via Wikimedia
President Sankara had an incredible vision for his country, Burkina Faso.
His mission to transform a land that relied on foreign aid for basic necessities like food required extreme changes. Thus, his first order of business involved ditching the cars...
In 1983, government spending was wasteful and corruption was rampant prior to Sankara’s first term.
To address the frivolous spending, he and his administration sold every Mercedes Benz provided to government officials and replaced them with cheap Renault 5’s instead. This humbling act was only the beginning.
Salaries were cut and class privileges were no longer acceptable among public officials. His economic policies were founded on ideologies that shook up traditional dynamics between men and women, the young and the old.
Children were vaccinated and educated. Women were upheld as equal to men in the workforce and at home. This was an “upright man,” who was adored for his emphasis on self-sufficiency and pride.
His radical reforms proved to be too great a threat to the French and other world powers invested in an underdeveloped and crippled Africa.
His time in office was cut short by his 1987 assassination, yet Sankara’s revolution is still a movement African leaders look to as an example of what could be achieved through shifts in the fundamental mentality of its government and the people it is appointed to serve.