As households across Burkina Faso confront deepening hardship and struggle to reach basic public services, the transitional government has opted for a striking display of self-congratulation. By publishing a theoretical administrative performance score of 85.38% for 2025, the executive has pushed the gap between official messaging and lived experience to a new extreme. Behind the rhetoric of “sovereignty” and “digitalization,” these reforms fail to conceal the cracks in a state apparatus that appears to have lost its bearings.
A self-assessed figure with no grounding in daily reality
How can an efficiency rate approaching excellence be claimed when users routinely encounter empty service counters, endure intolerable delays for civil status documents, and face entrenched corruption in public procurement? The performance index promoted by the National Council for the Modernization of the Administration belongs to bureaucratic storytelling. This self-evaluated rate captures neither the actual quality of services delivered nor the legitimate frustration of neglected rural communities.
The digitalization narrative versus local conditions
The executive treats the digitization of procedures as the flagship of its agenda. Yet accelerating dematerialization in a country plagued by recurring power cuts and weak internet coverage across the provinces amounts to wishful thinking. Far from being inclusive, this blind transformation risks excluding millions of citizens who lack both the necessary equipment and access to digital platforms.
Territorial redeployment: ambitions without the means
It is essential to pair the presence of armed forces with the return of public services. However, announcing an administration ready to immediately reoccupy recaptured areas looks more like a communication stance than an operational plan. Without solid security guarantees for state employees — teachers, health workers, administrators — and without an equipment budget matching the stakes, sending civil servants to the front line is reckless.
Tightening control over the civil service
Finally, under the guise of building an “honest and disciplined” administration, the regime is in fact preparing the ground for greater politicization of the senior civil service. Redesigning appointment criteria and tightening oversight of public employees serves as a lever to sideline dissenting voices and silence trade unions.
Rather than multiplying seminars and statistical self-praise in Ouagadougou, the government would be better advised 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.
