Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kabore fired his prime minister on Wednesday amid an escalating security crisis that has killed thousands and led to street protests calling for him to go.
The country, one of West Africa’s poorest, has been beset by attacks carried out by groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) since 2016, killing 2,000 people and forcing more than one million people to flee their homes.
In mid-November, at least 57 people, 53 of them gendarmes, were killed in an attack on a police post in the country’s north.
Kabore first appointed Dabire in early 2019 as part of a reshuffle coinciding with a rising wave of jihadist attacks in the impoverished country.
He was reappointed in January 2021, after the president was re-elected for his second and last term.
Dabire was previously Burkina Faso’s representative at the eight-nation West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) and in the 1990s served as minister to former president Blaise Compaore, partly at a time when Kabore himself was premier.
