A digital spectacle amid a nation’s deeper crisis
As Ouagadougou glows with the colours of the national days of patriotic commitment and civic participation, the transitional government is rolling out its full communications machinery. The “Allée des services au peuple” stands as the perfect showcase for the regime of the Popular Progressive Revolution: online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and the computerisation of universal health insurance. Everything is stage-managed to project the image of a modern, connected, and efficient state.
Yet behind this technological veneer and the triumphant figures brandished at ministerial gatherings, the country’s reality tells a far more bitter story. This frenzy of administrative dematerialisation looks like a communications gadget designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundations of the nation crumble.
How the digital drive is being received
On paper, administrative dematerialisation has real merit. The expansion of online criminal records and the digitisation of judicial acts are undeniable technical advances. But who are these tools really built for?
With internet penetration struggling to cross the 20% threshold and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centres, digital administration remains a mirage for the vast majority of the population. Presenting online enrolment in universal health insurance as a major success when it reaches only about 1.3% of the population amounts to misleading political framing.
Worse still, this strategy is deepening a violent social divide: on one side, a connected urban minority able to request documents in a few clicks; on the other, millions of invisible citizens, deprived of the most basic mobile network and ignored by this two-speed modernisation.
The real priorities of the Burkinabè nation
For a state’s digitalisation to make sense, the population must first enjoy the minimum conditions of existence and the cognitive and material capacities to benefit from it. The order of national priorities needs to be reorganised around two absolute emergencies.
Security: the indispensable precondition for any citizenship
No dematerialisation can flourish in a territory torn apart by insecurity. With more than two million internally displaced people who have fled terrorist violence, the urgent need of the Burkinabè population is not to obtain a civil status document from a smartphone, but to survive, find shelter, and return to their land.
- Physical access before digital access: You cannot digitise public services in a commune under terrorist control or whose telecommunications infrastructure has been sabotaged.
- The right to life before the right to an e-service: The absolute vital priority remains restoring territorial sovereignty and securing people and property. Without security, the dematerialised state is merely a spectre with no territorial anchor.
Education: the sine qua non of digital inclusion
Even assuming security is restored and internet coverage is deployed across the entire territory, access to dematerialisation runs into an insurmountable wall: illiteracy.
- The literacy divide: A major share of the population can neither read nor write, let alone use a computer. Offering complex web platforms to citizens who have never had access to basic education is a systemic aberration.
- The schooling emergency: Thousands of schools remain closed because of the conflict. Pouring massive financial and human resources into servers and virtual platforms while generations of Burkinabè children are deprived of school is a genuine strategic contradiction.
What comes next: rebuilding on solid foundations
Wanting to digitise the administration before securing the country and educating its citizens is like painting the facade of a house whose foundations are collapsing.
The logical sequence of development first requires restoring security so that populations can live and produce on their territory. It then demands a massive educational effort to give citizens the ability to read, understand, and interact with modern society. Only once this fundamental base is consolidated can dematerialisation unleash its full potential and become a universally accessible service.
For technological progress to cease being a mere urban privilege or a tool of political communication, Burkina Faso must reinvest in the core of its sovereign missions: securing the territory to bring back peace, then educating the population to give it the means for autonomy.
