Who is Blaise Campaoré?

In the early days of his role as West Africa correspondent, when Conakry’s streets were a killing field, my husband looked up from his screen and said: “How do you write a snappy intro about two countries no one’s ever heard of?”

We laughed, knowing that was a pitfall of covering 15 West African countries, many of which receive scant attention by western media.

Bloodshed at a demonstration in Conakry, Guinea aimed at stalling plans by the military leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara to run in upcoming presidential elections meant that country was climbing the mainstream media’s agenda.

Harder to explain was Burkina Faso, a large but largely unknown country, whose president, Blaise Campaoré (pictured above with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi), had been appointed by the Economic Community of West African States to broker a peace deal with Dadis Camara.

Over the past four years, Campaoré has become mediator du jour, negotiating in three African disputes: Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and now Guinea.

In July 2006, he was named mediator of the Inter-Togolese Dialogue, a series of measures aimed at pulling this small West African country out of the disastrous effects of a decade of prolonged political, economic and financial governance crisis.

In 2007, he was back in the spotlight as mediator in Côte d’Ivoire, a cornerstone of the region’s economy that from 2002 was torn apart by a civil war that had turned its tropical landscape into a troubled heap of African corpses.

Campaoré brokered the peace agreement that was signed by Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and the then-rebel Forces Nouvelles leader Guillaume Soro after a month of negotiations in Ouagadougou on March 4, 2007.

At last February’s Ecowas business forum, Campaoré spoke of the urgency of implementing the Millennium Development Goals, the role of the private sector in developing world wealth creation, peace and security, good governance, the fight against poverty, and ensuring the harmonious integration of West Africa into the global economy.

So what better candidate for Nigeria (as current chair of Ecowas) to choose than Campaoré for the job of fixing Guinea?

Not sure. Have a look at his record.

He entered the political scene in 1987 in a bloody coup that murdered his erstwhile brother in arms, Thomas Sankara, who despite having taken power in a coup four years earlier was regarded by many as a genuine idealist.Campaoré’s stewardship later saw the elimination of Henri Zongo and Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani, accused of plotting against his regime.

Four years later he was elected unopposed when just 25% of the electorate turned out to vote. He was re-elected in 1998 and 2005, breaking a constitutional amendment that allows a president two terms of five years each in power. Campaoré, who by then had been in the president’s seat for 18 years, said the amendment could not be applied retroactively and he took power once again.

Burkina Faso has faced domestic and external concern over the state of its economy and human rights, and allegations that it was involved in the smuggling of diamonds by rebels in Sierra Leone. It has substantial gold reserves, yet its main export is cotton, which leaves it vulnerable to market fluctuations. The United Nations ranks the country as the third poorest in the world.

In 1998, Norbert Zongo, the publisher and editor of the Burkina Faso newspaper l'Indépendant, was murdered while his newspaper was investigating the murder of a driver who had worked for the Campaoré’s brother. An Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded that Zongo was killed for purely political reasons, but no one has been charged for his murder.

When a decision was taken to drop the case, Reporters Without Borders said: "After eight years of campaigning, this decision makes the reign of impunity in Burkina Faso official… The president has got what he always wanted - injustice”. On the upside, at least there was an independent inquiry that was able to pass a judgment unfavorable to the government.

Among the more high profile allegations against him are those that have emerged during the trial first in Sierra Leone and then in The Hague of Charles Taylor, former Liberian leader, for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Sierra Leone, where one of the bloodiest and most chilling wars in West Africa raged for 11 years. Linked investigations found documents showing arms shipments from Ukraine to Burkina Faso.

They have also collected statements from witnesses describing how these arms were transported to Taylor’s militias and to Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, plus other military and commercial links between Compaoré, Sankoh and Taylor. These are allegations of course, but they keep cropping up.

A leader in the Sierra Herald, a Sierra Leonean newspaper and website, asks why Campaoré has been drafted in to help Guinea when he is “the chief gun-runner and rabble-rouser of the sub-region, with paws in the three rather fragile states of Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone.”

Perhaps here is the very reason he’s been chosen.

His role in Côte d’Ivoire offers clues. His appointment there is understood to have happened due to his support for the Forces Nouvelles, the breakaway militia in the north of the country who had mutinied with success in 2002. Involving him as mediator was viewed as the only way to exercise power over the rebels and broker a peace agreement using what Africa Confidential calls his “diplomatic cunning” aimed at transforming himself “from rebel sponsor to regional peacemaker”.

Two years on, and in spite of that agreement, the country remains split across the middle, tens of thousands of weapons continue to circulate and elections aimed at restoring democracy have been postponed five times.

In Guinea, he is believed to have been the backer of a plot against the previous regime under Lieutenant General Lansana Conté. Following Conté’s death, many of his senior officers switched allegiance and now serve in Dadis Camara’s regime. Ecowas could be hoping this would give Campaoré enough leverage to build a rapport with Dadis Camara, says Africa Confidential.

The early signs have not been encouraging, but then the two sides in Guinea’s conflict have irreconcilable positions. Dadis Camara, meanwhile, lies in hospital in Morocco after being shot by one of his top aides earlier this month. The official media in Guinea has reported that the junta leader is recovering and will return to the country as soon as possible, but unofficial reports suggest he is incapacitated and unaware of his surroundings.

Whether or not Dadis Camara returns to Guinea and to power, Campaoré will still be talking to military men in his efforts to diffuse the situation. He may have the knack for talking to soldiers, but the civilians on whom Guinea’s future depends may have more difficulty in talking to the grand daddy of West African coup leaders.

For a glittering glimpse of tough-dug gold, there will be blood

My parents arrive, Deet-drenched and eager, on fire with expectations but justifiably half-broken by their first taste of African heat.

