Burkina Faso’s junta head on Saturday named former communications minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo as prime minister, according to a presidential decree, a day after dissolving the government.

Ouedraogo served in the cabinet of outgoing premier Apollinaire Joachim Kyelem de Tambela, who was stripped of his functions by Captain Ibrahim Traore on Friday.

No reason was given for the dismissal of Tambela, who had headed three successive military-appointed governments since Traore came to power in a 2022 coup.

A close ally of Traore and a journalist by trade, Ouedraogo was formerly editor-in-chief and then director of the Sahel country’s state television.

After the September 2022 coup, Traore tapped Ouedraogo for the post of Minister of Communications and government spokesman as a civilian figure in the military administration.
He was subsequently reappointed to the role in three reshuffles.

The west African country was plunged into instability by a January 2022 coup in which Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba seized power.

Little more than eight months later, Damiba himself was overthrown by Traore, 36, who now heads the junta regime.

Under Traore, the country, along with its fellow junta-led neighbours in Mali and Niger, has turned away from former imperial ruler France and pivoted towards Russia instead.

The three states have banded together to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), and are battling jihadist violence that first erupted in northern Mali in 2012.

Since it spread to Burkina Faso, that conflict has killed around 26,000 people and forced some two million people to flee their homes, according to monitoring group ACLED.