by Martin van Staden
Ibrahim Traoré, the dictator of Burkina Faso, recently declared on state television that “people need to forget about the issue of democracy”, adding: “We have to tell the truth: democracy isn’t for us.” He said that “democracy kills” and invoked Libya as a cautionary tale of bloodshed and instability whenever outsiders attempt to impose the system. “Democracy is slavery”, he concluded.
On this narrow point, Traoré is not entirely wrong.
Democracy, as practised and preached in 2026, harbours serious flaws, which I think are lethal to the conceptual democratic principle.
Democracy does not reliably produce the best leaders. It tends to reward short-term populism, extractive rent-seeking, and tyrannical majoritarian excesses, and is not conceptually geared towards long-term institutional strength and sound policy. Electoral competition can entrench mediocrity or worse, while the promise of the “will of the people” frequently mas\ks the capture of the state by special interests.
Chilean miracle
One need only consider General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
The Marxist “democracy” that preceded his 1973 coup had driven the country into economic ruin through hyperinflation, nationalisation, and fiscal recklessness. Pinochet, ruling as a dictator, oversaw the implementation of market-oriented reforms – deregulation, privatisation, fiscal discipline, and openness to investment – that laid the foundations for Chile’s transformation.
Today, long after the return to democracy, Chile remains the most prosperous society in South America, with dramatically reduced poverty and higher living standards than its neighbours. It is difficult to imagine those structural changes surviving the pressures of radical South American democracy.
Democracy, in that instance, had created the conditions for its own near-destruction. Authoritarian intervention, however brutal, created space for recovery.
An apt ad hominem
Traoré is therefore correct to highlight that democracy is no panacea and can, in certain contexts, prove lethal to prosperity and stability. The problem is that Traoré himself – the man – has no business making this argument.
Under his leadership since the September 2022 coup, Burkina Faso has seen the security situation that he used to justify the intervention deteriorate markedly.
Jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State control large swathes of territory, and reports indicate that government forces and allied militias have themselves been responsible for significant civilian deaths, in some periods exceeding those caused by the insurgents. Over 1,800 civilian fatalities have been documented in incidents involving state actors since Traoré took power, amid a broader escalation of violence that has displaced millions and turned Burkina Faso into one of the epicentres of extremism in the Sahel.
Far from restoring order, the junta has failed to fight off external enemies, has dissolved political opposition, seized assets, and extended the “transition” period indefinitely. This is not the record of a reformer who has earned the right to lecture on democracy’s shortcomings.
Traoré has not cut regulations, welcomed genuine investment, or introduced policies that foster social mobility and private enterprise. Instead, his regime has pursued the familiar post-colonial cocktail of “sovereignty” rhetoric, anti-Western posturing, alliances with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and a “progressive popular revolution” that prioritises political control over collective prosperity.
Burkina Faso, like much of the region, remains trapped in poverty and instability. Traoré is no Pinochet.
An African tradition
This pattern is depressingly familiar across Africa.
During the struggle against colonialism, the first generation of African leaders routinely invoked the language of self-determination and the popular will.
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana argued that “freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift” but is claimed “as their own and none can keep it from them”. He insisted that colonial rule was contrary to the aspirations of the African people.
Julius Nyerere of Tanzania framed the anti-colonial fight as a struggle for human dignity, arguing that “no nation has the right to make decisions for another nation; no people for another people”.
Hastings Banda of Malawi returned from exile declaring he had come “to break their stupid federation and to give you, my people, the Africans of this country, your government and independence”.
Milton Obote in Uganda rallied people around “Self Government Now; One Man One Vote.”
Colonialism was illegitimate because it defied the will of the people. Africans must be allowed to determine their own destiny.
Yet once in power, the same leaders showed little interest in testing or respecting that will.
Nkrumah established a one-party state and declared himself president for life. Nyerere defended single-party “democracy” as more authentically African than Western multi-party systems. Banda ruled as “dictator by consent” under a personality cult. Obote centralised power before being ousted by Idi Amin, whose own brutal regime harboured little democratic pretence.
One can thus rightly ask: But why not then colonialism? Countering with “will of the people” or “self-determination”, under these circumstances, is a nonstarter.
The hypocrisy is astounding.
Anti-colonial rhetoric rested on the principle that imposed rule was unjust precisely because it ignored the people’s desires. Once independence was secured, those desires were sidelined in favour of socialism and other forms of terroristic central control: banning the opposition and equating dissent with treason or “neo-colonialism”.
The result was perfectly foreseeable.
Tanzania’s ujamaa experiments, Malawi’s long stasis under Banda, Uganda’s turmoil: these countries did not become beacons of prosperity under “benevolent dictatorship”. Ghana has shown some improvement in recent decades through more market-friendly turns, but it hardly stands as a dazzling counter-example to the broader post-independence failure.
In truth, the rhetoric of self-determination served only as effective public relations rather than a consistent principle.
