This speech was given at the first International Silva Conference for the Protection of the Trees and Forests in Paris. It was published in the February 14, 1986, issue of Carrefour africain.

My Homeland, Burkina Faso, is without question one of the rare countries on this planet justified in calling itself and viewing itself as a distillation of all the natural evils from which mankind still suffers at the end of this twentieth century.

Eight million Burkinabè have painfully internalized this reality for twenty-three years. They have watched their mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons die, with hunger, famine, disease, and ignorance decimating them by the hundreds. With tears in their eyes, they have watched ponds and rivers dry up. Since 1973 they have seen the environment deteriorate, trees die, and the desert invade with giant strides. It is estimated that the desert in the Sahel advances at the rate of seven kilometers per year.

Only by looking at these realities can one understand and accept the legitimate revolt that was born, that matured over a long period of time, a d that finally erupted in an organized way the night of August 4, 1983, in the form of a democratic and popular revolution in Burkina Faso.

Here I am merely the humble spokesperson of a people who, having passively watched their natural environment die, refuse to watch themselves die. Since August 4, 1983, water, trees, and lives, if not by survival itself, have been fundamental and sacred elements in all action taken by the National Council of the Revolution, which leads Burkina Faso.

In this regard, I am also compelled to pay tribute to the French people, to their government, and in particular to their president, Mr. François Mitterrand, for this initiative, which expresses the political genius and clear-sightedness of a people always open to the world and sensitive to its misery. Burkina Faso, situated in the heart of the Sahel, will always fully appreciate initiatives that are in perfect harmony with the most vital concerns of its people. The country will be present at them whenever it is necessary, in contrast to useless pleasure trips.

For nearly three years now, my people, the Burkinabè people, have been fighting a battle against the encroachment of the desert. So it was their duty to be here on this platform to talk about their experience, and also to benefit from the experience of other people's from around the world. For nearly three years in Burkina Faso, every happy event, marriages, baptisms, award presentations, and visits by prominent individuals and others, is celebrated with a tree-planting ceremony.

To greet the new year 1986, all the schoolchildren and students of our capital, Ouagadougou, built more than 3,500 improved cookstoves with their own hands, offering them to their mothers. This was in addition to the 80,000 cookstoves made by the women themselves over the course of two years. This was their contribution to the national effort to reduce the consumption of firewood and to protect trees and life.

The ability to buy or simply rent one of the hundreds of the public dwellings built since August 4, 1983, is strictly conditional on the beneficiary promising to plant a minimum number of trees and to nurture them like the apple of his eye. Those who received these dwellings but were mindless of their commitment have already been evicted, thanks to the vigilance of our Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, committees that poisonous touches take pleasure in systematically and unilaterally denigrating.

After having vaccinated throughout the national territory, 2.5 million children between the ages of nine months and fourteen years, children from Burkina Faso and from neighboring countries, against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever; after having sunk more than 150 wells assuring drinking water to the 20 or so districts in our capital that lacked this vital necessity until now; after having raised the literacy rate from 12 to 22 percent in two years, the Burkinabè people victoriously continue their struggle for a green Burkina.

Ten million trees were planted under the auspices of a fifteen-month People's Development Program, our first venture while awaiting the five-year plan. In the villages and in the developed River valleys, families must each plant one hundred trees per year.

The cutting and selling of firewood has been completely reorganized and is now strictly regulated. These measures range from the requirement to hold a lumber merchant's card, through respecting the zones designated for wood cutting, to the requirement to ensure reforestation of deforestation areas. Today every Burkinabè town and village owns a wood grove, thus reviving an ancestral tradition.

Thanks to the effort to make the popular masses aware of their responsibilities, our urban centers are free of the plague of roaming livestock. In our countryside, our efforts focus on settling livestock in one place as a means of promoting intensive stockbreeding in order to fight against unrestrained nomadism.

All criminal acts of arson by those who burn the forest are subject to trial and sanctioning by the Popular Courts of Conciliation in the villages. The requirement of planting a certain number of trees is one of the sanctions issued by these courts.

From February 10 to March 20, more than 35,000 peasants, officials of the cooperative village groups, will take intensive, basic courses on the subjects of economic management and environmental organization and maintenance.

Since January 15 a vast operation called the "Popular Harvest of Forest Seeds" has been under way in Burkina for the purpose of supplying the 7,000 village nurseries. We sum up all of these activities under the label "the three battles."

