After being declared president of Burkina Faso a few days ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was invested, Wednesday, February 16, at the head of the country, three weeks after taking power by a coup d'état. .

"I swear before the people of Burkina Faso (...) to preserve, respect, enforce and defend the Constitution, the fundamental act and the laws" of Burkina, declared Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba while taking an oath before the Constitutional Council, during a ceremony broadcast by national television.

He was dressed in a military fatigues surrounded by a scarf in the colors of Burkina Faso, his head wearing a red beret.

No foreign representative attended the swearing-in ceremony which was held in a small room in the Constitutional Council, where only the official press was admitted.

Several hours before the swearing-in, access to the Council was filtered by a large security force system erected within a radius of 100 m around the institution's headquarters in Ouagadougou, noted an AFP journalist.

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A minute of silence

Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba, 41, took power on January 24 in Ouagadougou after two days of mutinies in several barracks in the country, overthrowing elected President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, accused in particular of not having put an end to the jihadist violence which has been hitting Burkina Faso for nearly seven years.

He set up a junta called the Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration (MPSR), which has "security" as its priority.

In the wake of Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of violence attributed to jihadist movements, affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, which have killed more than 2,000 people in the country and forced at least 1.5 million people to flee their homes.

During the taking of the oath, a minute of silence was observed in memory of the civilian and military victims of the jihadists.

No position on French commitment to the Sahel

Suspended from the authorities of ECOWAS, Burkina Faso and the members of the junta have so far escaped additional sanctions.

A West African ministerial mission to Ouagadougou was delighted that Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was "open" to dialogue.

ECOWAS and the African Union have asked the junta for a "reasonable" timetable for the "return to constitutional order" and the release of ousted President Kaboré, who was still under house arrest in a villa in Ouagadougou on Wednesday.

In his only public address three days after the coup, Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba said he needed international partners.

He quickly consulted the living forces, political parties, trade unions and civil society organizations, which were rather lenient towards him.

Following these consultations, on 6 February he issued a decree announcing the creation of a commission made up of 15 members with a view to "drawing up a draft charter and agenda, together with a proposed duration of the transition and the modalities of implementation" within a "two-week period".

His swearing in took place a few hours before the announcement by France and its European partners of their withdrawal from neighboring Mali, due to the hostile attitude towards them of the soldiers in power in Bamako, also resulting from a coup of state.

Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba has not taken a position on the French and European military commitment in the Sahel, but since he has been in power, the French force Barkhane has been able to carry out anti-jihadist operations in Burkina.

He has reshaped the structures of the anti-jihadist struggle and recently visited the north of his country, the region most affected by the attacks.

In a book published in 2021, he was critical of anti-jihadist policies, deploring local armies that were too weak, with "redhibitory flaws", and "necessary" but "secret" Western partners.

With AFP

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