Simporé’s televised admission: can Burkina Faso’s army still hold the line?

When General Célestin Simporé, Minister of Defense, sat down for a much-publicized interview on Radio-Télévision du Burkina (RTB), the goal was clear: paint a flattering portrait of Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s security record. Instead, the general offered a clumsy justification for the current security stalemate, claiming the Burkinabè army had historically been “poorly trained.” But this attempt at political self-exoneration collapses under the weight of the facts on the ground. A pressing question now grips public opinion: how did yesterday’s supposedly deficient army manage to contain the enemy far more effectively than the “new army” retrained by Moscow and lavishly equipped with billions?

Rewriting history to conceal today’s rout

By insisting on national television that the armed forces lacked tactical instruction and operational readiness before the transition, General Simporé attempts to construct a simplistic narrative: today’s failures are merely yesterday’s legacy.

Yet the facts are stubborn. Under previous regimes, despite a glaring lack of material resources and undeniable structural weaknesses, the military apparatus managed to hold the provincial capital network and maintain coherent territorial defense lines. Today, even as the transitional regime boasts of creating over 30 new battalions and placing military training at the heart of its agenda, effective state control has collapsed across more than 65% of the national territory.

The resounding failure of the Russian training doctrine

To replace the old training model, Ibrahim Traoré’s regime threw itself headlong into the arms of Russian Africa Corps soldiers. The result of this “downgrade”? A sharp spike in lethality on the front lines:

• An appalling human toll: The massacres are too numerous to count. From the Mansila tragedy to recent setbacks in the Centre-Nord region, hastily trained new units are paying an unprecedented blood price.
• Inability to counter asymmetric warfare: The Russian training method, focused on frontal brutality and indiscriminate firepower, proves utterly ineffective against mobile terrorist armed groups (GATs) operating in small motorcycle columns and using improvised explosive devices.
• A rupture with local populations: By sacrificing human intelligence and military ethics in favor of a scorched-earth logic, the new doctrine has alienated rural communities, depriving soldiers of their only effective shield against terrorist infiltrators: citizen information.

An insult to the sacrifice of rank-and-file soldiers

Declaring on a television set that the troops were “poorly trained” is an insult to the memory of the thousands of soldiers and gendarmes who fell in combat over the past decade. With rudimentary equipment and counted rations, these men held the line against an emerging threat without ever abandoning entire regions as is now the case under the guise of “tactical evacuations” — as seen in the Boussouma tragedy.

General Simporé’s admission on RTB convinces no one. Two years after Captain Traoré’s absolute seizure of power, blaming yesterday’s training is an admission of impotence. It was not yesterday’s weapons that lacked value; it is today’s strategy that is collapsing under the weight of propaganda.

By Marguerite Ndongo — Political and Security Analyst