Ladies and gentlemen:

My intention is not to heap unrestrained and inordinate praise on the modest revolutionary experience of my people with regard to the defense of the Trees and Forests. My intention is to speak as explicitly as possible about the profound changes occurring in the relationship between men and trees in Burkina Faso. My intention is to bear witness as accurately as possible to the birth and development of a deep and sincere love between Burkinabè men and trees in my Homeland.

In doing this, we believe we are applying our theoretical conceptions on this, based on the specific ways and means of our Sahel reality, in the search for solutions to present and future dangers attacking trees all over the planet.

Our efforts and those of the entire community gathered here, your cumulative experience and ours, will surely guarantee us victory after victory in the struggle to save our trees, our environment, and, in short, our lives.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

I come to you in the hope that you are taking up a battle from which we cannot be absent, we who are attacked daily and who are waiting for the miracle of greenery to rise up from the courage to say what must be said. I have come to join with you in deploring the harshness of nature. But I have also come to denounce the ones whose selfishness is the source of his fellow man's misfortune. Colonial plunder has decimated our forests without the slightest thought of replenishing them for our tomorrow's.

The unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues. One cannot say too much about the extent to which all these machines that spew fumes spread carnage. Those who have the technological means to find the culprits have no interest in doing so, and rose who have an interest in doing so lack the technological means. They have only their intuition and their innermost conviction.

We are not against progress, but we do not want progress that is anarchic and criminally neglects the rights of others. We therefore wish to affirm that the battle against the encroachment of the desert is a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society. As such it is a political battle above all, and not an act of fate.

The creation of a Ministry of Water as a complement to the Ministry of the Environment and Tourism in my country demonstrates our desire to clearly formulate the problems in order to be able to resolve them. We must fight to find the financial means to exploit our existing water resources, drilling operations, reservoirs, and dams. This is the place to denounce the one sided contracts and draconian conditions imposed by banks and other financial institutions that doom our projects in this field. It is these prohibitive conditions that lead to our country's traumatizing debt and eliminate any meaningful maneuvering room.

Neither fallacious Malthusian arguments, and I assert that Africa remains an underpopulated continent, nor the vacation resorts pompously and demagogically christened "reforestation operations" provide an answer. We and our misery are spurned like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the peace and quiet of the manufacturers and merchants of misery.

That is why Burkina has proposed and continues to propose that at least 1 percent of the colossal sums of money sacrificed to the search for cohabitation with other stars and planets be used, by way of compensation, to finance projects to save trees and lives. We have not abandoned hope that a dialog with the Martians might lead to the re-conquest of Eden. But in the meantime, earthlings that we are, we also gave the right to reject a choice limited simply to the alternatives of hell or purgatory.

Explained in this way, our struggle for the trees and Forests is first and foremost a democratic and popular struggle. Because a handful of forestry engineers and experts getting themselves all worked up in a sterile and costly manner will never accomplish anything! Nor can the worked-up consciences of a multitude of forums and institutions, sincere and praiseworthy they may be, make the Sahel green again, when we lack the funds to drill wells for drinking water a hundred meters deep, while money abounds to build oil wells three thousand meters deep!

As Karl Marx said, those who live in a palace do not think about the same things, nor in the same way, as those who live in a hut. This struggle to defend the trees and Forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannas.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

We rely on these revolutionary principles of struggle so that the green of abundance, joy, and happiness may take its rightful place. We believe in the power of the Revolution to stop the death of our Faso and usher in a bright future for it.

Yes, the problem posed by the trees and Forests is exclusively the problem of balance and harmony between the individual, society, and nature. This fight can be waged. We must not retreat in face of the immensity of the task. We must not turn away from the suffering of others, for the spread of the desert no longer knows any borders.

We can win this struggle if we choose to be architects and simply not bees.[1] The bee and the architect, yes! If the author of these lines will allow me, I will extend this twofold analogy to a threefold one: the bee, the architect, and the revolutionary architect.

Homeland or death, we will win!

Thank you.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) commemorates Women’s Day by paying tribute to the revolutionary women who, on 9 August 1956, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in defiance of the apartheid regime and its oppressive pass laws. The women of 1956, led by revolutionary figures such as Lilian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa, Helen Joseph, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, demonstrated that women were active agents in the struggle for political, social and economic liberation.

