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Can the ‘Great Green Wall’ carry out Sankara’s ecological, pan-African dream?
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Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s folk-hero president, once marshalled a nation to halt the spread of the Sahara. Decades after his brutal death, a pan-African project of epic scale and ambition is aiming to reverse the creeping desertification that threatens to engulf a vast region, accelerating climate change, migration and conflict.
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Burkina Faso, a landlocked country lashed by the hot and dusty winds of the Sahara, was once a land of lush forests, high grass and impetuous rivers, Captain Thomas Sankara, its revolutionary leader, was fond of saying.
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“Back then, it was the roots of our trees and grass that bound together the soil’s fertiles humus, withstanding the force of torrents and floods,” said the “African Che” in a landmark speech detailing his plans to reforest the country.
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“Today, all the rain that falls on Burkina Faso runs away to other countries, to the sea,” Sankara added in his 1985 address. “We will hold it back through our struggle.”
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The man who renamed the former French colony of Haute-Volta as Burkina Faso — meaning the “Land of the Honest”, or “Upright” — was ahead of his time in recognising climate change and desertification as the single biggest threat to the wellbeing of its people.
“The desert is at our gates, it’s already upon us, ready to engulf us,” he warned. In order to turn back the tide, Sankara launched a massive tree-planting drive to “regreen” the country, halt soil erosion and foster sustainable agriculture. His “fight against the desert” was both “ideological” and “existential”, a means to empower the impoverished nation and guarantee its survival.
“Step by step, tree by tree, we will create this great park of 10 million trees,” he promised. “Even if it takes 10 million years.”
Just two years later, aged 37, Sankara was mowed down by soldiers in a military coup. But his vision of a “wall of trees” holding back the encroaching desert has taken root in a pan-African project of breathtaking scale, a cross-continental barrier stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
Halting the desert
An African-led project, the Great Green Wall aims to buttress the fragile ecosystems of countries in the Sahel region south of the Sahara. Its advocates say it will restore huge swathes of degraded land, capture carbon emissions, create millions of green jobs, stem mass migration and reduce conflict in a hotbed of jihadist militancy.
On Monday, the ambitious but underfunded initiative received a much-needed shot in the arm with donors at a conference in Paris pledging more than $14 billion to speed up the Wall.
“We are now standing shoulder to shoulder with the entire African continent,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, who hosted the One Planet Summit.
“The future of the Sahel region depends on the Great Green Wall,” added Akinwumi Adesina, the head of the African Bank for Development. “Without it, the Sahel region as we know it may disappear.”
A train station swallowed by the encroaching desert in Sudan. © Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah, Reuters
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Sankara was long dead when the Great Green Wall was launched in 2007, but the project is in many ways his brainchild, argues Sylvestre Bangré Ouédraogo, a former environment minister who grew up in the same town as the revolutionary leader.
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“Sankara began building Burkina Faso’s own barrier against the desert and worked hard to inspire other countries,” he says. “He would warn them, ‘Today the desert is creeping into Burkina Faso, but tomorrow it will be Ivory Coast’s turn and then Liberia’s’.”
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The centrepiece of Sankara’s barrier was a vast reforestation drive that required every household, village, school and business to plant saplings and tend to tree nurseries. Both Burkinabes and foreigners were expected to plant trees on special occasions, such as weddings. At times the president would personally roll up in his trademark Renault 5 — the cheapest car of the day (he famously banned ministers from using luxury cars) — to ensure they did.
Ouédraogo, who served as head of environmental affairs in the Ouagadougou area during Sankara’s time, recalls frantic preparations to ensure venues were always decked in green whenever the president was due: “When he arrived and saw plants on the stage he was happy; when there were none he frowned and summoned us to do better.”
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Sankara declared drastic curbs to tree-felling and livestock grazing, the main drivers of deforestation. He even considered marshalling the air force to “bomb” the country with tree seeds in the hope some would sprout. “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness,” he would say when challenged over his unorthodox practices.
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Thomas Sankara celebrates the second anniversary of Burkina Faso’s revolution on August 4, 1985, with a suitably green backdrop. © Daniel Laine, AFP
“Some of his methods were, let’s say, ‘empirical’, but there is no disputing the vision and ambition,” Ouédraogo says. “He never missed an opportunity to stress that however poor Burkina Faso may be, it had a purpose and a mission. Sadly, he did not have a chance to carry it out.”
Sankara’s pioneering environmentalism was not entirely abandoned after his death, but the impetus and urgency vanished.
“He would ride his bicycle incognito to visit people’s homes and discuss trees,” Ouédraogo recalls. “It’s that kind of enthusiasm that went missing after he was gone.”
‘No to prêt-à-porter, yes to bespoke’
Sankara was perhaps most insightful in his belief that the “fight against the desert’’ would only bear fruit if local communities were empowered and invested with the responsibility to improve their lot and that of their children. For this reason, he argued, development of the Sahel region must necessarily be African-led and community-led.
“No to ready-to-wear aid, yes to bespoke aid,” was one of the many slogans coined by the staunch anti-imperialist, whose antics irked the former colonial power, France.
Ouédraogo, a 20-year veteran of the UN Development Programme, says the same concern underpins the Great Green Wall, a vastly ambitious but unsung project led by the African Union with support from international donors.
“When I joined the UNPD, donor countries would say, ‘You’re only getting the money if you do so and so’. They did not get the communities involved and interested, and rode roughshod over local specificities,” he says. “Fortunately, that’s changed now. Investments are focused on local needs and expertise.”
When the Great Green Wall was launched, Ouédraogo worked with international charity Tree Aid to help restore degraded land in some of the poorest parts of the country. This involved fostering new techniques to improve water conservation, increase yields in a sustainable way, and find alternative fuels to wood.
Of course, it also involved a lot of tree planting, nursing and protecting, from the mighty baobab to the supple moringa, a drought-resistant plant sometimes referred to as a “miracle tree” because of its nutritious and pharmacological properties.
“Every action is based on local needs, assessments and expertise,” Ouédraogo says. “Local actors are responsible for its implementation — otherwise, it just doesn’t work.”
Healing our ecosystems
Tree Aid was set up in 1987, the year of Sankara’s assassination, in response to famine in Ethiopia. It now operates in several countries of the Sahel, including Burkina Faso’s neighbours Mali and Niger. Its chief executive, Tom Skirrow, says the charity has long found it difficult to push its work up the agenda of international leaders and donors.
“It’s important that the Great Green Wall is African-led and inspiring a grassroots movement across the continent. But, as a result, international leaders and donors tend to take a back-seat and to date haven’t engaged in a meaningful way,” he says. “In this respect, we’re delighted to see growing momentum for support and investment in this epic movement,” he adds, referring to the pledges made at the Paris summit.