All of Africa's coup leaders during the past five years are still in power

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00:00We can speak now to Nina Willen. She is head of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Institute,

00:07which is the international relations think tank, one based in Brussels. You saw just a copy there

00:12of one of her recent books. Welcome to the programme. Thank you very much for joining us.

00:18We really do appreciate your time. Let's talk a little about Guinea-Bissau and then widen this

00:23to the region, if that's all right with you. You know, the people of Guinea-Bissau being told

00:30that the new de facto leader, General Horta and Tam, is going to be in power for a year,

00:37that his period in charge will be transitional. Is there likely to be a peaceful transition,

00:42do you think, to something better in 12 months? What do people really think?

00:48Thank you. Thank you, Angela, for inviting me to talk about this here.

00:52Well, I would say that the likelihood that this lasts only for a year is very, very small at the

01:00moment. What we've seen in Africa more broadly on the continent is a new coup wave, which started in

01:062020. And since then, we've seen 17 coup attempts, counting this one yesterday as well, and 10 of

01:13them have been successful. So if you're a coup leader in Africa and you see the statistics,

01:20then you can also see that there is quite a big incentive to launch a coup. And what's more is

01:28that all of the coup leaders who have taken power during the past five years across the continent,

01:33we really have now this coup belt. If we look from the east to the west of the continent,

01:39they are still in power. So all of the transitions that have been announced, they have been overridden by

01:45by the different coup leaders. Many of them, the transition have been extended. While there have

01:52been elections in some states, they have also been won by the coup leader, meaning that the ones who

01:59have taken power in these coups, they have taken power to stay on. And of course, we don't know yet

02:05what's going to happen in Guinea-Bissau. But if we're looking at the region at large, and if we're looking

02:09at the continent, and we're looking at the context around us, which is very much characterized by

02:15impunity, and if we are going in a broader stage to also amorality, then the risk is that this new

02:24leader will try to stay in power as well. Yeah, I wanted to talk about the impact in the wider

02:29region. And there you were saying that, you know, they appear to act with impunity. What about the

02:34regional bodies? We've heard the African Union condemning this. What about ECOWAS? Do either of

02:41them have any clout? And, you know, a number of countries have recently left ECOWAS, the West

02:46African economic body. You know, do you think Guinea-Bissau is likely to?

02:54I mean, both the AU and ECOWAS have really shown that they have very, very little leverage on the

03:01coup leaders on the continent, especially then since the latest coup wave started in 2020. What we've

03:07seen is that ECOWAS and the AU have taken different responses to certain coups, for example, in NIDER in

03:152023, where ECOWAS infamously threatened to intervene with a military force if the coup leaders did not

03:23give up power and reinstall a constitutional order, a threat that was not materialized, and that was called

03:29a bluff by the coup leaders, who then threatened to launch a regional war against the ECOWAS members.

03:36And following that threat, that was in July 2023, after the NIDER coup, then Mali, Burkina Faso,

03:45and NIDER, they declared that they were going to withdraw from ECOWAS, so exit ECOWAS. And they have

03:53held firm to that decision and started their own, they called it the confederation. I think

03:59it's hard to call it a confederation, but they have an alliance of Sahelian states that was launched

04:04in September of 2023. So following ECOWAS threat of intervention, which was a clear reaction,

04:11I think, this new alliance of Sahelian states to the threat of intervention from ECOWAS. And it has

04:16really divided ECOWAS. ECOWAS has then stepped back from its threat. It's also stepped back from sanctions

04:24that they imposed on the Nigerian coup leaders and have called on the three states that exited the

04:31organization to come back, realizing, of course, that the different threats that they had made

04:38to restore order in the region or in these three states had not worked. On the contrary, it really

04:45reinforced the different coup leaders in these three states. So what we're seeing is really that ECOWAS has

04:52lost quite a lot of whatever power it had before 2020. It's not very credible. Out of the 15

05:00member states, there are five which have had a successful coup since 2020. And so far, ECOWAS has

05:07not managed to restore constitutional order in any of these states. And when it comes to the AU, AU has also

05:15had a somewhat divided response out of, they have consistently condemned all of the coups on the

05:23continent, except for the constitutional coup that took place in Chad in 2021, in April, when Idris

05:30Debye was killed on the battlefield and then his son took over unconstitutionally, which the AU did not

05:36take notice of. So they have also faced criticism for not being consistent in the way that they have

05:43condemned coups. And you alluded there to some of those coups in the Sahel. Very often the pattern

05:52we have seen is that a vacuum is created, that vacuum. Do you think this is likely to happen in

05:59Guinea-Bissau? The vacuum might be filled by jihadists or Russian mercenaries or the Chinese in some form.

