Many African States Are Prone to Military Rule

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Why has Africa experienced so many military coups d’état? Since 1960, the continent has seen almost 120 successful military takeovers.

Based on data compiled by American political scientists Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne on their Arrested Dictatorship website, at least 45 of the 54 nations across the African continent have experienced at least a single coup attempt since 1950. Of 492 attempted or successful coups carried out around the world since that year, Africa has seen 220, they tell us.

There have been seven successful African coups this year alone, five of them in the Sahel region of west central Africa, in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, and Sudan. Some have enjoyed considerable popular support.

But in most cases, the men in uniform, just like their civilian predecessors, have failed to involve the masses in the political process and a state elite largely retains control.

One typology of coups d’état, as identified by Alex Thomson, a specialist in African politics at Coventry University in Britain, lists three categories: the “guardian coup,” the “veto coup” and the “breakthrough coup.”

In a guardian coup, the military intervenes to rescue the state from civilian mismanagement. Veto coups are prompted by social changes that directly threaten the interests of the military and their allies. Finally, the breakthrough coup sees the military oust an outdated authoritarian or traditional regime, seeking to change society entirely. It wants a revolutionary break from the past.

There are numerous examples of each. Guardian coups usually leave society and the economy largely unchanged. Nigeria, Thomson points out, could be considered to have experienced several guardian coups in the post-colonial period. Africa’s most populous nation had eight coup attempts, six of them successful.

The soldiers handed power back to civilians in 1979 and 1999 and since then the country has transferred power through democratic elections, but in many ways little has changed.

The 1992 and 2013 takeovers in Algeria and Egypt, respectively, can be classified as veto coups. Here the secular military intervened because it feared the outcome of multi-party elections. In both cases, Islamist movements were poised to exercise political power that they had won or were about to win.

Ethiopia experienced a breakthrough coup in 1974, when the military established a socialist state in the wake of Emperor Haile Selassie’s 44 years of rule.

In 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited three main reasons for the recent increase in coups: strong geopolitical divides between nations; the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic and social impact on countries; and finally, the UN Security Council’s inability to take strong measures in response to coups.

This year’s coups have been of the guardian variety. The military takeover in Niger in July against President Mohamed Bazoum was based on claims that he had engaged in “high treason” with external forces. He is the fifth Nigerien president to be overthrown by a putsch since the country gained independence from France in 1960.

One month later, following a disputed presidential election in Gabon, soldiers deposed President Ali Bongo after 14 years in office. He had succeeded his father Omar Bongo who served from 1967 until his death in 2009. 

The coup in Niger in July was also accompanied by anti-French sentiments in the streets. Moussa Tchangari of the civil rights organization Alternative Espaces Citoyens also spoke out against the French presence there.

Arikana Chihombori-Quao, former permanent representative of the African Union to the United States, claimed that the recent military coups in west Africa were part of the early stages of an “African revolution” against Western neocolonialism, particularly that of France.

This wave of military interventions is a reaction to the West’s ongoing “plunder of the continent’s natural resources,” she explained in an interview in August with Nigerian news channel Arise TV. “This is just the beginning of the African revolution and it is not going to stop.”

Chihombori-Quao argued that these recent coups represent “children of Africa taking back what is ours” and have nothing in common with the brutal Western-led military interventions of the past.

Others, however, see the hand of Russia. But this is nothing new, really. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union portrayed itself as a natural ally of the newly independent African states. And unlike the Europeans, it had never incorporated any African territories into its empire. This generates a lot of sympathy and respect.

In the past three years, the governments of five former French colonies have been toppled. The new leaders of two of those countries, Mali and Burkina Faso, are overtly pro-Russian; in a third, Niger, the new prime minister installed after the July coup has met recently with the Russian ambassador.

In Mali and the Central African Republic, where the main threats to the country’s stability derive from domestic authoritarianism, French troops have been replaced with Wagner mercenaries.

“Russia has been running a successful disinformation campaign that was crucial in evicting French forces and UN peacekeepers in Mali, and in establishing a new Sahel alliance,” explained Ulf Laessing, the Mali-based head of the Sahel Program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank. “They are about to pull off the same in Niger,” he told the Washington Post Oct. 30.

Whatever the reason, “The underlying causes of coups are present and worsening,” warned Powell.