Blaise Compaoré

Blaise Compaoré (born 3 February 1951) led Burkina Faso for 27 years, making him one of the longest-serving rulers in West Africa. He came to power on 15 October 1987 in a coup that killed his former comrade and then-president Thomas Sankara, a revolutionary pan-Africanist icon. Compaoré subsequently dismantled much of Sankara's radical socialist program under a policy he called Rectification, reopening Burkina Faso to the IMF, the World Bank, and France.

Domestically, Compaoré consolidated power through his party, the Congress for Democracy and Progress (CDP), winning successive elections in 1991, 1998, 2005, and 2010 that opposition groups and observers often described as tilted. His rule was marked by the 1998 killing of investigative journalist Norbert Zongo, which triggered mass protests, and by the influence of his powerful Presidential Security Regiment (RSP).

Regionally, Compaoré played a double-edged role. He was repeatedly accused by UN panels of backing Charles Taylor in Liberia and the RUF in Sierra Leone during the 1990s civil wars, including facilitating arms-for-diamonds trafficking. Yet he later rebranded himself as a mediator, brokering talks in Togo, Côte d'Ivoire (the 2007 Ouagadougou Political Agreement), Guinea, and Mali.

His downfall came in October 2014, when he attempted to amend Article 37 of the constitution to extend his term limit. Mass protests in Ouagadougou stormed and burned the National Assembly on 30 October 2014, and he fled to Côte d'Ivoire the next day, where he received Ivorian citizenship.

In April 2022, a Burkinabè military tribunal convicted Compaoré in absentia of complicity in the murder of Thomas Sankara and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He has not returned to face the verdict. Briefly invited back to Ouagadougou in July 2022 by the post-coup junta of Paul-Henri Damiba for a reconciliation meeting, he remains in exile in Abidjan.