The initial success of the Small Rural Credit Promotion Project implemented in Burkina Faso in 1988 from tribal structuring and in a socializing dynamic – just the time to lure poor women who wanted to try to create their own micro-enterprise by seeing it as a form of "mutual aid" – will have very much quickly attracted the appetites of different Decentralized Financial Systems (FSD – microfinance) which have, since then, engaged in a merciless competition between them and with the PPPCR...

This led to an annihilation of the confidence that had finally been established within the PPPCR, but which was already in the process of being destroyed by the will shown by the Western and more particularly French leaders (including the Caisse Nationale de Crédit Agricole) to to put forward from now on the criteria of profitability which are the main mark of the exploitation of the human being by the human being in the general framework of... capitalism.

Taking up the story of the extremely promising beginnings of this approach initiated barely a year after the assassination of Thomas Sankara, Cerise – a group of Western analysts specializing in the study of the successes and failures of microfinance – reminds us of this:
"In the "developmentalist vision" that underpinned the first two stages of the project's development, trust was one of the key concepts that underpinned the approach: trust of the project in its "poor clients", women's confidence in a sustainable project, trust between the women of the same solidarity group, and also, within the project, trust between the members of a team united around the same objectives and philosophy of action. (Ibid., page 53)

We must agree: all this was very similar to this socialism that microfinance – if it wants to continue to benefit from the (small) Western capital without which it could not do anything significant in sub-Saharan Africa – must absolutely drive out of African memory...

Being itself inserted into imperialism, it can only have one idea in mind: as soon as it seems to "work", as soon as the poor women of Burkina Faso engaged in the PPPCR have become faithful executors, it is necessary to transmit the power of direction ... to the Western system of control ... which requires precise and quantified results, and especially with regard to the total mass of interest that must enter the coffers of the banking system attached to the various loans made at this rate exorbitant 26% that characterizes the ... PPPCR.

However, as Cerise can only observe:
"In this initial context, control was simply not part of the 'culture of the project' and evoking the need for it was perceived as a questioning of humanist values and the people who carried the project, and a "serious drift towards banking logics", subjects of derision at the time within the project. (Ibid., page 53) 

We read it right: in its early days, the project was perceived as completely mocking the "banking logic"... Which shows us that the poor women of Burkina Faso had been deceived from one end to the other in the process of setting in motion the whole of a Project that they seem to have understood as a continuation of the socialist policy of Thomas Sankara...

Question that we must ask now: what should have been done to allow the "banking logics" to triumph within such a project which was, in a way, a matter of heart, courage, solidarity in a context where it was a question of remedying poverty induced by climatic events catastrophic in one of the poorest countries in the world...? The answer is in the 26% interest... Would they be enough to cover the "bank" costs... Everything depended first of all on the mass of loans granted... It had to reach sums finally very large in a context of misery... It was necessary to obtain the commitment, in the adventure of creating a microenterprise, a quite considerable number of people whose men had had to be excluded very quickly... since women seemed to submit more easily and with more sense of responsibility to this quite extraordinary figure of ... 26%.

But what costs had to be covered? Referring to the general case, Cerise writes:
"The difficulty of achieving financial equilibrium for this type of project is related to:
– high costs, difficult to limit (transaction costs, cost of the resource, cost of information, cost of training);
– a productivity of labour whose progression finds its limits in the structure of the project;
– the option of a centralized structure. (Ibid., page 57) 

All that is put together in this enumeration corresponds to the costs of replacing socialism (and therefore on the part of militancy, and therefore dedication to a cause that goes beyond the immediate interest of each participant) by the personal interests of the members of each trade that is interested in obtaining maximum income from his participation in the exploitation of the human being by the human being...

If the poor women of Burkina Faso, who have embarked on the creation of a micro-enterprise under the control of the international banking system, want the fruit of their labor and the work of the people they could pay in the following years to continue to interest Westerners, they must comply with the criteria of the holding. The first is that of the 26%. If, by losing their health, and that of their loved ones who would put their hands on the necessary task which is here a feat almost unachievable without the workers ending up dying in one way or another, they manage to take a place in the world capitalist system, this will result in the fact that they would have managed to reach this figure of 26% and all the figures that will be added to it ... under the control of the bank accounting which will be very careful to go and grow most of the total interest per where they will be most profitable... which does not necessarily mean in the informal sector of Burkina Faso...

In his own way, and on this last point, Cerise immediately warns us:
"Women's activities funded by the PPPCR were mainly developed in local markets. In the Sahelian areas, and even more so in the Tapoa, these markets are narrow, distant from each other and the activities of women are limited in number and volume. As the supply of credit increases in a given area and allows the volume of women's existing activities to increase and the entry into the market of new producers, market demand becomes saturated. (Ibid., page 58)

And we have to go somewhere else!...

This is what Westerners have in the back of their heads when they come quietly to tell the working poor of sub-Saharan Africa that we should above all renounce socialism, and especially to keep, in the depths of their hearts and minds, the memory of those political leaders who, like Thomas Sankara, Modibo Keita, Patrice Lumumba, etc., have nevertheless shown, with the greatest courage, the way of the future to a sub-Saharan Africa that would like to stop being only a toy in the hands of an imperialism that, in any case, is only decadent.