DONT LET NO ONE FOOL YOU, THOMAS SANKARA IS THE GREATEST AFRICAN LEADER WHO EVER LIVED. LISTEN & LEARN. Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara (December 21, 1949 – October 15, 1987) was a Burkinabé military, a captain in the Upper Volta Air Force, he was trained as a pilot, Pan-Africanist theorist, and President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. Viewed as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution. He was a true African Patriot and probably the only African head of state that understood what it will take to change Africa. As president, he promoted Democratic and Popular Revolution Sankara seized power in a 1983 popularly supported coup at the age of 33, with the goal of eliminating Corruption and the Dominance of the former French colonial power ( who is still economically attached to 24 of Africas 56 nations ) He wanted his country to accept the responsibility of its reality and its destiny with human dignity He immediately launched the most ambitious program for social and economic change ever attempted on the African continent. To symbolize this new autonomy and rebirth, he even renamed the country from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (Land of the Upright People). *His government included large number of women. His policy was oriented toward fighting corruption, reforestation, averting famine, and making education and health real priorities. His foreign policies were centered around anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalizing all land and mineral wealth, and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritizing education with a nation-wide literacy campaign, and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles. Other components of his national agenda included planting over ten million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel, doubling wheat production by redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents, and establishing an ambitious road and rail construction program to tie the nation together. On the localized level Sankara also called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities construct schools with their own labour. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraging them to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant. Improving womens status was one of Sankaras explicit goals, that was unprecedented in West Africa. Moreover, his commitment to womens rights led him to outlaw female genital circumcision, forced marriages, condemned polygamy; and promoted contraception. *His government was the First African government to claim that AIDS was a major threat to Africa. In order to achieve this radical transformation of society, he increasingly exerted authoritarian control over the nation, eventually banning unions and a free press, which he believed could stand in the way of his plans and be manipulated by powerful outside influences. To counter his opposition in towns and workplaces around the country, he also tried corrupt officials, counter-revolutionaries and lazy workers in peoples revolutionary tribunals. ( He tried corrupt officials in open tribunals, took back what they had stolen and make them apologize openly to the Nation but did not kill or imprison them ) His revolutionary programs for African self-reliance as a defiant alternative to the neo-liberal development strategies imposed by the West, made him an icon to many of Africas poor. Sankara remained popular with most of his countrys impoverished citizens. However his policies alienated and antagonised the vested interests of an array of groups, which included the small but powerful Burkinabé middle class, the tribal leaders whom he stripped of the long-held traditional right to forced labour and tribute payments, and the foreign financial interests in France and their ally the Ivory Coast. As a result, he was overthrown and assassinated in a coup détat led by the French-backed Blaise Compaoré on October 15, 1987. A week before his execution, he declared: While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas. https://facebook/video.php?v=783610211711089
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 17:40:40 +0000
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