WHY WEST AFRICAN LEADERS LIKE BIO, TINUBU, MAHAMA, BOAKAI AND OTHERS WHO ARE WISE SHOULD SLEEP WITH ONE EYE OPEN ——-MILITARY COUPS ARE CONTAGIOUS
By Kabs Kanu
A Liberian authority connected to President Joseph Boakai has warned Liberians not to draw dangerous parallels between the Guinea Bissau coup and the prevailing political situation in Liberia. Smart man!! He knows what is happening .
Authorities in other West African nations can offer the same warning to their citizens . Who really wants military coups ? After we have seen that military coups are cosmetic and do not always solve a country’s problems, we do not wish coups on any country.
However , some situations are just what they are. They will happen when the conditions for them prevail.
Our studies of Political Science teach us that military coups are contagious . The idea that military coups are contagious is a subject of ongoing debate among scholars and policymakers.
But let it be known that though it is indeed true that military coups are contagious, evidence has proved that they do not just happen. Military coups are like motor accidents . They are caused and so a coup in one country in a region can lead to dangerous parallels being drawn in other countries because coups are interconnected through a combination of shared underlying conditions . If presidents of other West African countries are doing the same things that the Guinea Bissau president did, not only can dangerous parallels emerge from citizens of other countries; there is a likehood that soldiers in other countries could try the same thing.
Some early research from the Cold War era and recent analysis suggest that the occurrence of one coup may increase the subsequent probability of others, as would-be plotters are emboldened by successful examples in other countries. Yes, military coup are like viral diseases. They are contagious. The news from Guinea Bissau is bad and wise West African leaders will not sleep tonight. As a matter of fact, due to the recent proliferation of military coups in West Africa, many have been sleeping with one eye open.
Nobody will deny the fact. The same things that transpired in Guinea Bissau that provoked the soldiers to intervene and stage yesterday’s coup are happening in other West African countries.
Sierra Leone and Nigeria were given travel bans by the U.S. in 2023 because the presidential elections in both countries were rigged . International elections observer teams from all over the world made a tremendous outcry and stopped short of calling Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio, who, ironically is the ECOWAS Chairman now and Nigeria’s presidential elections winner, Bola Jagaban Tinubu , as elections thieves. To save space, I will not mention other West African countries but the facts are clear —-With the outstanding exception of Burkina Faso, presidents in the other countries are not ruling justly; they do not conduct government by democracy or constitution or rule of law . Some West African leaders like Julius Bio and Bola Tinubu are criminals.
There is another reason that West African leaders are casting nervous glances right now. Coup leaders appear to learn from the playbooks of others, not just in seizing power, but also in managing the aftermath. They observe which tactics are successful in entrenching their authority, sidestepping international sanctions, and crafting narratives to legitimize their rule. A successful military coup somewhere emboldens soldiers in interconnected countries that , with sound planning and organization, they too can strike the presidential palace or State House and succeed.
It is also a fact that the frequent occurrence of coups in recent years has contributed to the erosion of strong international and regional norms against military takeovers that were prevalent after the Cold War.
One would expect that with all the coups making rounds in West Africa, some of our leaders would learn. But sadly and tragically, African leaders do not learn.
Some like Julius Maada Bio are not serious with the power they have grabbed. Bio is very careless with power or is seized by a demonic mania of over – confidence . He does not sit at home. He spends all his time traveling the world to attend summits, mini- summits, conferences and ordinary meetings ( to which he should have been actually sending his Vice- President , foreign minister or other ministers ) . The foot- loose Sierra Leone president even travels abroad to attend his SLPP diaspora political party ‘s receptions, coctails and induction events . People say that the reason for Bio’s bloated confidence is that that Sierra Leoneans are cowards and also he has castrated the Sierra Leone Army, flooding it with members of his tribe/ ethnic group. He believes they will not overthrow him.
Bio is also being emboldened by the hypocrisy and complicity of the West, the U. S and some European nations and organizations like the African Union ( AU) and the ECOWAS.
But Bio is not a smart man. Sierra Leonean citizens may be unserious or cowards ( As people and even other West Africans think ) and the military may have been castrated but that is no reason for a president to be reckless with power ss he is doing. Bio must come to terms with the fact that his luck might run out one day , especially with the toxic socioeconomic and political conditions he has been generating in Sierra Leone since he came to power in 2018.
West African leaders who are wise are deeply worried about another dynamic that has emerged in the geopolitical stratosphere ——Inconsistent or weak international responses to coups . Western nations and stakeholder organizations are no longer fully committed to defending democracy in African countries . Some have abandoned the principles of multilateralism, however much they mouth it on pudiums at the UN. Isolationism is an emerging diplomatic mantra, while others have destroyed democracy in their own countries and have lost the moral authority to dictate to African countries. Their inconsistent, lukewarm and disinterested responses to coup and crises in Africa signal to potential plotters who seize power that staging coups or hijacking democracy will not have lasting negative consequences anymore as it used to do before and this further lowers the deterrent effect.
Let nobody mistake the signs of the moment: Any president or government in Africa can be comfortably overthrown because African patience with bad, undemocratic , corrupt and oppressive leaders is wearing thin once again. We await to see what happens in the succeeding years as more elections come up.
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