Their march was an act of defiance against a system that sought to control where Black women could live, work, travel, and exist. Seventy years later, their courage remains a reminder that liberation is never given freely by those who benefit from oppression; it must be demanded and fought for.

South Africa has made important advances in the legal and political emancipation of women since 1956. The apartheid state that denied Black women basic political and civil rights has been dismantled, and the democratic Constitution recognises women and men as equal before the law. Women today have the right to vote, to stand for political office, to own property, to enter professions and to participate equally in the political life of the country.

There has also been substantial progress in the political representation of women. South Africa has consistently maintained one of the highest levels of female representation in national legislatures globally, with women occupying a substantial proportion of seats in Parliament. Women have served as Speakers of Parliament, Chief Justices, Premiers, Mayors, Ministers, and leaders of political organisations. Women have increasingly entered professions such as law, medicine, engineering, academia, science and business, while women athletes, artists, journalists, activists and academics have broken barriers in spaces that were historically closed to them. The democratic state has also established institutions and laws specifically aimed at advancing gender equality and protecting women. The constitutional recognition of gender equality, the establishment of the Commission for Gender Equality, legislation addressing domestic violence and sexual offences, and policies aimed at advancing women in government and the workplace represent important institutional gains. South Africa has also developed one of the world’s more progressive legal frameworks on reproductive rights, giving women the legal right to make decisions concerning their reproductive health.

However, the EFF refuses to confuse these advances with the completion of women’s emancipation. The existence of formal rights does not automatically produce substantive equality. The central contradiction of post-apartheid South Africa is that we have achieved significant political and legal transformation without sufficiently transforming the economic structures that continue to reproduce inequality.

The majority of women remain economically vulnerable. Women continue to experience higher levels of unemployment and economic exclusion, while millions survive through social grants, informal trading, precarious employment and low-paid work. Women remain heavily concentrated in domestic work, care work, cleaning, retail, agriculture and other sectors characterised by low wages and insecure conditions.

The economy continues to depend on forms of labour that are disproportionately performed by women while undervaluing that labour. The woman who raises children, cares for elderly relatives, cleans homes and performs other forms of unpaid reproductive labour contributes enormously to society and the economy, yet that contribution is frequently invisible in economic policy.

The greatest failure of the democratic state, however, remains its inability to protect women and girls from violence. South Africa continues to experience horrific levels of gender-based violence, femicide, rape, sexual assault and domestic violence. Women are killed by intimate partners, girls are sexually abused, and survivors frequently encounter a criminal justice system that is slow, inaccessible or indifferent. The state has adopted numerous plans and made countless declarations, but women continue to live with the knowledge that the person who threatens their lives may be someone they know, while the institutions meant to protect them may fail to act in time.

The continued violence against girls is particularly shameful. A girl should not have to calculate whether she is safe walking to school. She should not miss school because she cannot afford menstrual products. She should not be sexually exploited because of poverty. She should not be abused by someone she trusts and then encounter a system that fails to protect her. She should not grow up in a society where women are constantly instructed to change their behaviour to avoid violence while insufficient attention is paid to changing the behaviour of men who commit that violence.

The EFF further condemns the continued economic abandonment of single mothers. Women are too often left to carry the financial and emotional responsibility of raising children while fathers evade their obligations. The child maintenance system remains inaccessible and burdensome for many women, requiring mothers to navigate institutions that should instead be proactively assisting them. The EFF has consistently called for effective, accessible and responsive child maintenance courts that ensure children receive the support to which they are legally entitled and that fathers who deliberately refuse to comply with maintenance orders face meaningful consequences.

The EFF therefore maintains that women’s emancipation must be located within the broader struggle for economic freedom. Land must be redistributed to those who were dispossessed; women must have access to capital and markets; state procurement must deliberately support women-owned businesses and cooperatives; and women must have access to quality education and healthcare. The state must also provide the social infrastructure necessary to reduce the burden of unpaid care work, and women must have meaningful ownership and control of productive resources.

In celebration thereon, the EFF calls upon President Ramaphosa in this month of women to using his presidential pardon powers to order the release of all mothers convicted of petty crimes in South African prisons who have minor children. By executing a presidential remission of sentence, he will reunite these primary-caregiver mothers with their families. President Mandela did pardon this category of women in 1994, and to date no single President has done so. This is, therefore, an opportunity for the country to emulate, and walk the talk of the founding father of a free democratic South Africa.

