So I’m scrolling through a report on aggregate mining in Burkina Faso Ouagadougou—don't ask, it’s a weird Tuesday—and I land on the Pissy quarry. Yes, that’s its real name. And what I read makes me want to throw my laptop out the window.
Eighty percent of the workers breaking granite under the blistering Ouagadougou weather are women. Average age: 40. They work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their technique for cracking giant rocks is to… get this… burn tires on them for up to 15 days until the heat creates fissures. Then they smash the rock with metal bars. By hand.
They get paid in cash at the end of the day. No contracts, no insurance, no sick leave. When they get injured—and 76% of them have, from hitting their hands with tools or getting rock splinters in their eyes—only 18% go to a hospital. The rest use "traditional natural medicine." I'm sure that works wonders for a shard of granite in your cornea.
These women, many of whom have zero formal education, are literally building the capital city with their bare hands and breathing in toxic tire smoke to do it.
And then I see the other news coming out of Ouagadougou.
So, Who Exactly Is This "Hope" For?
The Architectural Digest Version of Reality
There’s this shiny new mausoleum for Thomas Sankara, the country’s revolutionary former leader. It’s an architectural marvel designed by the world-famous Francis Kéré. It’s got a 34-meter dome, skylights, and it's built with "laterite bricks and clay from the region" in a project that "involved the collaboration of local communities."
The architect says it’s a "symbol of progress, change, and hope for all."
Hope for all.
Are we talking about the same Ouagadougou? The one where women are hammering rocks for pennies a tray? Did they "collaborate" by supplying the gravel that Kéré’s team mixed into the concrete? The disconnect here is staggering. It’s worse than staggering. No, 'staggering' doesn't cover it—this is a level of cognitive dissonance that could power a small city.
You can't build a monument to a populist hero on a foundation of near-slave labor and then call it "hope." You just can't.
The Official Language of Doing Absolutely Nothing
And Then the Suits Show Up
As if that wasn't enough, a big shot from the World Bank, Harold Tavares, flew into Ouagadougou airport in June. He had some "high-level exchanges" with the Prime Minister about a new "Country Partnership Framework." I love these phrases. They sound so important and mean absolutely nothing.
The press release says the new framework "emphasizes the simplification of procedures and the ownership by countries of their development policies."
Let me translate that for you: "We're going to generate a 200-page PDF full of buzzwords that will have zero impact on the woman in the Pissy quarry who just hit her thumb with a hammer for the third time this week."
What does "simplification of procedures" mean to someone whose biggest aspiration is just to secure food for her 4.3 children? What "ownership" does she have? This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to scream. It reminds me of every corporate retreat I’ve ever been forced to attend, where VPs talk about "synergy" and "disruption" while the people actually doing the work are just trying not to get laid off. It’s a performance. A ridiculously expensive, globe-trotting piece of theater. Offcourse, he probably stayed at the Azalai Hotel Ouagadougou, a universe away from the dust and smoke of the quarries.
Fiddling With Freezers While the Country Burns
The Elephant in the Room is a Russian Bear
Here’s the part that makes the whole thing a dark comedy. Burkina Faso is a failed state in waiting. The country has had two military coups since 2022. The current junta leader, some captain named Traoré, is losing his grip. Jihadists control over half the damn country. There are more than 2 million displaced people. The capital is flooded with people fleeing violence, and where do they end up? Competing for back-breaking, informal jobs in places like the Yagma and Pissy quarries.
The government has kicked out the French and cozied up to Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries. There are rumors of purges in the military, fuel shortages, and rising inflation. The place is a tinderbox, and every analyst with a pulse is predicting another coup is just a matter of time.
And in the middle of all this… we’re building monuments and hosting international conferences? On November 12, 2025, they’re hosting the International Conference for the Popularization of Refrigeration in Africa. I’m not kidding. The country is on fire, and they’re holding a conference on cold chains. The organizers are talking about "turning structural challenges into opportunities for growth."
The structural challenge ain't a lack of refrigerators. The structural challenge is that the state is collapsing.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one. Maybe a shiny new building and a conference about freezers is exactly what you need when your country is imploding. It’s something to put on the news, I guess. It’s a story to tell that isn’t about jihadists or military factions or women burning tires to survive.
It’s a much nicer story. It just happens to be fiction. And the people breaking the rocks, they know it...
It’s All Performance Art
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