Is Africa’s Coup Epidemic Back?

            There was a time in recent history when African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria seemed to compete for the number of military coup d’états.  Fortunately, that period passed, but recent events make one ask: is the coup epidemic in Africa back again?  Between 1960 and 2000, Africa averaged four coups a year.  From 2000 to 2019, The average was around two each year, but this political phenomenon seems to be ramping up. 

In 2019, a failed coup took place in Gabon, and this year, there were two coups in Mali within months of each other.  In March, an attempted coup against Niger President-elect Mohamed Bazoum was prevented only days before his inauguration. In April, Chad President Idriss Deby died fighting northern rebels, ending three decades of his rule.  In the aftermath of his death, a military council run by his son, Mahamat Idriss Deby, seized power, promising to hold elections within 18 months. France, the former colonial power, supported the council’s decision, but the opposition and rebels dismissed the takeover as a coup and said the military must relinquish power to a civilian-led government.

            BBC News on May 27 reported a study by two U.S. researchers, Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, which identified more than 200 such attempts in Africa since the late 1950s.

            About half of these have been successful - defined as lasting more than seven days.

Burkina Faso, in West Africa, has had the highest rate of successful ones, with seven and only one failed, but Sudan has had the highest overall number coup attempts with 15 - five of them successful. The most recent was in 2019 with the removal of Omar al-Bashir as head of state following months of popular protest.  Bashir had himself seized power in a military coup in 1989.  There are other African countries that also have suffered from successful coups: Burundi (11); Ghana and Sierra Leone (10); Comoros (9), Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea Bissau (8), and Chad and Niger (7).

 "African countries have had the conditions common for coups, like poverty and poor economic performance. When a country has one coup, that's often a harbinger of more coups." Ndubuisi Christian Ani from the University of KwaZulu-Natal told BBC News, adding that popular uprisings against long-serving dictators have provided opportunity for the return of coups in Africa.

 "While popular uprisings are legitimate and people-led, its success is often determined by the decision taken by the military," he said.

 In a January 11, 2019 report, the analytical firm Geopolitical Futures pointed out that while the popular view is that attempted and successful coups in Africa have been less frequent since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, data shows that coups are only slightly less common and successful post-1991 than they were before. The more things change, the more they stay the same, the report stated.  Of the nine attempted coups since 2015, only two were not in Africa: Turkey (2016) and Myanmar (2021).

 Geopolitical Futures further said that southern countries like Namibia, South Africa and Botswana historically have been less prone to coup attempts compared with other regions.  Africa is not beset with coups, the article stated, so much as coups are prevalent in particular regions or countries.  One could draw many conclusions from that fact, but further study is needed to do more than speculate on why this political tool is so common.  There are many reasons why coups take place, and each situation has unique circumstances that must be taken into account.  Some have significant foreign influence, for example.

On June 5, 1997, anticipating a coup by former president and political rival Denis Sassou-Nguesso, Congo-Brazzaville President Pascal Lissouba ordered his Cocoye militia to detain Sassou and forcibly disarm his Cobra militia, thus initiating a civil war. Fighting soon engulfed the whole city, with the Cobra and Cocoye militias and a third faction, the Ninja militia, each controlling areas within the capital. The government recruited Ukrainian mercenaries to fly attack helicopters and later used them in a bombing campaign of Cobra-controlled areas. Both sides actively shelled densely populated areas, causing a high civilian death toll.

At the same time, Lissouba personally visited Rwanda, Uganda and Namibia, attempting to gain the support of their leaders. He publicly accused the Cobra militia of employing supporters of former Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko, prompting the president of the now-Democratic Republic of the Congo, Laurent Kabila, to send several hundred soldiers to Lissouba's aid.  For forty-eight hours in late September of that year, the army of Kinshasa fired what was estimated by residents of the capital to be more than 100 shells. They indicated that Kabila's artillery fired both on areas under the control of Sassou-Nguesso, and on areas controlled by President Lissouba.

The outbreak of the Congolese civil war coincided with the ongoing internal conflict in Angola.  During the presidency of  Lissouba, Congo provided active support to the anti-government National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) guerrillas, who in turn reportedly supplied Congo with diamonds. Angola seized the opportunity to destroy UNITA's last supply line by entering the conflict on Sassou-Nguesso's side. France also supported the Cobra militia by offering armaments, aiming to secure its interests in the country's oil industry.

