Burkina Faso: Ahmed Newton Barry, the perfect tool of the neo-colonial media machine
“Burkina Faso is heading toward North Korea.” This grotesque comparison, delivered by Ahmed Newton Barry on France 24 on September 30, 2026, says a great deal about the total disconnect of a man who, from his gilded exile in Paris, spits into the soup of the revolution the very revolution he is the antithesis of. A former president of CENI, now wanted by Burkinabe justice for “criminal association linked to a terrorist enterprise,” Barry has turned into a docile mouthpiece for French neocolonial propaganda.
What irony! The man who claims to defend democracy and the freedom of the Burkinabe chose the easy way out: fleeing his country and settling comfortably in Paris, where he distills his venomous analyses on France 24 and RFI, French state media notoriously hostile to African sovereignty.
While millions of Burkinabe celebrate the “Night of the RPP” and hail the achievements of four years of revolution, Barry, from exile, weeps over the “insurrections of 1966 and 2014,” as if those popular uprisings had given birth to a democratic paradise.
Comparing Traoré’s Burkina Faso to North Korea is either gross ignorance or the most total bad faith.
A country where 74.53% of the territory has been reconquered, where growth reaches 5.3%, where thousands of young people enlist as VDP to defend the homeland, where the Place de la Révolution is packed to bursting to celebrate the leader does that look like a totalitarian regime?
Barry conveniently forgets that under his “democratic golden age,” Burkina Faso was the scene of daily terrorist attacks, massacres of civilians, and a state incapable of protecting its citizens.
Barry dares to speak of “wrecking the army,” when it is precisely the Defense and Security Forces, reinforced by the VDP, that reversed the security trend and pushed back terrorist armed groups.
Who “wrecked” the army? The successive governments of the democratic era, incapable of providing equipment, training and leadership to soldiers sent to the front without support! Traoré, by contrast, restored dignity and resources to the Burkinabè army.
As for the “press question” and “political parties,” Barry mourns the disappearance of a space he confuses with anarchy. The suspension of France 24 and RFI, accused of broadcasting terrorist propaganda, is not an attack on press freedom but a measure of national sovereignty.
Political parties were dissolved not out of tyranny but because they had failed in their mission: none was able to offer a credible alternative to the security and political crisis.
Ahmed Newton Barry is not a defender of democracy: he is a bitter exile who, unable to accept that the Burkinabe people have chosen a path other than the one he advocated, uses French media to try to discredit a popular revolution. His comparison with North Korea is laughable; his credibility is lower than the ground.
The Burkinabe, for their part, continue to build, under Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s leadership, a sovereign, resilient country determined to chart its own path with or without the approval of the treacherous Newton Ahmed Barry and his epigones.
Maurice K.ZONGO
