In recent years, putsches, more often military coups, have returned to fashion in West Africa. Mali ushered in the movement in 2012, with the overthrow of President Amadou Toumani Touré in March of that year. At the time, the military, including Captain Haya Sanogo, had highlighted « the President’s inability to manage the crisis in the North » of the country. The Tuareg rebellion, led by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (Mnla), allied with Islamist groups, had conquered the north of the country and made Kidal its capital.

However, the military was not able to stabilize the military and security situation. This led, sometime later, to the intervention of the French Army, through Operation Serval, to prevent the surge towards Bamako and the south of the country, of Islamist troops who had finished supplanting the Mnla and to conquer almost all of northern Mali.        

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At the time, the French soldiers were welcomed as liberators, to the point that François Hollande, on his arrival in Bamako, in February 2013, received an unforgettable triumphal welcome. All Malians said they were proud to welcome « the warlord who liberated Mali ». We saw how things evolved sometime later… But that is not the subject of this article.

With the election of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (IBK), at the end of the Transition period, the military returned to their barracks, while continuing to occupy themselves at the front, in the war against so-called Islamist terrorists. And seven years after coming to power, IBK in turn suffered the same fate as ATT, of which he had been Prime Minister. Mali was entering a chaotic transition, punctuated by a showdown with sub-regional organizations such as ECOWAS and UEMOA, which imposed an embargo which proved unsuccessful and totally unpopular throughout the sub-region. On the contrary, the Malian putschists, in their desire to resist the hostility of France as leaders of the sub-region, turned to Russia and above all, the Wagner militia led by Evgueny Prigojine.

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The inability of ECOWAS to make Assimi Goïta and his comrades give in gave ideas to the Burkinabè soldiers, who in turn overthrew Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who had just started a second term after a Presidential election that he had won hands down in the first round. On January 23, 2023, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba took power, under the pretext of finally giving the Army the means to fight more effectively against the insecurity caused by the rebel movements that raged over a very large part of the national territory. Ironically, Kaboré’s feller will also be overthrown 8 months later by a young captain, Ibrahim Traoré, who will also put forward the same reason for a more effective fight against Islamist insecurity. Encouraged by developments in Mali, he also leaned strongly towards an alliance with Russia and the Wagner movement.

Better still, nostalgic for a time he did not know, Traoré takes as a reference Captain Thomas Sankara whom he has chosen as model, and whom he even imitates in the wearing of military uniform. At present, given that he has not yet made any progress in the objectives he set for himself when he came to power, nor reduced the influence of Islamist forces on Burkinabe territory, we can only wish him not to be the victim of any « rectification » on the part of his acolytes, like his late model.

Because in the meantime, the fever of military coups had spread to Guinea Conakry, where President Alpha Condé, re-elected a few months earlier for a third presidential term, against a background of violent protest, was overthrown by the very troops who had served him to quell any demonstration against his desire to remain in power. The crowds and associations which had welcomed this change of power by force and hailed the action of the former Corporal of the French Foreign Legion whom Alpha Condé made a Colonel, Mamady Doumbouya, pretending to forget his past, bitterly criticized today.

If the soldiers who took power in all these countries advanced the motive of restoring security and putting an end to mismanagement and impunity, we can only note the futility of their actions in all these countries. This did not prevent their Nigerien counterparts, under the leadership of General Abdourahmane Tiani, from repeating the coup of his close neighbours, using the same narrative. A way of saying that the new wave of pronunciations is no different from what African countries experienced between the 1960s and the end of the 1990s. It’s just as the late Fela Kuti said, “soldier go soldier come”. The only difference with what is happening now is that Africans have taken the pretext of putting all the ills of their countries on the back of France, or Franceafrique, which, for many, is the same thing.

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A Cameroonian writer, Arol Ketchiemen, has just published a book entitled The saviour coup d’états in Africa. Even going back to the very first putsch, that against Patrice Lumumba, on September 5, 1960 in Congo Kinshasa, perpetrated by Colonel Mobutu, it is difficult to find a coup d’état that had a beneficial effect. Jerry J. Rawlings in Ghana had to do two things to change the constitutional order in his country. His first coup could have had a saving effect. He strove to eliminate the former dominant military oligarchy of his country, leaving power to a civilian in less than a year. Seven months later, he returned to oust civilian Hilla Liman, whom he helped elect, and settle for 20 years. He promised one thing, however, in 1980: “We are going to put in place institutions so strong that even if the devil himself came to power, it would be impossible for him to do what he wants.”

Unfortunately, in the French-speaking parts of Africa, leaders are still reluctant to strengthen institutions and make them stronger than those in power. This has meant that even in a country as democratic as Senegal, attention has been focused for more than 5 years on the possibility or not, for the outgoing President, of being able to stand for an additional term of 5 years. When the country should have come to a point where issues like this shouldn’t even be a concern. This makes it possible to understand why, in other countries with institutions much more fragile than those of Senegal, coup d’état will still follow coup d’état, without the daily lives of the populations changing. This will cause each newcomer to be applauded, and his predecessor to be reviled by all. Hence the pointlessness for ECOWAS to want to change things by force of arms.

By Mohamed GUEYE / mgueye@lequotidien.sn