I want them to feel safe. But in a misjudged moment of truth, I reveal that a woman I know in Accra has day guards, night guards, armed guards, panic buttons, guard dogs and sensors set off by a cotton moth’s gossamer wings.

They look around for our security staff, spotting caretaker Jonas, ex-pro footballer but lately all bulging hernia and crooked leg. He’s wearing cracked spectacles he’s too proud to have us replace. “We’re fine with him, he says nothing happens round here,” I say.

Jonas flops the papers onto the breakfast table. “Bloody Weekend: Boy Beheaded, Woman Killed & Four Armed Robbers Gunned Down” reads the splash.

My timing for the safety chat seems wide of the mark. I make a hurried concession, announcing plans to buy a dog, and we look at the photos in the paper.

Here is a handcuffed man, in whose lap is cradled a dead 6-year-old boy. The child is his nephew, whose eye and ear he pierced before beheading him.

Next to it Rita Baah, 30, raped by her priest when she went to receive “spiritual soap to make her make her more beautiful and extraordinarily attractive to men”. He finished her off with a mauling hammer, then draped her body across his tiny moped to dump it.

Under these, four dead men, faces uncovered, shot by police following an armed robbery in the Ashante region in central Ghana.

“I thought Ghana was a happy place” says my mother. By the end of her stay, she’ll be in no doubt that it is, but for now, she’s focussed on the papers.

I try to think of a time in the past two weeks that The Daily Graphic has arrived without pictures of the dead, but it’s a struggle.

Days earlier, the paper was the first to publish a photo of 14 women and children from Dompoase in western Ghana, laid out still-clothed in a mortuary when an illegal mine where they worked collapsed as they clawed into the hillside for gold.

Ghana police called it the country’s biggest mining tragedy, but the data doesn't seem to verify that. In 2007, 18 miners were killed while 30 others went missing when an illegal gold mine caved in west of Accra. In total 15 bodies were found at the latest accident at Dompoase, but the police said more would be recovered.

Everyone’s heard of Ghana’s gold (it accounts for more than 90% of the country's total mineral exports with revenues last year reaching $2.2bn), but less known is the human cost as small scale, artisanal miners known as Galamsey tear at the gold beneath their feet to recover small portions of the riches exiting the country in multinational hands.

For while the ground is rich, just 3% of the profits it generates are thought to come back into Ghanaian hands.

Many of the Galamsey were once farmers, working fertile land that could support harvests of tomatoes, plantain and cocoa for generations. When Ghanaian officials sold the rights to the gold to multinational companies, the farmers were evicted for the price of a single harvest.

Now they claw back what they can in rivers and makeshift mines owned by small local operators, some licensed, some not. The mine at Dompoase was illegal, but the owner died with the others so no questions could be asked.

Much of it happens in the river basins, rich with alluvial gold, using mercury which seeps through food and water causing mutations and afflictions so scarcely understood its witnesses claim evidence of witchcraft, its victims ostracised or killed.

In the mines, people work, eat and sleep in stifling conditions, in humidity and darkness with temperatures hovering around 38°C and brutality from mine owners rampant.

There was shock in Ghana was it emerged that almost all who died at Dompoase were women, but in the 45 African nations where this activity happens, up to 50% of the miners are thought to be female, according to Community and Small Scale Mining, a networking group chaired by the UK’s Department for International Development.

In some places, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, CASM says the participation of women is much higher. There, it’s illegal for children to work in the mines, but one million of them do, their mothers subjected to some of the worst rape and sexual abuse in the world by security forces and militia that control the extraction activities.

Last month, the Minister for Women and Children's Affairs in Ghana, Akua Sena Dansu, called for a clampdown on women’s participation in Galamsey. In a statement to parliament, she touched on the NGO’s findings, putting it bluntly saying the “major contributing factor to the involvement of women in illegal mining activities, is the irresponsible nature of some men”.

The women mine in backbreaking, filthy conditions, frequently with the twin load of young baby and unborn child in the cycle of relentless pregnancy that dominates poor communities.

To supplement the family income, they take second jobs. CASM found that in one mining community in Kenya, 70% of the women have sexually transmitted diseases from sex work to boost earnings because their husbands spend the money elsewhere.

That inescapable sex inequality’s rampant throughout Accra. We watch it as we take a cab that afternoon to visit an American who’s selling Alsatians.

Amid our congealing trail of traffic, women street vendors come with heavy burdens of necessities. They're carried on heads in baskets and buckets that load multi-kilo force on bodies already bearing infants on front or back.

The men carry light loads of commercial long shots: chest expanders, Barbies and Santas wrapped in warm red coats for the 34 degree heat. I can’t recall seeing one with a heavy headbasket of anything.

Interviewed by the BBC, the women who sell in these conditions said they felt lucky they were not forced to work in the mine at Dompoase, but standing amid lines of crumbling tro-tros in thick-baked air, their lots don’t look much more fortunate.

Turning his gaze from this economic adversity, my father says: “Do you think the oil will be any different from the gold?”

He’s been an oilman all his life, and is in no doubt that the wranglings between China the UK and America for control of the Ghanaian oil discovered by an Irish company that promises years of work for riggers from the Middle East and India looks set to repeat the curse of the extractive industry that’s characterised the gold rush for years.

“Depends whether Ghana gets involved” I say, explaining the Ghana National Petroleum Company’s plans to scramble finance to keep the others out of the way.

A few yards on we buy three apples from a (male) street vendor, paying a heavily-inflated white man’s price and reducing his load by a third. As we sit in the snarl-up, we watch him return to a woman with a bulging bucket of apples on her head, twenty times his own load, to replenish his stock before moving back into the superheated, stinking, movable junkyard to sell them.