Privatisation de l’aéroport de Ouagadougou : Le préavis de grève est suspendu et « non levé »

Dear fellow Burkinabe, why privatizing the main and the only aerial entry point into the nation ?
When you look around, you notice that the entire world is changing and all partners and old friendly nations are becoming more and more desperate for strategic positioning. When you go to any developed country, the government has some sort of major interest in the entry point of their country. But when you look at ours, we are in the process of giving it away to private sector that is not even the citizens of burkina faso. What do you think that is going to happen ?
1- The foreign private company will not care to upgrading our airport because it is all about getting back their investment. And that company will do everything, even if it is illegal, in order to get their investment back as quick as possible. For example, their can let private jets come and leave with pure gold or other minerals without anyone knowing. It happened many years ago. Or private jets can bring weapons into the country to start civil war. That happened too, in other African countries where private jets were supplying weapons for minerals. Let’s be serious my fellow Burkinabe.
2- Burkina Faso is strategically located in Africa, especially West Africa. Believe it or not the country has lots of advantages. For example, burkina faso can be transformed into logistics and supplies chain management country that would serve the entire West coast and Central Africa with small and medium sizes parcels for all Air shipping coming from all over the world to be distributed in Africa. This is possible. We do not need ocean to prosper.
3- Foreign private company has its allegiance to its country of origin therefore, if that country decides to paralyze burkina faso, it will be easy to do so because burkina faso will not be the one controlling the security detail of their airport in question.
4- If burkina faso really wants to privatize their international airport, they need to have the citizens or the government owning at least 40 percent of the shares with a potential of increasing in the event that the other party wants to sell their shares. Or the government can own 20 percent and the private citizens entrepreneurs can own the remaining 20 percent. But the foreign company should not have all the 100 percent shares. It will be too risky to have that control.
5- I think that we are having the tendency to copy everything from others without looking at our own reality and try to shape the idea base on our own position. I believe that we can copy the framework of an idea but we need to shape our own idea into that framework. Just like a computer software that one will customize it to their needs. If you look at all the airports in Europe and the USA, the cities in which they are located control or somewhat own the airport and the airline sublease the hubs from the cities. They don’t privatize any airport. Let’s be serious about what we are trying to implement in our country so we can be sustainable in the future. The airline can be private, but not the airports. That will be a recipe for disaster. For example, the railway that is control by private. A company was trying to allegedly smuggle some minerals through there few months ago. What do you think can happen with a private airport ?
6- lastly, I think that the government should hold on this approach of privatization until we can all think through the pros and cons before making the final decision. It is in our national security that we shall not jump into investors money so fast and compromise our security. We have enough security problems for the time beings, let’s not add more oil into the burning fire. I believe we can do better than that. Let’s create a non partisan and patriotic think-tank in the near future to address these strategic developments and security issues of our nation.
Regards,
Leiw