Burkina Faso’s young army captain who led the latest coup, Ibrahim Traore, will get sworn-in as the country’s new interim president on Friday, the constitutional council announced on Wednesday, reported The Africa News.
On Wednesday, Burkina Faso’s constitutional council said that it “officially notes the vacancy of the presidency,” adding that Traore had been designated as the president by a national meeting of the country’s forces.
Traore will become Burkina Faso’s new leader according to the transition charter which was adopted by the national forum on October 14. Some 300 people tasked with charting the transition unanimously named him “president of the transition, head of state and supreme chief of the national armed forces”.
The charter stipulates that the term of the president of the transition will end once the leader elected after the 2024 presidential race will be sworn in. It added that the president of the transition will not be eligible for the upcoming elections.
The 34-year-old Captain Traore led disgruntled junior officers last month in the second coup in eight months to hit the jihadist-torn west African country. The coup toppled Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.
Damiba himself had seized power only in January, forcing out Burkina’s last elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore.
After the coup, Damiba promised to control Burkina Faso’s deteriorating security situation. However, he failed to counter terrorist activities of al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) fighters. Thousands of people already have been killed by jihadis linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group and some 2 million people displaced.
Captain Traore has also agreed to respect national democratic transition timeline that was agreed between his predecessor Damiba and West Africa regional bloc ECOWAS.
He assured that Burkina Faso’s government would respect the commitments made with ECOWAS in July to restore constitutional order in the next 24 months.
