Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba

Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was born on January 2, 1981, in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso ^[1]. He came of age during the long presidency of Blaise Compaoré, a period when the armed forces occupied a privileged place in national life, and he chose a military career while still a young man.

Damiba entered the Burkinabé army and later pursued advanced training abroad. He studied at the École militaire in Paris, one of France's principal institutions for staff officers, and earned a master's degree in criminal sciences from the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, also in Paris ^[2]. He supplemented this formal education with certification as a defense management expert, a background that set him apart from many of his contemporaries in the officer corps. Anyone asking who was Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba before 2022 finds a soldier shaped equally by field commands at home and academic study in France.

Early in his career he served in the Regiment of Presidential Security, the elite unit that protected Compaoré ^[3]. That regiment was dissolved after it attempted a coup against the transitional government in September 2015, an episode that scattered its former officers across the regular army. Damiba was never charged in connection with the 2015 attempt and continued to rise through the ranks.

The defining problem of Damiba's generation of officers was the jihadist insurgency that spread into Burkina Faso from neighboring Mali after 2015. Groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State attacked army posts, villages, and churches, displacing well over a million people by the early 2020s ^[4]. Damiba spent much of this period in operational commands in the most exposed regions of the country.

He served in the north and east, zones where the insurgency hit hardest, and gained a reputation as an officer who understood counterterrorism doctrine as well as the realities of underequipped units in the field. In December 2021 President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré appointed him commander of the third military region, which covers Ouagadougou and much of the surrounding area ^[3]. The promotion placed him at the head of troops in the capital just weeks before the coup that made him famous.

Damiba also wrote about the crisis he was living through. In June 2021 he published a book, Armées ouest-africaines et terrorisme: réponses incertaines?, a critical study of how West African militaries had responded to jihadist violence ^[2]. The book questioned prevailing counterinsurgency strategies in the Sahel and signaled, in retrospect, an officer who believed the political leadership was failing the army. Among Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba facts, the existence of this published critique is one of the more unusual: few coup leaders leave a written record of their thinking beforehand.

Frustration inside the army boiled over after a series of massacres, most notably the November 2021 attack on a gendarmerie post at Inata in which dozens of gendarmes were killed, some reportedly after going weeks without adequate food supplies ^[4]. Soldiers mutinied at several barracks on January 23, 2022, demanding better resources and changes in military leadership.

Within a day the mutiny became a coup. On January 24, 2022, soldiers detained President Kaboré, and that evening a group calling itself the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration, known by its French initials MPSR, announced on national television that it had taken power, suspended the constitution, and dissolved the government and parliament ^[1]. Lieutenant Colonel Damiba was named president of the movement. The putschists said the takeover had occurred without bloodshed and justified it by citing the state's inability to contain the insurgency.

International reaction was swift. The African Union and the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, suspended Burkina Faso from their institutions, following the pattern set after recent coups in Mali and Guinea ^[5]. Inside the country, however, crowds in Ouagadougou greeted the announcement with visible support, a measure of how far public confidence in the elected government had eroded.

Damiba moved quickly to formalize his position. The constitution was restored in early February with amendments, and on February 16, 2022, he was sworn in as president of Burkina Faso, later designating a transitional government with a civilian prime minister, Albert Ouédraogo ^[1]. A transitional charter adopted in March initially set a three year path back to elected rule.

His presidency was dominated by the same security crisis that had brought him to power, and this is where any honest Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba biography must dwell. He reorganized military commands, created new fighting units, and proposed local dialogue committees intended to encourage some militants to lay down their arms ^[6]. He also negotiated with ECOWAS over the length of the transition, and in July 2022 the bloc accepted a compromise under which power would return to civilians by July 2024 ^[5].

Results on the battlefield did not follow. Attacks continued and in some regions intensified during 2022, with large parts of the national territory outside government control. In September 2022 a supply convoy heading to the besieged northern town of Djibo was attacked, an incident in which dozens of people were killed or went missing, deepening anger within the ranks ^[4]. The gap between the coup's promises and conditions on the ground became the central charge against Damiba's rule.

On September 30, 2022, gunfire erupted in Ouagadougou and soldiers appeared on state television that evening to announce that Damiba had been removed from office. The new junta was fronted by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, a 34 year old artillery officer who had taken part in the January coup and now accused Damiba of straying from the movement's original goals and failing to stem the insurgency ^[7].

A tense standoff followed over the next two days, with rumors that Damiba was preparing a counterattack from a military base. Religious and community leaders mediated between the two camps. On October 2, 2022, Damiba agreed to resign, setting conditions that included guarantees of safety for himself and soldiers loyal to him, and a commitment by the new authorities to respect the timetable agreed with ECOWAS ^[7]. He then left the country for Togo, whose government confirmed it had received him in the interest of regional stability ^[8].

Since his departure Damiba has lived outside Burkina Faso and has kept a low public profile. In Ouagadougou the Traoré government later announced measures against several figures of the former regime, while the transition itself moved away from the ECOWAS timetable after the ruling authorities extended military rule.

Damiba's eight months in power form a compact case study in the politics of the central Sahel. He seized office on the argument that soldiers could succeed where elected politicians had failed, and he was removed by junior officers making the same argument against him. That cycle, repeated in Mali and echoed in Niger in 2023, has led analysts to speak of a coup belt stretching across West Africa, and Damiba's rise and fall sits near the center of that story ^[6].

Assessments of Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba achievements are necessarily modest given the brevity of his rule. Supporters credit him with restoring a constitutional framework quickly, appointing a largely civilian cabinet, opening channels for local dialogue with some armed groups, and negotiating a transition calendar that ECOWAS accepted ^[5]. Critics answer that violence worsened on his watch and that his government never articulated a strategy fundamentally different from the one he had condemned in print a year earlier.

His 2021 book remains a point of reference for researchers studying military thinking in the Sahel, precisely because its author went on to test his ideas in power ^[2]. Whether Damiba returns to public life in Burkina Faso remains an open question. For now he is remembered as a soldier scholar whose presidency demonstrated how quickly legitimacy built on security promises can evaporate when the security situation does not improve.