“Many of his achievements were reversed by his successor who literally couped him, therefore, they never existed”
???
Sadly, what I meant was that none of his achievements amounted to anything actual Burkinabae people experienced as genuine long-term beneficial changes. That nothing he did from this image lasted or was enough of a net good that even a week of some other guy couldn't undo it all.
The environmental initiative was abandoned after his assassination
Yeah, I've done a ton of desertification remediation projects, and this is not the flex you think it is. Primarily that desertification prevention projects are always nice ideas and fade after a couple years when you find out how well most interventions don't work. I've watched hundreds of people in the Sahel plant trees for big, well-funded events. Most die within a year or so because, as it turns out, small trees need water. Planting trees is not some new invention. OK, so he planted 10 million? They're trees - where are they? I've been to BF a few times, it looks just as much like a desert as Niamey, and it's bleak AF once you get north of Ouaga. Trees require years of labor to get to the point where trees take. He was probably just looking at issues with charcoal use and forestry issues and did the math. It's nice that he did this, but this isn't some mind-blowing unique thing. It's what every foreigner shows up and tries to do as well in the Sahel, like they're the first one to think of it. Even if 10% of the trees survived, you would think that 1 million trees would still be around, yes?
“By 60%” not “to 60%”
Had time to dig into this, and whew - this is simply not true. There's no source for the 73% literacy rate claim. Second, explain to me how people became UNliterate? BF's literacy rate is around 40%. Yet, the most literate group is children who had been in schools. Why are the adults, including the older adults running at 10% literacy rates when 73% of everyone was literate 30 years ago? We would see literacy rates that don't look like every other Sahelian country.
Second, literacy is not learning the alphabet, and in the 70's and 80's, literacy was only the ability to reach French, an abomination of a language. Leftovers of the colonial past that the stats were only for French, and they included local languages later. If you think it's so easy, go learn to read french this week and tell me how that goes for you.
What may have been misconstrued, IMO, is one of two things: It might have been teaching local language written in regular romance letters, which, again, is not literacy because there's really not anything to read in local languages. People sound out the things they read like signs, so it's sort of half way to anything. OR he included people who claimed to know Arabic from Koranic schools. I promise you, no one can read Arabic IRL, but it's an alphabet. You do occasionally out in the villages see people writing local language in Arabic, which is interesting. But it's not the same thing as literacy.
“The country was a mess by its very formation; therefore, Sankara had no achievements”
Not at all - it's that while he was violating human rights just a bit (very popular at the time) to hold the new country together, it left him distracted and fighting for internal power, rather than doing things that were longer-lasting. Meaning that you can't just think it was a magical utopia for a few years based on a meme. His achievements don't live on beyond memes that make it sound like Marxist African leaders had any sort of successes at all. No one needs to come by and tear them down, it al gets washed away because everything in the Sahel is hard on life and achievement. Nothing lasts. And Sankara is no exception.