The soaring price of cement in Burkina Faso has become a heavy burden for ordinary citizens, slowing the construction sector and straining the national economy. To explain this crisis, authorities point to the rise of community works under the presidential initiative Faso Mêbo. However, beyond the program’s questionable economic value, using it to justify the cement shortage reveals a deep incongruity in state planning.

Faso Mêbo: a politically useful but economically weak instrument

Billed as a symbol of endogenous development, Faso Mêbo relies heavily on popular mobilization, volunteerism, and donations of materials, especially cement. While the idea of involving citizens in building their country may resonate symbolically, the economic and technical reality of this model raises serious concerns.

By entrusting large infrastructure projects—roads, pavements, public buildings—to a system based on volunteer labor and erratic donations, the state moves away from engineering standards and long-term durability. Without rigorous technical oversight and guaranteed maintenance budgets, many observers fear these low-cost structures will crumble with the first rains, turning popular effort into enormous waste. Worse, by bypassing the local private construction sector, this approach weakens small and medium enterprises that create real, sustainable jobs and pay taxes, in favor of informal project management.

The illogic of the official explanation for price hikes

Even if we grant that Faso Mêbo consumes a significant amount of cement, blaming it alone for the price surge remains an economic and logical anomaly. In a planned economy, the emergence of a new state demand should be anticipated. Claiming that prices have shot up because the state uses cement is an admission that authorities launched a nationwide program without ever assessing industrial capacity to support it. A state cannot be surprised by its own consumption.

The reality that this communication tries to obscure lies elsewhere:

• Energy strangulation of factories: The primary brake on cement availability remains the state’s inability to provide stable electricity to local cement plants, which operate at reduced capacity due to frequent blackouts.
• The trap of rigid protectionism: By banning cement imports to protect local factories that lack the energy to produce, the state itself created the scarcity.
• Institutionalized black market: This artificial shortage fuels speculators, and the Commerce Ministry’s control mechanisms prove powerless against them.

Blaming Faso Mêbo for the cement crisis is a contradiction. Either the initiative is modest in scope and its impact on the overall market is minimal, or it is as massive as the government claims, and its launch without prior industrial planning amounts to a serious management error. In either case, the high cost of living and cement in Burkina Faso does not stem from the patriotism of paving stones, but from the flawed strategic choices of a state struggling to rationalize its economy.