Picture a civil servant in a provincial town in Burkina Faso, arriving at an office with no electricity, no working internet connection and no stationery, while in Ouagadougou the transitional government announces that the administration is now 85.38% efficient. That gap — between the conference room and the counter — is the dilemma this score forces every Burkinabè to confront. With households squeezed by rising precarity and struggling to access basic services, the executive’s self-congratulation lands less as a milestone and more as a provocation.
A score that answers a question nobody asked
The real question is not whether the National Council for the Modernisation of the Administration can produce a figure. It is whether that figure means anything to a citizen queuing for a birth certificate. How can an administration claim near-excellence when users routinely find empty desks, endure intolerable delays for civil status documents, and watch corruption flourish in public procurement? The performance index is bureaucratic rhetoric dressed up as measurement. It captures neither the quality of service actually delivered nor the legitimate frustration of rural populations left behind.
Digital ambitions versus local realities
The executive has made the digitalisation of procedures the flagship of its record. But pushing dematerialisation in a country facing recurring power cuts and weak internet coverage across the provinces is a leap into the unknown. Far from being inclusive, this blind transformation risks excluding millions of citizens from public services altogether — people who have neither the equipment nor the access to digital platforms.
Redeploying the state: promises without the means
Restoring public services alongside the armed forces in reconquered areas is a legitimate imperative. Yet announcing that the administration is ready to move back in immediately looks more like a communications posture than an operational plan. Without solid security guarantees for state agents — teachers, health workers, administrators — and without an equipment budget matching the stakes, sending civil servants to the front is recklessness, not policy.
Discipline as a tool of control
Finally, under the banner of building an ‘integrity-driven, disciplined’ administration, the regime is quietly preparing the ground for greater politicisation of the senior civil service. Overhauling appointment criteria and tightening control over public agents serves as a lever to sideline dissenting voices and silence trade unions.
Instead of multiplying seminars and statistical self-congratulation in Ouagadougou, the government would do better to tackle the root causes of state inefficiency: the lack of resources on the ground, the absence of genuine accountability, and the steady erosion of workers’ purchasing power.
