A heap of coups challenges Africa

When some countries welcome military rule, the continent rethinks how to better nurture democracy.

The Monitor's View

From East Africa to West Africa in recent months, more than half a dozen power grabs by military forces have brought tens of thousands of citizens onto the streets. Yet there’s a twist. In Sudan, protesters are demanding civilian-led democratic rule while in Mali and Burkina Faso, people are actually celebrating the mutineers. If that sounds like a contradiction, look again.

These divergent reactions reflect a similar and popular expectation in Africa. People want honest, effective government. As one marcher celebrating the military takeover in the capital city Ouagadougou told The Guardian, “This is an opportunity for Burkina Faso to retain its integrity.” The two sets of demonstrators differ over the means to achieve such governance due to the different threats they face, but their demands for it show how vested ordinary Africans have become in democracy.

Africa’s answers to its coup tendencies could be part of the problem. In the 1990s when coups were common, leaders on the continent decided to build blocs of countries centered around trade or security to promote economic opportunity, safety, and rule of law. The premise was that shared standards of governance, enforced by multilateral forces, could bolster democracy. That mostly worked until the recent coups – 11 successful or attempted ones in the last year and a half.

In Mali and Burkina Faso, many people blame a regional body, the Economic Community of West African States, for failing to hold their leaders to agreed standards of governance and then punishing their societies with economic sanctions in response to military takeovers. Public opinion in Mali, which has seen two coups since August 2020, reflects that frustration.

The latest survey by Afrobarometer found that 64% of Malians said they prefer democracy over any alternative form of government and even more, 69%, reject military rule. At the same time, only 38% said they trusted the last civilian government while 82% found the military reliable. A large majority said the economy was on the wrong track.

The sentiments reflect two primary indicators of poor governance in the region: corruption and insecurity. Mali, Burkina Faso, and other neighboring countries consistently rank poorly on global indexes for corruption. At the same time, a security crisis posed by violent extremists has worsened despite regional and international efforts to halt it. The region saw a 70% increase in violence linked to Islamist groups last year from the year before, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington.

“The military has many people’s confidence,” Ibrahima Maiga, co-founder of the Movement to Save Burkina Faso, a prominent protest group, told The Guardian. “We love freedom, democracy, yes. But we are here at the level that we are trying to survive. The most important thing is providing safety and security.”

Harvard University scholar David Moss writes, “Democracy is indeed more like a living, breathing organism than a machine built to specification. It needs to actively work against corrosive forces, both moral and institutional, or succumb to them.” In West Africa, as in Sudan, corruption and security failure are core grievances driving citizens to flip the script of progress in Africa. Yet in their demands for good governance, they are showing that democracy cannot be engineered by outsiders. Each society must nurture integrity and strength from within.