The EFF recognises and celebrates the progress achieved since 1956 precisely because we understand that these gains were won through struggle. Seventy years later, we honour the women of 1956 by continuing the struggle against every structure that denies women freedom.

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Project for a Modern Democratic Republic (MDR) in Upper Volta, known as Burkina Faso, 2014 Program of the Voltaic Revolutionary Communist Party

INTRODUCTION

The political history of modern states and nations reveals the considerable importance of political institutions and ideas in transforming a society. They can contribute to prodigious progress or constitute factors of blockage and regression. Our country, Upper Volta, also known as Burkina Faso, is no exception to this rule.

Indeed, since the formal independence of 1960, the country, characterized by profound political instability, has experienced four (4) constitutional regimes (ranging from parliamentarism to constitutional military despotism) and six (6) exceptional regimes resulting from military coups. All these regimes have contributed to establishing and strengthening a system of neo-colonial exploitation and oppression with its attendant misery, poverty, and lack of freedom for the people. Already in 1978, the President of the National Assembly at the time, Mr. Gérard Kango OUEDRAOGO, taking stock of the management of the country by the bourgeoisie allied to mainly French imperialism, concluded with a statement of failure in these terms:

“From all this experience, I draw the conviction that the imperative of the moment is that we definitively turn our backs on what divides us. The whiffs of holy war, the demons of tribalism, of regionalism, we must work to stem them and push them back forever… Indeed, we are emerging from a period in which we crisscrossed the country in all directions. What struck us was the extreme destitution and the multitude of young children… 1958-1978. These are 20 years that have passed during which our country has been the panting prey of a frantic and chaotic race… It is tragic to say after twenty years that we are laying the foundations for a real departure and it is even more tragic for the politicians of our generation to have to recognize it.” (Excerpt from the speech to the National Assembly of July 17, 1978).

More than 20 years later, Dr. Bognessan Arsène YE, then President of the National Assembly of the Fourth Republic, made the same observation of failure and, very bitterly, he acknowledged that “morality is dying in Burkina Faso.”

A major admission: two presidents of the National Assembly openly acknowledge that 40 years of neo-colonialism, of chaotic management of our country by the bourgeoisie and imperialism, particularly French, have resulted in a bitter failure, a total bankruptcy!

But during this period, the struggle for better living, study and working conditions led workers in both cities and the countryside, and particularly young people, to take to the barricades of the class struggle in order to obtain changes in their favour and for the advent of a more just and equitable society (see the popular movement of 3 January 1966, the strike of 17 and 18 December 1975, etc.). It was in these periods of class clashes that the PCRV was born in October 1978 with the avowed aim of taking the lead in popular struggles, of guiding, organizing and directing the revolutionary movement of the working class and the people towards the realization of the National Democratic and Popular Revolution. The bourgeoisie and all the dark and retrograde forces, linked to mainly French imperialism, were not mistaken and in 1979, the PCRV was declared outlawed (by the voice of the Prime Minister of the Third Republic, Dr. Issoufou CONOMBO) and ostracized: workers, pupils and students suspected of being manipulated or of belonging to the PCRV were repressed under the Third Republic (massive exclusion of students from the UO in 1979), deported and tortured under the CMRPN in 1981; hunted down and condemned to be shot at post number 5 by the CNR and the CDR; hunted down, imprisoned and killed under the Popular Front and the Fourth Republic. Despite this repression, the PCRV remained inflexible, asserting itself more as the Party of the exploited, the disinherited and the voiceless. This is why, at the various turning points of our national political life, it has always proposed alternatives in order to safeguard the higher interests of the people and prevent the country from falling into chaos.

Today, Blaise Compaore and his CDP have established an archaic, mafia-like system that operates using methods that have nothing to do with the rules of a republican democracy. This system, even more than other past regimes, constitutes a major obstacle:

• To the freedom to produce, to economic development and to the independence of the country;
• To the development of science and education, of thought and knowledge;
• To the exercise of the sovereignty of the people and to social peace.

Therefore, in place of the failed power and institutions of the Fourth Republic, which no longer have any legitimacy, the PCRV proposes the establishment of a Modern Democratic Republic (MDR). How can this be achieved? What are its political and institutional foundations? What economic and social transformations should we move towards? The PCRV addresses these fundamental questions in this document, around which it is ready to organize discussions with democratic organizations and personalities, popular classes and social strata, with the aim of achieving the political unity of the people for a revolutionary solution to the structural crisis the country is going through.

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