Five months after the coup that toppled Christian Roch Kaboré, the former president went to the presidential palace on Tuesday 21 June for a face to face meeting with his successor, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Henri Damiba. He was accompanied by Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo, another former president of Faso. On the agenda were security issues and the conduct of the transition.
This is the first official meeting of Roch Christian Kaboré after his fall from the presidential palace on 24 January. The president of the transition received in audience his predecessors to “discuss security issues, the conduct of the transition and many other topics of national interest” according to a statement from the Burkinabe presidency.
“The meeting between these three personalities testifies to the Head of State’s desire for reconciliation, for a united, determined and united Burkina in the fight against the terrorist hydra,” the statement said, adding that the meeting “reflects the call for national unity and social cohesion launched by the President of Faso for greater social cohesion and for a Burkina reconciled with itself and its history.
Moreover, this audience is “the beginning of a series of actions envisaged by the Head of State to ease the political situation and promote the participation of all the sons and daughters of Burkina in the work of national reconstruction,” the statement concluded.
Finally, the meeting comes five months after Colonel Damiba overthrew Roch Kaboré in a coup d’état on the grounds of stemming the growing jihadist violence in the country since 2015. Currently, the country is facing the deadliest of the terrorist attacks, which took place on 11 June, with a death toll of about 86 and more than 20,000 displaced people listed by the authorities.
