To justify the skyrocketing price of cement, authorities in Burkina Faso frequently point to the surge in community construction projects under the ‘Faso Mêbo’ initiative. However, beyond the highly questionable economic rationale of this program, citing it as the sole cause for the current cement crisis represents a profound disconnect from reality.
Across Burkina Faso, the cost of a tonne of cement has reached prohibitive levels for the average citizen, significantly slowing the construction sector and stifling the national economy. In response to widespread public discontent, the government has adopted a familiar narrative: cement is expensive because the nation is undergoing extensive development thanks to Faso Mêbo, a presidential program for community works. This official explanation, however, suffers from a dual weakness. Not only is the true utility of Faso Mêbo far from universally accepted, but using it as a shield to account for shortages starkly highlights critical deficiencies in state planning.
Faso Mêbo: a political tool with debatable economic effectiveness
Heralded as a symbol of endogenous development, the Faso Mêbo initiative primarily relies on popular mobilization, volunteerism, and donations of materials, particularly cement. While the symbolic intent to engage citizens in building their country is commendable, the economic and technical realities of this model raise serious questions.
By entrusting significant infrastructure projects—such as roads, paving, and public buildings—to volunteer efforts and unpredictable donations, the state deviates from established engineering standards and principles of durability. Without rigorous technical oversight and guaranteed maintenance budgets, many observers fear that these low-cost infrastructures could rapidly deteriorate with the first rainy season, rendering the popular effort a vast waste of resources. Furthermore, by bypassing the local private construction and public works (BTP) sector, this approach weakens national small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that create genuine, sustainable jobs and pay taxes, in favor of often informal project management.
The incongruity of the official argument on price hikes
Even if we concede that Faso Mêbo consumes a significant quantity of cement, explaining the high cost of the product solely by this factor remains a logical and economic anomaly.
In any planned economy, the emergence of a new state requirement is anticipated. To assert that prices are soaring because the state itself is utilizing cement is tantamount to admitting that authorities launched a national-scale program without ever assessing the industrial apparatus’s capacity to support it. A state simply cannot be surprised by its own consumption. The truth that this communication attempts to obscure lies elsewhere:
- Energy asphyxiation of factories: The primary impediment to cement availability remains the state’s inability to provide stable electricity to local cement factories, which operate at reduced capacity due to frequent power cuts.
- The trap of rigid protectionism: By prohibiting cement imports to protect local factories that lack the necessary energy to produce, the state has inadvertently created the very scarcity it now faces.
- Institutionalized black market: This artificial scarcity benefits speculators, against whom the control mechanisms of the Commerce Ministry prove largely ineffective.
Blaming Faso Mêbo for the ongoing Burkina Faso cement crisis is a misdirection. Either this initiative is of modest scope, and its impact on the global market is minimal, or it is as massive as the government claims, and its launch without prior industrial planning constitutes a grave error in governance. In both scenarios, the high cost of living and cement in Burkina Faso does not originate from a ‘patriotism of paving stones,’ but rather from the deficient strategic choices of a state struggling to rationalize its economy. This situation is a critical point in African news today, reflecting broader challenges in Africa politics English and impacting African society news.
