s nationalist resolve, his severing of imperialist conduit pipes, has provoked France’s ire.

If you possessed any iota of love or genuine regard for African nations, then, as a former colonial power, the plight of Cameroonians ought to have elicited humane intervention from France and the EU to deliver that nation from the clutches of a ruler who no longer comprehends his environment and is therefore not in tune with the metrics of political administration. Togo fares no better. Yet because their leadership is ever ready to kowtow and accept impious and deceptive instructions, they are rated as “super performers”.

Many nations in your good graces have violated human rights repeatedly. In some states, any remark against the president is deemed an affront, and the media station must pay a fine or face closure. Reporting or covering terrorism is now criminalised. The EU has not questioned that. You seek instead to extinguish the light emanating from the one Sahelian nation pursuing the will of its people. This imperious command structure must be dismantled if Africa is to chart its own trajectory of development, unshackled and unhurried.

Selective justice eviscerates credibility.

The homily on the International Criminal Court is risible, emanating from the EU. That tribunal has prosecuted Africans almost exclusively, whilst Western architects of illegal wars traverse global capitals with impunity. The same Europe that maintained a studied silence as one of West Africa’s regimes orchestrated the massacre of over three million nationals in a fratricidal war elicited neither EU censure nor ICC indictment to this day. The same Europe that abetted the violent ouster of Côte d’Ivoire’s former president, Laurent Gbagbo, over electoral disputes now countenances his successor, whose governance has deteriorated, solely because he advances French interests. This is not justice. This is jurisprudence tailored for client states.

The world should know that Democracy is not a universal panacea. The “democracy” you evangelise is neither sacrosanct nor teleological. It has repeatedly failed African polities, yielding electoral rituals bereft of security, institutions bereft of capacity, and rhetoric bereft of sustenance. Nations must be accorded the inalienable right to cultivate governance systems consonant with their historical antecedents, cultural ethos, and existential imperatives. We are all homo sapiens—bipedal, bimanual—but our civilisational modalities diverge. What redounds to Harry’s prosperity may prove deleterious to Tom’s survival. Cease exporting homogenised political templates and anointing them as universal dogma.

Sovereignty is not amenable to vote by foreign dictators, so questions of civic space and press liberty merit discourse by aliens is an infringement. Yet authentic discourse presupposes parity and mutual respect for sovereignty. It cannot transpire when a foreign parliament issues imperatives to a government it does not embody. That deliberation belongs to Burkinabè citizens, their civil society, and their state. Strasbourg has no standing therein.

To the Government of Burkina Faso

Your administration, though imperfect, is erecting hospitals, inaugurating dialysis centres, constructing STEM academies(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and reclaiming territory from insurgents without the crutch of foreign garrisons. Your accountability is to the Burkinabè people. Govern accordingly. France and the European Union must understand that the Sahel has transcended you. The epoch of control via military encampments, NGO conduits, media hegemony, and now parliamentary resolutions has expired. Its demise was not wrought by a coup, but by the collective volition of African peoples who repudiated a dysfunctional compact. No resolution ratified in Brussels can annul a decision consecrated in Ouagadougou. Burkina Faso is a sovereign state. It shall remain so, irrespective of how frequently a French general convenes a vote in Europe. The time has come to allow Africa its due.  Sovereignty admits no negotiation.

Fidelis C. Ikengwa wrote in from Lagos.