Background
Gérard Ouédraogo was born on December 19, 1925, at Ouahigouya, capital of Yatenga, one of the three great Mossi kingdoms. Comes from the royal house, his nephew is the present Yatenga Naba (traditional ruler).
Gérard Ouédraogo was born on December 19, 1925, at Ouahigouya, capital of Yatenga, one of the three great Mossi kingdoms. Comes from the royal house, his nephew is the present Yatenga Naba (traditional ruler).
He was educated in Ouahigouya and Bamako and entered the administration there (the part of Upper Volta where he lived was, at that stage, part of the French Soudan).
When Upper Volta was reconstituted in 1947, he was appointed chief of the private secretariat to its first governor, going on to work for the High Commissioner of the French West African Federation (AOF) in Dakar.
He was elected in 1956 to the French National Assembly in Paris, where he stayed for three years. In the 1957 territorial elections, he was also elected to the Voltaic National Assembly and there was agreement of a coalition between his party and the RDA. This was a period of quick mutations in Voltaic politics and, for a period, Ouedraogo was Minister of Finance in the government of Maurice Yameogo, who had formerly been under him in the MDV. But with independence Yameogo consolidated his position and sought ways of eliminating potential rivals. Ouedraogo was thus sent to London as Ambassador in 1961, although the amount of diplomatic work he had there was small. He remained as an MP until 1965, although Yameogo had, in 1961, introduced a single party, the Democratic Voltaic Union, nominally affiliated to the RDA.
With the fall of Yameogo in 1966, Ouedraogo went back to Upper Volta, believing he had a good chance of political leadership, but the army decision to rule for four years was a setback to his plans, so he was obliged to take a post as adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
With the return to political activity he emerged as one of the leaders of the UDV-RDA, although in rivalry with the trade unionist, Joseph Ouedraogo (no relation). At the party congress, April 1970, Gerard became chairman of the party and Joseph became secretary- general. Their party won a majority in the elections (35 out of 57 seats) and Gerard was appointed Prime Minister, while Joseph became President of the National Assembly. As Prime Minister, however, Gerard has found his hands more than a little tied by the quasi-military system of government. There are still five army officers in the cabinet and the President is a military man, still in control of the broad lines of policy. On Lamizana’s official visit to Paris in October 1971, the Prime Minister was there in attendance, very much as second fiddle.
He entered politics in 1952 in alliance with a Frenchman called Michel Dorange, with whom he formed the Upper Volta section of the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF). From 1952 he represented Upper Volta in the Grand Council of the AOF in Dakar, where he held a number of posts. After the demise of the RPF, he and Dorange formed their own political party, the Democratic Voltaic Movement (MDV).