In the last two weeks, I had dedicated this column to political ill winds in our part of the world called West Africa. First was the coup Guinea-Bissau’s President Patrice Talon staged against himself to prevent the opposition from gaining power in an election he was sure to lose. Secondly, soldiers in Benin attempted a coup that failed, however, because Nigeria, Ecowas and France stopped them. Three years before, there had been the successful military overthrow of elected governments in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. A contagion? This is a word we normally see in the lexicon of the field of health. Are we about to see it extended to the political register? Very likely, almost certainly.
What has been happening in West Africa since 2022 is close to a political contagion whose symptoms are all too visible, but regrettably, nobody seems to care. It happened first in 2022 in Guinea, followed by Mali, then Burkina Faso and Niger in 2024. In the first three the democratic world appeared to think it was a small fire that would soon burn itself out. Well, it didn’t. Instead, the fire began to spread. Until it came to Niger and that was when Nigeria started to feel the heat because it was closer home. It was then the regional economic bloc, Ecowas, saw the sign of a much bigger headache to come. But equivocation and ambivalence prevented a prompt coordinated response. That enabled the military hotheads to consolidate their hold on power. This missed opportunity to abort the Niger coup and restore constitutionality would come back to haunt Ecowas in a more confounding manner.
Towards the end of November this year, soldiers struck in Guinea-Bissau, a tiny Portuguese speaking country that became independent not too long ago. What happened there was not the typical military overthrow we have come to know. A sitting president, who was about to lose power in an election he himself had called, asked soldiers to help unseat him instead of conceding defeat to the opposition. Exactly a week later, a section of Benin Republic’s army moved against Talon. The plot failed because the President was quick to send for help from Nigeria, Ecowas and Benin’s former colonizer France. Not to forget the strong rumour last October of an imminent coup against Nigerian president Tinubu. What prompted the rumour was a rush of the arrests of army officers and some politicians that month. Somehow, the gathering storm never led to a rainstorm after all. But it was a sign that democratic governance is yet to take firm roots after 27 years.
This fragility of democracy in West Africa seems set to persist, helped to a large extent, by the determination of the triumvirate of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to make coup a political export commodity. For a start, Burkina Faso has granted sanctuary to Lt.-Col. Tigri, Benin’s fugitive coup plotters’s leader. He was able to escape from Benin through a toilet window in the TV house where he had gone to announce Talon’s overthrow. He managed to bribe immigration officials to let him through to Burkina Faso where he was received with open arms. Shortly afterwards, AES [Alliance des Etats du Sahel formed by the three countries] issued a statement that said Tigri should see Ouagadougou as “home.” AES is now a safe haven for soldiers who attempt but fail to dethrone legitimate regimes in their countries. This is open encouragement of forcible regime change. An invitation to a power usurpers’s club. A very insidious precedent.
It can be stopped, however. The first thing is to pull the ears of that naughty boy in Burkina Faso, Capt Ibrahim Traore so they look embarrassingly like a rabbit’s ears; his big wings must be clipped to size. He considers himself the triumvirate’s head and so speaks and acts out of order. There can be no better portrait of this enfant terrible than Dr. Folarin’s “Between Traore and Sankara”. Unlike his late compatriot, Traore is no believer in African unity but one that threatens to dismember it. There is no pan Africanism in him. If Nigeria ever needed an excuse to teach Traore a lesson of his life, this is it. In mid-December, he seized a Nigerian Air Force fighter plane that had had to make an emergency landing in Burkina Faso’s second largest city and detained its military crew and passengers for almost a fortnight now. The small boy is making a mountain out of a mole to smack Nigeria. A matter that should have been sorted out diplomatically and quietly is being brought to the attention of the entire world – to make Nigeria look small and powerless. Let’s show him he is mistaken.
