The Dirty Pot: What a Burkinabè Activist Told Macron — And Why Africa Is Listening

At the New Africa-France Summit in Montpellier, a moment unfolded that has since traveled far beyond the conference hall. Rahimouandé Elda Koama, an entrepreneur and activist from Burkina Faso, stood before French President Emmanuel Macron and delivered what can only be described as a reckoning — calm, deliberate, and impossible to dismiss as mere rhetoric.

The Libya Thread

Koama opened by tracing a line that Western commentary on the Sahel crisis often conveniently skips: the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Her argument was structural, not emotional — the collapse of Libya destabilized the Sahel, and France's subsequent military presence in Mali was framed as help when it was, in her telling, damage control for a crisis France itself had a hand in creating.

Notably, Macron did not deny this. He conceded that the Libya intervention had failed to respect the sovereignty of its people — a rare, on-record admission from a sitting French president. Koama pressed the point further: if that failure is acknowledged, then the entire premise of French military presence in the Sahel as "help" collapses with it. Foreign intervention, she reminded him, pointing to both Libya and Afghanistan, has never actually solved the problems it claims to fix.

Rejecting the Language of Charity

The most striking section of Koama's address wasn't about troops or borders — it was about vocabulary. She named "development aid" itself as the problem, invoking the Burkinabè revolutionary Thomas Sankara's argument that aid which does not lead to independence from aid is a mechanism of continued dependency rather than a solution to it.

She reinforced this with a citation of the late Pan-Africanist historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, whose core idea she distilled sharply: "You don't develop people; people develop themselves." The logic that follows is uncompromising — if outsiders cannot develop a people, they cannot claim credit for that people's development either. Nearly a century of aid flowing into Africa, she argued, is itself the evidence that the model doesn't work.

A Demand for Co-Construction, Not Charity

Koama was careful not to reject partnership itself — she rejected its current architecture. Africa, she said, already has capable minds, active investors, and homegrown innovation. What it will not accept any longer is a relationship where it is cast as the recipient of pity rather than a co-architect of its own future. Phrases like "saving Africa" or cataloguing its "miserable" populations, she declared, are finished — not up for negotiation, simply over.

Her concrete proposal was pointed: the French Development Agency (AFD), approaching its 80th anniversary, should not just rebrand — it should restructure, giving African partners genuine voice and decision-making power at the table, not just the appearance of consultation.

The Dirty Pot

Koama closed with an image that has since become the most quoted part of her speech: the France-Africa relationship as a cooking pot — stained by superficial apologies, corruption, a lack of transparency, and language that still demeans the people it claims to uplift. Her warning was direct: clean the pot through real action, or the meal will be cooked, served, and eaten by no one but France itself.

Why This Moment Resonates Beyond Burkina Faso

Koama's address landed as more than a single speech — it crystallized a mood spreading across a generation of West and Central African civil society, one increasingly unwilling to accept the vocabulary and structures inherited from the colonial and post-colonial aid era. Her framing echoes a wider regional shift: Sahelian states moving away from French military and economic alignment, a renewed embrace of Sankarist and Pan-Africanist thought, and a demand — not a request — for partnerships built on parity rather than paternalism.

Whether Paris responds with the structural change Koama demanded, or with another round of symbolic gestures, remains an open question. But the terms of the conversation have shifted. The old script — France as benefactor, Africa as beneficiary — is being publicly, articulately rejected, and not just by governments, but by the citizens those governments answer to.

Coverage and analysis of West Africa-France relations is tracked on an ongoing basis under NavvyaSignal's Global Politics desk.