The rising cost of cement in Burkina Faso is officially attributed to the surge in community construction projects under the « Faso Mêbo » initiative. However, this explanation appears deeply inconsistent, especially given the questionable economic rationale behind the program itself.
Across Burkina Faso, the price of a ton of cement has become prohibitively expensive for the average citizen, severely impeding the building sector and stifling the national economy. In response to widespread public discontent, the government has adopted a familiar narrative: elevated cement costs are a direct consequence of the nation’s extensive construction efforts, spearheaded by the presidential Faso Mêbo community works program. Yet, this official justification suffers from a dual flaw. Not only is the true effectiveness of Faso Mêbo widely disputed, but employing it as a defense against shortages underscores critical shortcomings in state planning.
Faso Mêbo: a political instrument with debatable economic efficacy
Touted as a symbol of endogenous development, the Faso Mêbo initiative primarily relies on grassroots mobilization, volunteer labor, and material donations, particularly cement. While the symbolic aim of engaging citizens in national construction is commendable, the economic and technical realities of this operational model provoke serious inquiry.
Entrusting significant infrastructure projects—such as roads, paving, and public buildings—to a system reliant on volunteerism and unpredictable donations means the state is diverging from established engineering standards and long-term durability. Without stringent technical oversight and guaranteed maintenance budgets, many observers fear these low-cost infrastructures could rapidly degrade with the first rainy season, effectively turning collective popular effort into a massive waste of resources. Furthermore, by circumventing the local private construction and public works (BTP) sector, this approach inadvertently weakens national small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that create genuine, sustainable employment and pay taxes, instead favoring often informal site management.
The incongruity of the official argument regarding price increases
Let’s concede, for argument’s sake, that Faso Mêbo indeed consumes a substantial quantity of cement. Even then, attributing the product’s exorbitant cost solely to this factor remains a glaring logical and economic inconsistency.
In any well-managed economy, the emergence of a new state requirement should be proactively anticipated. To assert that prices are soaring simply because the state is utilizing cement is tantamount to admitting that authorities initiated a major national program without ever evaluating the industrial apparatus’s capacity to support it. A government, by definition, cannot be taken by surprise by its own consumption demands.
The underlying truth, which this official communication attempts to obscure, lies elsewhere:
- Energy strangulation of factories: The primary obstacle to cement availability remains the state’s inability to provide stable electricity to local cement plants, many of which operate at reduced capacity due to frequent power outages.
- The trap of rigid protectionism: By prohibiting cement imports to safeguard local factories that lack the necessary energy to produce efficiently, the state has inadvertently engineered the very scarcity it now seeks to explain.
- Institutionalized black market: This artificially created scarcity fuels a lucrative black market, where speculators thrive, while the control mechanisms of the Ministry of Commerce appear largely ineffective.
To blame Faso Mêbo for the current cement crisis is a fundamental misinterpretation. Either this initiative is of modest scale, rendering its impact on the overall market negligible, or it is as extensive as the government claims, in which case its launch without prior industrial planning constitutes a grave strategic misstep. In either scenario, the escalating cost of living and cement in Burkina Faso is not rooted in patriotic community efforts, but rather in the flawed strategic decisions of a state struggling to rationalize its economic management.
