Burkina Faso's $64 Billion Bet
Traoré's National Development Plan and the Break From External Dependency
Burkina Faso launched its 64-billion-dollar National Development Plan (NDP) for 2026–2030, earlier this week on 9 March. The plan is one of the largest economic programs ever proposed in the Sahel. About two-thirds of this money will be raised domestically from the revenues generated by state-owned enterprises and through citizen shareholding programs.
“Using our sovereign resources, we can sustainably transform our economy and improve the lives of our people,”insisted Finance Minister Aboubakar Nacanabo, highlighting the significance of this break from the previous regime’s reliance on external funding.
Earlier, on January 29, when the cabinet adopted the NDP, Nacanabo listed four specific objectives to be achieved in these five years:
1) Reduction of the poverty rate from 42% to 35%
2) Increase in life expectancy from 61 to 68 years
3) Increase in electricity generation capacity from 685 MW to more than 2,500 MW
4) And, most importantly, retaking control over the whole territory of the country
The Burkinabe state was in control of barely 60% of its territory when Capt. Ibrahim Traoré took power in 2022, after the ouster of the France-backed regime of Roch Kaboré’s in a popularly supported military coup earlier that year. Terror groups held the rest of the country.
Expelling French troops from the country, Traore’s government has strengthened the national army, regaining control over almost 75% of the territory by the end of 2025.
The country has also experienced major strides in agriculture and industry. Nationalizing five foreign-owned gold mining assets in June 2025, the state was able to cash in on the rally in the price of gold, the main export of Burkina Faso. Using the revenue generated to repay over two billion dollars, the government reduced its domestic debt by a quarter, considerably improving the country’s fiscal position.
On this sound footing, Burkina Faso has now made an ambitious leap, with the 64-billion-dollar five-year plan, aimed at not only expanding the mining operations but also processing raw materials locally instead of exporting them. Developing infrastructure to promote industrialization is a top priority in the NDP, which has been in the making for a year, starting on 9 March 2025.
On December 31, 2025, the steering and supervision committee, chaired by Prime Minister Jean Ouédraogo, reviewed and adopted the NDP. “The document,” Ouédraogo said, “now stands as a true national pact for the structural transformation of our economy, the consolidation of security and peace, the rebuilding of the State, and the promotion of inclusive and sovereign endogenous development.”
 | A guest post by
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Imagine the healing of a world that comes from the leadership of a country that recognizes and abandons the ages long conceptual error of attempting to attach the features of a fungible commodity to their 'unit of measure' in their production and exchange and record keeping about 'value.' The leadership of this country does have its sights on what the Real Value is: the resources and labor and innovation and creativity and capacity of its land and people.
But can that full capacity manifest when the means by which the bookkeeping about their own economic activity holds an abstract Unit of AcCount - Money - to also BE an item of value akin to and/or equal, even superior, to the very natural resources of the land?
When we stopped using fungible physical commodities as 'trade goods' and moved to bookkeeping about the value contained in the goods and services of our interchange, we mistakenly and foolishly and illiterately assigned "value" to the number units themselves using symbols ($, etc.) as though those units were still commodities that had just lost their physical form.
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit is a mistake of monumental proportions that even the best intentions cannot overcome while not correcting it. The 'inherited or imposed illiteracy' that surrounds money itself cannot be cured by holding the actors in this melodrama accountable for their actions within the illiterate paradigm. You see, one first has to think of, or be forced at gunpoint to accept, that money is an item of value that can also perform the function of 'unit measure of value.' But those two are mutually exclusive. The function called 'measure' is not sensible or reliable if the unit is constantly in flux and self-referential. That is the core illiteracy about money in the 'educated' class of the present day.
The 'reality transformation' that first occurs is the assumption that abstract units of representation possess the same characteristics of their predecessor trade goods and that some magical entity has the power to 'create' the abstract units of representation representing nothing but themselves!
But 'Money creation', from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank.
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept that this whole process must precede and subjugates economic activity of genuine value. And we accept this nonsense because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'. It is NOT.
So, when the leadership of a society truly is motivated to establish "inclusive and sovereign endogenous development” it must realize that the present system and conceptual basis of money itself cannot assist but only interfere with this effort.
But won't it be amazing for a society's leadership to abandon this age old problem and correct the conceptual error by calling the world to genuine liberation through the establishment of a genuinely Logical and Mathematically Literate System of The Abstract Representation Of Value !?
Here are the Resolutions that can be presented in every jurisdiction that will call the world to correction of the conceptual error. https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
Remaining within the framework of the conceptual error leaves people thinking that they must contend with others in ways that can only bring more and greater cycles of conflict.
We cannot keep accepting self-declared 'authority' on the part of the "issuer" of the numbers we use to do the bookkeeping about our own activity. Nor can we accept that the numbers on the ledger (or the coins of the realm that came before) are items of value all by themselves.
Yet, most all are going along with this.
Money is not a resource at all. That is the core illiteracy that people struggle with. Holding back genuine economic activity waiting for the abstract units to record that activity is like waiting for some of the inches to be available so that you can measure the boards to build something. And the unit of money is itself an absurdity in the field of Applied Math. How can one make sense of equations using a term that is undefined and unstable?
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii
Marc Gauvin
"If we debunk our current notion of money as the misrepresentation that it is, then no one has power over anyone, yet all become far better informed than they currently are.”