The conflict also was influenced by the aftermaths of the so-called First Congo War and of the Rwandan genocide. A large number of Rwandan refugees who fled the DRC (formerly Zaire) in May 1997 after the fall of Mobutu, took part in the conflict — approximately 600 Rwandan Hutus joined militias formed by Sassou, with others fighting against him. Allegations regarding the involvement of Cuba on the side of the Cobras also were made, with others accusing UNITA of aiding the Ninja militia.  In the end, Sassou’s forces and foreign aid prevailed, and he remains president to this day, eventually winning elections postponed by the civil war.

The 2012 Malian coup d'état began on March 21 of that year when Malian soldiers, displeased with the management of the Tuareg rebellion in the North, attacked several locations in the capital Bamako, including the presidential palace, state television, and military barracks. The soldiers, who said they had formed the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State, declared the following day that they had overthrown the government of Amadou Toumani Touré, forcing him into hiding. The coup was followed by widespread international condemnation, harsh sanctions by Mali's neighbors, and the swift loss of northern Mali to Tuareg forces. On April 6, the junta agreed with Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) negotiators that they would step down from power in return for the end of sanctions, giving power to a transitional government led by parliament speaker Dioncounda Traoré. In the following days, both Touré and coup leader Amadou Sanogo formally resigned; however, more than a month later, the junta was still widely believed to have maintained control. 

 In December 2016, Gambian President Yahya Jammeh rescinded his earlier acceptance of his election loss to Adama Barrow weeks earlier, declared his annulment of the election and filed a petition with the Supreme Court of Gambia to contest the results.  The African Union (AU) said it would withdraw recognition of Jammeh as president as of January 19, 2017. Although Jammeh attempted to have Barrow's inauguration blocked, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court refused to rule on the matter, and on January 17, he declared a 90-day state of emergency. Various ministers resigned, and about 46,000 civilians (about 75% of whom were children) fled the country. Senegal was selected by ECOWAS to lead the operation to remove Jammeh from his post and deployed troops closer to the Gambian border on January 18. Jammeh was warned to step down by midnight, but he refused, and the deadline passed. On that same day, parliament voted to extend Jammeh's term by three months.

Senegalese troops entered The Gambia the following day. The United Nations Security Council approved a resolution backing Barrow’s election, while calling on Jammeh to step down. It supported ECOWAS' efforts to ensure that the results of the 2016 presidential election were respected by using political means first, so Senegal halted its offensive to allow mediation of the crisis one final time, with the invasion to proceed at noon on January 20 if Jammeh were to refuse to relinquish power.  Jammeh continued to refuse to step down and missed two deadlines on that day, while regional leaders tried to persuade him to step down. During the early hours of January 21, Jammeh announced on state television that he was stepping down from the post of President, and left the country later on the same day.

In November 2019, Robert Mugabe was removed as president and party leader of ZANU-PF, and replaced by former First Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa.  On the evening of November 14, elements of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) encompassed the capital of  Harare and seized control of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and key areas of the city. The next day, the ZDF issued a statement saying that it was not a coup and that President Mugabe was safe, although the situation would return to normal only after the ZDF had dealt with the "criminals" around Mugabe responsible for the socio-economic problems of Zimbabwe.

The uprising took place amid tensions in the ruling ZANU-PF party between Mnangagwa (who was backed by the ZDF) and First Lady Grade Mugabe (who was backed by the younger, so-called G40 faction) over who would succeed the 93-year-old President Mugabe. A week after Mnangagwa was fired and forced to flee the country, and a day before troops moved into Harare, ZDF chief Constgantino Chiwenga issued a statement that purges of senior ZANU–PF officials like Mnangagwa had to stop.

Coinciding with the 1997 Congo-Brazzaville coup, the then-Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) declared that illegal removals of government on the continent were no longer acceptable.  Of course, the original OAU charter said the same thing, but at times this mandate was ignored, as it was in in effect as regards Congo-Brazzaville. The Lomé Declaration of July 2000 described what was considered an unconstitutional change of government, including: a military coup against a democratically elected government; mercenary intervention to replace a democratically elected government; replacing a democratically elected government by dissident armed groups and rebel movements, or refusal of an outgoing government to relinquish power following defeat in free, fair and regular elections.

            Since Lome, the now-AU and Regional Economic Communities have been more ready to impose sanctions and take other measures to punish leaders of coups.  For example, various international peace and security actors condemned Mali’s August 18, 2020, coup. They also called for a return to constitutional order. ECOWAS and the AU went even further with targeted sanctions to coerce the coup plotters out of power.  It must be hoped that this new stance on coups will forestall future illegal removals of government in Africa so a new epidemic of coups does not appear.