New Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Kabore has reportedly pledged to “open up opportunities for a better tomorrow”.
Kabore won the just concluded elections, gunnering 53.49% of the votes cast in Sunday polls, ensuring a victory in the first round of a vote aimed at restoring stability after the popular revolt that ousted long-time leader Blaise Compaore in October 2014.
“We must get to work immediately,” 58-year-old Kabore, a former prime minister under Compaore who later broke ranks with the exiled ex-president, told several thousand supporters outside his party headquarters in the early hours of Tuesday.
“Together we must serve the country,” he said.
Kabore’s nearest rival Zephirin Diabre, who gunnered 29.65%, conceded defeat before the results were released.
The head of the electoral commission, Barthelemy Kere, described the election as “generally satisfactory” despite “a few anomalies” and said turnout was strong in all of the country’s 45 provinces.
Burkina Faso’s 18 million people, most of whom live in grinding poverty, are hoping the election will usher in a long era of peace and democracy, ending the periodic coups that have marked the country’s history.
Kabore, a former banker seen as a consensus figure by some and an opportunist by others, has pledged to build “a new Burkina Faso” by fighting youth unemployment, improving education and modernising the health system.