06:07What do you think is now going to happen?

06:11I would say that there is rarely a vacuum. It's always filled by someone very,

06:17very quickly. And what we saw now in Guinea-Bissau is that the coup leaders,

06:22there are justifications for taking over and which has been the case in almost all of the coups that

06:26we have seen has been corruption, corruption by the state leaders. And while the Sahelian coup

06:31leaders have also talked about combating jihadism and the terrorism in the different states here in

06:40Guinea-Bissau, the problem is not terrorism as such, but organized crime and drug trafficking. So

06:45that has been the justification for Guinea-Bissau. And it's really difficult to predict what's going to

06:51happen now. What we've seen in the Sahelian countries is that the junta leaders have definitely

06:56not kept their promise of being more effective in combating jihadist violence than the previous

07:03civilian leaders. On the contrary, what we're seeing is really an increase in Islamist violence in the

07:09region since the coup leaders took power in the different three Sahelian states. We really have

07:15the Sahel, which used to be in 2012, the region in Africa, which was the least affected by terrorist

07:20violence, is now the region that's globally the most affected. So, so far, the coup leaders have

07:27not managed to keep the promise that they came to power with. You mentioned it earlier, you know,

07:32this is a really common pattern, especially recently in African countries. There's an election,

07:39the results are disputed, the army takes control, they appoint a new leader. It's a pattern we see

07:45again and again. Is there a deeper explanation for the fact that this happens so often?

07:54Well, the research that I've been conducting on coups, and especially then since 2020,

07:59is that there is several different broader structural reasons behind this current coup wave.

08:04One is that a country has previously experienced coups, so the coup history. And as we already heard

08:10with the correspondence, Guinea-Bissau is one of the countries that have experienced the most coup

08:15attempts on the continent. I think the figures differ, but between 11 to 17 coup attempts since its

08:22independence in 1974 from Portugal, that can give you an indication that the military is very close

08:28to power. And if this coup is then successful, which I think we can consider it to be, then that's the

08:35the fifth coup since 1974. And so once a country has experienced a coup, there is a higher likelihood

08:43that it will experience another one. So it's a vicious circle. And it's the same for the Sahelian

08:47countries that we have seen. Burkina Faso, which has the quite tragic record of having 11 successful

08:54coups, has also seen that. And that's one of the reasons. The second reason is the military,

08:59very central role, so that the military is close to the one who's in power, often hold political

09:05positions. It's seen as perhaps in many of these states, the military has been seen as the one that

09:12can resolve a crisis, right? It's somebody who can combat the jihadist violence. It's seen as the

09:18savior, which is not the case in these scenarios, as we've seen after the coup leaders have taken power.

09:26And then perhaps the third reason to why we see this recent coup wave is the global power competition,

09:32because with the global power competition comes also the promise of new partners that are not that

09:39keen on enforcing democratic norms, that are not that bothered by collaborating with coup leaders.

09:47And we also see that with our Western states, that we are also starting to discuss whether,

09:53how were we going to position ourselves? Because now we are in a global power competition.

09:59And if we look to the Sahelian states, what we've seen is that as soon as the coup leaders took power,

10:04they expelled the Western and the multilateral actors, and they turned to Russia, who was very

10:10willing to come in and support them. And so that also means that there is an incentive for the coup

10:17leaders because they know that they can change partners and get support from from other partners

10:23if they want to. So I think we can look at those three reasons for the as major explanations for the

10:30latest coup wave. Then, of course, each coup is unique. Each coup has its own national reasons. But if we look

10:38at a structural level, I think these three reasons explain that quite well.

10:42Well, we're out of time. Thank you so much for that context. Very interesting to hear your insights

10:49and observations on that. Nina Willen, thank you very much. Director of the Africa Programme

10:54at the Egmont Institute Think Tank, which is, of course, based in Brussels. Thank you so much for your time.

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