Burkina Faso’s Oil Boom: Capitaine Traore Must Abandon the Resource Rental Economic Model

Recent media reports of the AES state of Burkina Faso exporting a$10 billion worth of gold in 2025 have marvelled at a feat which could have vey positive effect on the Sahelian nation’s economic development. However, while many have commented on the opportunities for making vast improvements to the country’s infrastructure, none have mentioned the fact that maximising the extraction and exporting of a range of minerals can form the basis of financing Burkina Faso’s a route to achieving industrialisation and a transformation from the resource rental economic model to that of a productive and independent economy.

The military leaders of Burkina Faso need to understand that earning billions if you continue to utilise a resource rental economy will get you nowhere in the long run.

Maximising the mining of Burkina Faso's minerals which include Zinc and Lithium would collectively bring in billions of dollars (or Yuan) which must be used as a first step to financing a plan for industrialising Burkina Faso's economy.

No incurring of usurious Western Bretton Woods-institutional debt or debt from Chinese loans.

The income from mining these minerals would form the basis of developing an industrial plan for payment of electrical generation capacity, steel capacity, and non-ferrous smelting capacity.

Concomitant to this would be the cost of mechanising agricultural production and a programme of mass education. The agricultural revolution must aspire way beyond peasant farming and the educational revolution must go beyond basic goals in literacy so as to encompass vocational-technical training and university and post-graduate level education.

Also, given that Burkina Faso like other Sahelian states face problems related to water scarcity, the programme ought to invest in the creation of a Great Man River project as accomplished in Libya under the leadership of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi.

If this were accomplished, Burkina Faso would be on its way to transforming itself from a rent resource economy into a productive one with the advantage of being in a position of being able to extract their own raw materials and convert them into global standard products under one currency regime.

The USSR and South Korea accomplished this respectively under Stalin and Park Chung Hee.

Traore and his co-leaders need to learn from the mistakes of the economic programmes of Nkrumah in Ghana and Nyerere in Tanzania. The former relied on international finance loans which created a state of indebtedness and the latter's peasant-is-king ideology was not only unambitious in scope but also created a cycle of debt with the Bretton Woods institutions.

In retirement Nyerere would complain that Tanzania did EVERYTHING that he was advised to do and yet the country ended up spending whatever meagre income it had on servicing debt which of course is the intent of the Bretton Woods institutions.

It is time for African leaders to move beyond the resource rental model and for their populations to demand that they do so. An important consequence of building an industrial society would be to put Burkina Faso in a position to be militarily self-sufficient. This is important considering the jihadist insurgency bedevilling the Sahelian region and the threat of recolonisation. The rulers during Japan's Meiji era understood this through their slogan Fukoku Kyohei: "Rich country, strong army".

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.