Aid, Espionage, and Extraction: The Hidden Machinery That Looted Burkina Faso

by Jaffa Levy · Published · Updated

The harmattan winds blow dust through the capital, curling along cracked pavements and into the corridors of a government learning once again how to stand alone.

On Oct. 7, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré’s administration arrested eight employees of the International NGO Safety Organisation, a Netherlands-based group that claims to protect humanitarian workers in conflict zones. The charges were grave: espionage and treason.

To many in Brussels or Washington, it looked like a familiar story of repression, another junta silencing civil society. Rights groups condemned the move, the Dutch government summoned Burkina Faso’s envoy. INSO issued a blistering denial, insisting its information was “categorically not confidential” and vital to protecting aid workers in a war that has displaced more than two million people.

Yet inside Burkina Faso, the mood was different. To many, the arrests felt less like an outrage than a reckoning, the act of a state sealing the back doors through which the empire still enters.

Five Reasons the Arrests Resonate

First: sovereignty over secrets. In any country, military data are not community property. In a war where convoys are ambushed weekly, such leaks can kill. No Western power would tolerate a foreign NGO mapping its bases.

Second: infiltration is historical fact. Across the Sahel, humanitarian corridors have often doubled as information conduits. To dismiss that record is to deny the region’s lived experience.

Third: the imbalance was structural. Mining, finance, and security all worked to export value outward. Closing the informational circuit is part of closing the economic one.

Fourth: proxy politics persist. With Traoré lionised across West Africa and vilified in Western press, attempts to isolate or destabilise his government are hardly unthinkable. The memory of Sankara’s fate lingers as warning.

Fifth: popular consent. In marketplaces from Bobo-Dioulasso to Ouagadougou, the refrain is simple: “At last, someone is standing up.” The digital sphere echoes it, a chorus of defiance and pride, equal parts nationalism and fatigue.

A Nation Haunted by Its Benefactors

For six decades, Burkina Faso has lived inside a paradox: independent on paper, administered in practice. The country’s old name, Upper Volta, was a French invention, a geographic convenience for colonial bookkeepers. Its post-war economy was locked into the orbit of the CFA franc, its reserves held in Paris, its convertibility dictated there. After “independence” in 1960, production still flowed outward: cotton, labour, gold.

When Thomas Sankara seized power in 1983, he tried to cut those cords. He renamed the country Burkina Faso, “Land of Incorruptible Men,” and preached self-reliance, women’s emancipation, vaccination drives, and agricultural sovereignty. Four years later he was assassinated, his body riddled with bullets, and Paris’s preferred order was restored under Blaise Compaoré.

In the years that followed, Western mining firms — Canadian, Australian, British — arrived bearing concession contracts written to endure. They extracted gold by the tonne, while tax holidays and stabilisation clauses shielded profits from local capture. By 2022, Teranga Gold alone exported roughly $1.5 billion worth of ore; little stayed behind except polluted rivers and deepened poverty. It was not commerce but a quiet pillage, the theft of a nation’s natural wealth, executed under legal cover and sanctified by partnership agreements. The exploitation was systematic, industrial in scale, a looting of the subsoil disguised as investment.

And as the mines hollowed out the earth, the NGOs filled the vacuum above it. They arrived as saviours, fluent in the language of need, working in tandem with the same corporate and donor networks that drained the country’s resources. They brought funding and fluency, but also hierarchy. Their budgets dwarfed ministries; their maps and data outstripped local intelligence. In time, even information, once a sovereign function, became an international commodity, priced, packaged, and exported like the gold itself.

When Humanitarianism Becomes a System of Control

Traoré’s rise in 2022 was not just another coup; it was a generational rupture. At 37, he was a soldier who had watched Western counter-terrorism campaigns fail to contain the jihadist spread while French and American troops patrolled with impunity. Within a year he expelled the French forces, severed key security accords, and rewrote the mining code to raise state ownership and nationalise the SOPAMIB mine.

Seen through that lens, the INSO arrests are not aberration but symmetry. The economic reclamation required its security equivalent.

Online, Burkinabè voices quickly drew the connection. “They were mapping our army for Paris,” wrote one popular account on X. “We are done being studied like insects.” Hyperbole perhaps, but born of long memory.

Throughout Africa’s post-colonial history, intelligence and aid have often intertwined. During the Cold War, the CIA financed “development” fronts in Angola and Mozambique; later, humanitarian outfits in Libya were caught funnelling reconnaissance to NATO before its 2011 air campaign. The Sahel’s rulers, fluent in this history, now see espionage not as paranoia but pattern.

Sana’s briefing described INSO’s local informants, shopkeepers, nurses, ex-soldiers, allegedly paid to report on troop movements and insurgent positions, their findings encrypted and transmitted to servers abroad. After the July 31 suspension, he said, the group continued underground. Whether every detail holds or not, the charge struck a chord because the template is so familiar.

The Peril in Vindication

Still, righteous anger can corrode. If “espionage” becomes a synonym for dissent, Traoré risks eroding the moral ground he claims to defend. The arrests must lead to trials, not disappearances; transparency, not vengeance. Aid corridors must remain open, or famine will follow principle into the grave.

Nor can isolation be a strategy. Burkina Faso’s pivot toward Russian instructors and Turkish drones may restore leverage, but dependence under new banners would only repeat the old cycle.

Traoré’s challenge is to transform defiance into durable governance: codify NGO oversight, publish licensing and audit regimes, create Burkinabè-led review boards. A revolution becomes a republic only when it learns procedure.

The West’s Mirror, the Sahel’s Memory

Western outrage has arrived right on schedule. Foreign ministries warn of “shrinking civic space,” even as their mining lobbies quietly resist the new profit-sharing rules. The double standard is transparent. Paris lectures Ouagadougou on democracy while buying uranium from Niger and selling arms to whoever pays in euros. Washington invokes human rights but funds drone bases in Agadez.

Burkina Faso’s demand is painfully modest: the right to decide who operates within its borders and under what law. If that principle is unacceptable to the former metropoles, then independence itself was always conditional.

Restoration, Not Repression

In the end, this is less a story about eight detainees than about a country refusing to remain a specimen. For too long, “aid” has doubled as reconnaissance, compassion weaponised as control. When Traoré ordered the arrests, he was not only policing an NGO; he was closing a century-old loop of subordination.

If he prosecutes transparently, he may yet turn a dangerous gamble into a turning point, a declaration that sovereignty, even when imperfectly wielded, is no crime.

For now, the harmattan keeps blowing through Ouagadougou: dry, abrasive, unrelenting. It carries dust, and it carries history. And somewhere in that wind is the whisper of a nation reminding its former masters, softly, finally, unmistakably, that it still exists.

Embedded video under YouTube license.

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