Watamou Lamien
burkinabé politician and journalist

Watamou Lamien was a Burkinabé politician and journalist.
Political Background
He had a leading role at the Voltan National Radio in the years leading up to the 4 August 1983 coup d'état. Lamien would head the Union of Burkinabé Communists (UCB), one of the parties within the revolutionary government. He served as Minister of Information and Culture between 1984 and 1986, and as Minister of Transport and Communications from 1987 until his death in 1988. Whilst officially he perished in a car accident, there have been significant speculation regarding the circumstances of his death.
Journalist and PCRV cadre
Lamien studied in Strasbourg. Upon his return to Upper Volta, he began working as a journalist at the Voltan National Radio in 1979. After three months he was promoted to editor-in-chief at the Voltan National Radio. He was a member of the clandestine Voltan Revolutionary Communist Party (PCRV).
Through his role in the radio, during the period of late 1981 and early 1982 he was frequently in contact with the Secretary of State for Information, Captain Thomas Sankara.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Watamou Lamien” as burkinabé politician and journalist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as burkinabé politician and journalist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q126126969. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1984, 1986 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Watamou Lamien” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.