It was a tool to eject colonial powers that were benevolent by comparison, and then install local tyrants. Once that authority was consolidated, the “will of the people” became secondary to the ruler’s vision. Colonialism was replaced not by genuine popular sovereignty but by a different flavour of top-down control. There was no categorical difference: it was less about liberation than about who (not as a collective, but as a personality) would wield power.
South Africa
This brings us to the deeper question of benevolent dictatorship.
Recent Afrobarometer surveys reveal a growing impatience with democracy in South Africa itself. In the 2025 survey, support for military rule rose sharply from 28% in 2022 to 49%, while fewer than half of South Africans now actively endorse democracy as the best form of government.
Dissatisfaction with how democracy actually functions stands at around 70%, highest among the poor and unemployed. Many citizens, weary of elections that fail to deliver jobs, safety, or basic services, are increasingly open to the idea of a “strong hand” – provided it fixes what the ballot box has not.
This echoes the 2022 findings where a notable share of South Africans said they would accept living under a dictatorship if basic rights were respected and the country’s problems were actually solved.
The pretence of democracy, it seems, is wearing thin even in the world’s “miracle democracy”.
Democratic gaslighting
If there is one insight worth salvaging from Traoré’s blunt rejection of democracy, it is this: democracy is not the be-all and end-all of good governance. Placing blind faith in it blinds us to how power actually functions in practice.
In South Africa, a supposedly democratic government imposed one of the world’s harshest Covid lockdowns – not to mention years of loadshedding – with minimal parliamentary scrutiny and zero popular consent, citing disaster powers. When challenged, the response was simple: “It’s an emergency.”
Yet when confronted with a genuine, chronic crisis – mass unemployment baked into the economy by rigid labour laws, restrictive regulations, and policy uncertainty – the same government suddenly discovers the limits of its “democratic mandate”. Repealing those laws, which would expand opportunity and mobility, is off the table because “we don’t have democratic approval for that”.
Democracy, in the wrong hands – by nature, the most common type of hands – becomes a convenient tool of gaslighting: extraordinary powers for what rulers want to do, procedural paralysis for what they do not.
South Africans are thus right to become more critical of democracy’s paper-thin claims. The loadshedding and lockdown years exposed how easily elected governments can evade accountability while ordinary people suffer.
“Choosing” a benevolent dictator
But disillusionment should not drive us into the arms of dictatorship.
Every dictator and his entourage believes that he is of the benevolent variety. Traoré presents his rule as a necessary revolution for sovereignty and survival. Others have cast themselves as “fathers of the nation”.
As I have written before, benevolent dictatorship is not an easy egg to unscramble. “Benevolent dictatorship” is not an item one can simply order from the menu of governance options tailored to your preferences.
In fact, the very act of yearning for a “benevolent” strongman – of imagining you can choose when a dictatorship should come about and that it should be beneficial – is itself a democratic impulse, an attempt to steer power through public sentiment.
In reality, dictatorship arrives on its own terms, driven by the incentives of the ruler and his inner circle, not by your wish list for reform. One cannot “choose” benevolence in advance. What emerges is whatever agenda the dictator and his cabal pursue once power is secured: often expansion of control, suppression of rivals, and policies that entrench poverty rather than alleviate it.
Rare exceptions like Pinochet’s Chile (or, in different contexts, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore or Paul Kagame’s Rwanda) succeeded because they absolutely went against the grain of dictatorial government, by implementing policies that limited arbitrary state power, encouraged investment, and allowed markets to function. This is precisely the opposite of the statist, anti-market instincts that have dominated much of African governance since independence. These cases were anomalies that can only be appreciated with hindsight, and even they came with heavy human costs.
Most dictatorships deliver repression and economic failure, not enlightened reform.
Neither democracy nor dictatorship – but constitutionalism
We should therefore take Traoré’s critique seriously enough to drop the cult of democracy, but reject his solution. Democracy has its pathologies – it can enable tyranny through the ballot box, reward demagogues, and frustrate necessary but unpopular reforms.
I do not worship at the altar of democracy – its flaws are real and growing. But arguing for dictatorship as the solution is fraught with much greater peril. In Africa especially, where institutional weakness and social distrust are the norm, the call for a strongman too often becomes a licence for predation.
The lesson is not to abandon all restraint in pursuit of an idealised dictator, but to recognise that sustainable progress requires institutional guardrails that neither pure democracy nor unchecked authoritarianism reliably provides.
What matters far more than majoritarian approval or the whims of a strongman are deeper principles: constitutionalism that actually constrains power, limited government that prevents arbitrary rule, federalism and property rights that disperse authority, and a steadfast insistence on the freedom and well-being of the individual over both what the majority happens to believe at any moment and what political elites claim to know best.
Institutions of governance must contain mechanisms that both allow bad leaders to be removed peacefully, and uninformed majorities to be ignored sustainably. These guardrails offer a more reliable path than either the illusions of unchecked democracy or the false promise of enlightened tyranny.
