Nigeria, April 22 -- Clad in fatigues and fluent in fiery rhetoric, Captain Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso has emerged as a poster child of a new wave of African populism. To his supporters, he is a revolutionary - bold, youthful, and principled.

To the disillusioned youth across the continent, he offers a seductive promise: progress without the inconveniences of democracy. But behind the revolutionary slogans and Sankara-inspired aesthetics lies a far less romantic reality.

Traore's anti-democratic posture is not a blueprint for development - it is a calculated strategy to entrench military rule under the guise of a populist revolution. Let us be clear, Africa has every right to interrogate the forms and functions of democracy on the c...