Sahel Reporter

As households across Burkina Faso confront deepening hardship and uneven access to basic public services, the transitional government has chosen to announce a turning point of its own. By publishing a theoretical administrative performance score of 85.38% for 2025, the executive presents the state machinery as having crossed a decisive threshold. Yet the distance between that headline figure and everyday life at the service counter tells a different story, one in which talk of “sovereignty” and “dematerialisation” struggles to mask an administration still hunting for bearings.

A declared breakthrough that citizens cannot see

The claim is bold: an efficiency rate brushing against excellence. The experience is far more sober. Users queue in front of deserted service windows, wait unacceptable lengths of time for civil status documents, and navigate a public procurement system where graft remains a permanent feature. The performance index promoted by the Conseil national de la modernisation de l’Administration belongs, in this reading, more to bureaucratic rhetoric than to measurable progress.

Self-assessment as a substitute for proof

A rate graded by the very institutions being graded cannot, on its own, say much about the quality of the service actually delivered. It says even less about the legitimate frustration of rural communities that remain far from the centre of attention, where the state is often present in name only and where administrative journeys stretch over days and hundreds of kilometres.

Digitalisation moving faster than the network can carry it

The executive has made the computerisation of procedures the signature of its mandate. Making dematerialisation the centrepiece of reform in a country that endures repeated power cuts and thin internet coverage across the provinces, however, looks less like ambition than like running ahead of the ground beneath one’s feet.

An inclusive promise that excludes millions

Far from widening access, a blind digital transition risks pushing citizens out of public services altogether. Without a smartphone or computer, without a stable connection, and sometimes without electricity at home, millions of Burkinabè find themselves on the wrong side of a reform designed in their name.

Reclaiming territory on paper, not in the field

Restoring public services alongside the armed forces in areas under pressure is a legitimate objective. Announcing that the administration stands ready to move immediately back into reconquered zones, though, reads more like a communications posture than an operational plan.

Who protects the teachers and health workers?

Absent solid security guarantees for state employees — teachers, health agents, administrators — and absent an equipment budget equal to the task, sending civil servants towards the front lines amounts to recklessness rather than reconstruction. Momentum on this front requires logistics, protection and money, not declarations.

Discipline as a lever: the reshaping of the civil service

Under the banner of building an “honest and disciplined” administration, the regime is quietly clearing the ground for a more heavily politicised senior civil service. Rewriting appointment criteria and tightening control over public employees becomes a mechanism for sidelining dissenting voices and narrowing the space available to trade unions.

What genuine momentum would require

If Burkina Faso is truly at a turning point, the pivot should be measured in outcomes rather than percentages. The deep drivers of state inefficiency remain largely untouched:

• Chronic under-resourcing of frontline services, from dispensaries to civil registry offices;
• The absence of real accountability when services fail or funds disappear;
• The continuing erosion of workers’ purchasing power, which hollows out the very administration being celebrated.

Multiply seminars and statistical self-congratulation in Ouagadougou and the 85.38% figure will keep rising on paper. Tackle those three problems instead and the momentum would finally be felt by the people who line up each morning at counters that are still, too often, closed.