During the four short years of 1983-87, Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso dumped colonial ideas of dependence and imperialist economic control firmly in the dustbin of history, as the country began to abolish its legacy of poverty, disease and feudal backwardness and took its first steps along the high road of socialist progress. In the sphere of health care, for example, a programme to eradicate measles, polio and meningitis saw two million people vaccinated in just one week, earning the country congratulations from the UN’s World Health Organisation. In urban areas, slums were replaced with public housing and collective communities, and medical dispensaries were built, along with over 350 schools. All regions of the country were connected via the Battle of the Rails building programme, during which workers laid railways to connect the capital Ouagadougou with mines 700kms away with their bare hands, owing to lack of foreign aid. In agriculture – after one of Africa deadliest ever droughts – the One Village, One Grove programme planted several million trees in Africa’s first campaign against desertification. Feudal landlords were stripped of their rights to tribute payments and forced labour, and land was distributed amongst the peasantry, which led to the doubling of the average yield of 1,700kg of wheat per hectare in 1982 to 3,800kg by 1986. As a result, in just four years, hunger was banished and Burkina Faso became completely self-sufficient. cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=1069
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 12:22:41 +0000
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