In 1983, a thirty-three-year-old military officer became president of one of the poorest countries on earth and immediately did something no African leader had done before or has done since: he made poverty the point.

Thomas Sankara did not pretend that Upper Volta — the name he would soon discard — was on the verge of prosperity. He did not promise that foreign investment would save them. He did not build a palace or buy a fleet of cars or open Swiss bank accounts for his ministers. He looked at what his country had, which was almost nothing, and he asked: what can we do with this?

He renamed the country Burkina Faso — Land of the Upright People. The name was the manifesto. Not the land of the rich. Not the land of the powerful. The land of the upright. The people who stand straight.

He sold the government's fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles and made the Renault 5 — the cheapest car available — the official service car for ministers. He cut his own salary to the equivalent of $450 a month. He required every minister to publish their assets publicly. When he discovered that some were enriching themselves, he announced their salaries on national radio.

He vaccinated 2.5 million children in a single week against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles — a campaign the World Health Organization called unprecedented. He planted 10 million trees to stop the Sahara from swallowing the south. He built roads with national labor because there was no money to hire contractors. He banned female genital mutilation and forced marriage by decree. He appointed women to his cabinet when no one in West Africa was doing so.

And he told the Organisation of African Unity, to their faces, that debt was slavery with a new name. That Africa should refuse to pay it. That the lenders would not die if Africa defaulted, but Africa would die if it kept paying.

No other African head of state joined him. Three months later, he was shot dead by his best friend.

There is a word for what Sankara practiced, and it is not socialism or capitalism or any of the imported frameworks that African leaders have spent decades trying to wear like borrowed suits. The word is sufficiency. He asked: what is enough? What do we actually need? And what would happen if we stopped wanting what we cannot have and started building with what we already hold?

This is the politics of the empty chair — the refusal to sit in the seat that power has designed for you, with its cushions of corruption and its armrests of foreign dependency, and instead to stand. To stand upright. To say: we will eat what we grow, wear what we weave, and build what we can carry.

Nigeria produces enough food to feed itself. Nigeria has enough engineers to build its own roads. Nigeria has enough teachers to educate its children. Nigeria has enough lawyers to write its own laws. The question has never been capacity. The question has always been will. And will is the thing that cannot be imported.

Sankara proved that a country with nothing could do extraordinary things if the people leading it wanted nothing for themselves. He also proved that such a leader will not be tolerated for long. The chair he refused to sit in eventually became the place where his body fell.

But the question he asked — what is enough? — is still waiting for someone brave enough to answer it. Not in Ouagadougou. In Abuja.