It does not just rain coups, it pours. Gabon in Central Africa is the latest victim as military officers executed a provocative palace coup last week in a crazy baiting of frustrated regional and continental bodies inching to intervene and displace coupists rampaging through West and Central Africa. With Gabon, it is now more unlikely than ever that ECOWAS will invade Niger Republic to restore the deposed President Mohamed Bazoum. French meddlesomeness in Niger and other Francophone countries has virtually made it impossible for ECOWAS to unhorse Abdourahamane Tchiani, the new military head of state of Niger. Last week, Niger Republic gave French ambassador 48 hours to leave Niamey. The ambassador remains adamant, and France, embarrassed by its loss of influence over its former colonies, is threatening reprisal. Had ECOWAS invaded Niger Republic in the name of restoring democracy and, even more nobly, preventing the coup fever from spreading around Africa, France, not democracy, would have been the first and major beneficiary.
Niger Republic is slipping from the grip of France – after Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso had fallen to the sway and swagger of coupists ostensibly revolting against France’s iniquitous entrenchment of remorseless neocolonial rule. The insensitive and self-righteous statement it issued to counter Niger Republic’s order expelling the French ambassador shows the contempt it has for its former colony. But for French help, said Emmanuel Macron last week, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger Republic would no longer exist as nations. He made the statement in reference to the jihadi insurgency that has constituted existential threats to French-speaking West Africa. Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu was smart enough to quickly sense the contradictions playing out in Francophone West Africa and the sinister and constraining influence which the former colonies seemed prepared to fight. It is okay to get ECOWAS united as a body to protect and defend democracy and prevent the spread of dictatorships across the region, but President Tinubu may just be starting to recognise that politics and international relations across the region may be far more complex and nuanced than they appear on the surface. Indeed, he must already be ruminating over ways of reconceptualising ECOWAS. The regional organisation is tired, decrepit and ideologically ossified.
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The Gabon coup – now dubbed a family affair by the sneering Gabonese opposition – probably plotted to steal the thunder of the main opposition party still contesting its electoral loss in the August 26 election, simply reinforces the ignoble motives behind most of the coups that have ravaged the continent. Those coups were hardly carried out because of bad governance, let alone to dethrone the peacock overlordship of France. Sudan’s coup was a product of power struggle. Chad’s was to help Mahamat Deby Itno, son of the assassinated Idriss Deby Itno, retain power in the family. Mali engaged in a merry-go-round with political leaders before it cut to the chase and decided to simply keep the coveted prize. Despite Russia’s help executed through Wagner mercenary group, the insurgency in Mali is nowhere near ending. Burkina Faso’s coupists could not resist the lure of power. (See Box) After all, they were the ones deployed in the war front to fight jihadi insurgency. They have not invoked new methods or urgency into the fight. Nor have they, together with Mali and Guinea, inspired revolutionary political leadership.
For President Tinubu, the farcical coup in Gabon is godsend. Together with the rest of coup-free ECOWAS, he is right to be worried about the spread of dictatorship. Central Africa, going by the extra attention paid to military postings in Rwanda and other countries, is also worried. But for the Nigerian president, the option of military intervention, from which he has gently walked away in the past few weeks when he sensed his countrymen’s disapproval of war, is no longer on the table. Of course he will insist that all options are on the table. However, the reality is that with the help of the African Union (AU), sanctions and other non-military options will now be applied with vigour to curb the military madness coursing through the continent. Gabon is godsend also because it helps President Tinubu reflect on his hitherto rosy understanding of what Nigeria is and what it represents. Now he knows he is not presiding over a country which, in line with his campaign before the elections, could be forged into a single, powerful voice for the continent. Nigeria has many voices; the president must henceforth do his best to coax (and sometimes cajole) a general tendency out of those voices as he represents his country to the rest of the world. Nigeria has religious and cultural differences; how to manage those differences at a time of severe economic and global challenges will keep him preoccupied. His success in that endeavour will of course not be total, but if his reflexes and deftness for building consensus have not deserted him, he will achieve enough success to build a fairly stable and progressive country. And if his successors build on that hypothetical success, the country will see many more epochs until it finally succumbs to the inevitable forces of history.
But France is desperate to keep its former colonies in the French orbit. It is, however, unlikely to succeed to a level that will assure it of the effortless dominance it had overweeningly entrenched for decades. Gabon all but made it certain that Nigeria will not get embroiled in a struggle it cannot win in Niger Republic, nor get in the way of the ongoing denudation of French influence all over West Africa. Surely it must mean something that apart from Sudan, all the countries that have executed coups so far in West and Central Africa are Francophone. France is peevishly spoiling for war in Niger, with its resistance to the expulsion of its ambassador; it is now clearly the responsibility of the AU, not just ECOWAS, to compel France to respect the sovereignty of Niger Republic, coup or no coup. France is sending a bad signal and setting a dangerous precedent by defying the sovereignty of Niger Republic and the expulsion order. It must not be allowed. The complications France seems desperately prepared to infuse into the coup fray in Africa because of its economic interests are indeed ominous. But even if it succeeds in the short run, it cannot win in the long run.
By now the chief proponents of forcefully restoring Mr Bazoum to office must have lost steam, if not interest. With Gabon flaunting its own ridiculous coup in everyone’s face, it is hard to imagine sending the military into Niger Republic without Central Africa or the rest of Africa lashing out at Gabon. What is more, should they succeed, the continental policemen must then proceed to Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso. It is a futile exercise, for interventions will not resolve the economic and political contradictions that have kept coup-ridden Francophone countries poor and blighted for decades.
