Walking into a coup d'etat in Ouagadougou
Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 920 Views |

Walking into a coup d'etat in Ouagadougou PIC. LESEGO NCHUNGA
Hot humid and dusty! Those were my first thoughts as we disembarked from the very small East African airline. French filled the air! The language, the culture. There was a dusky hue to the horizon, like a scene in a high-end film when the protagonist arrives in Africa. This looked like the Africa of cinema – something set in the early 1980s, with women dressed up in Ankara and gele head wraps, babies on their backs, and men in bellbottoms with short-sleeved suit blazers, high top afros, and shiny shoes! There was a romance about it.
There was also an undercurrent of tension. We couldn’t quite put our finger on it. Even as we stepped outside the airport building (nothing grander than the Sir Seretse Khama Airport building), we could tell that something was looming. In retrospect, I’m sure that closer attention to the news and current affairs would have readied us for what was to come! When we bought the Moov Africa sim cards and 5gigabites of data, we were not expecting that they would soon be rendered completely useless, when life would stop temporarily, to stare us in the eye, for a check-in. It wasn’t easy to find our chauffeur.
From Jakoba's mysterious disappearance on November 9 to the grim discovery of his remains at Mosinki Lands, a gap in the response mechanisms of the police and village leadership has been laid bare. The community's anger is evident, seen in the attack on Bakang Masole, the man found driving Jakoba's taxi and the main suspect, and the subsequent riot. Residents express discontent, citing a troubling trend of missing persons cases often...