TCS News Update: The Coup in Gabon And The ‘Return Of Coups’ to Africa
This article introduces a new series, the TCS News Update, which will bring you brief introductions to ongoing issues around the world. It will provide key details as well as points of analysis left out of mainstream media discussion.
This article is on the recent coup in Gabon, and whether there are issues with much of the discussion of the so-called ‘coup belt’ in the Sahel region.
General Brice Nguema, photo by the Press service of the President of Gabon via Wikimedia Commons
What is the situation in Gabon?
On the 30th of August, a few minutes after the incumbent president of Gabon, Ali Bongo, declared his re-election, top military officials launched a successful coup in Gabon, placing Bongo under house arrest.They cited “irresponsible and unpredictable government” as a justification, as well as questioning the validity of the election results, an accusation levelled at the president during the last election in 2016. The coup has brought an end to nearly 56 years of rule by the Bongo family.
Currently, Gabon has been placed under the control of a temporary government, headed by General Brice Oligi Nguema, who was sworn in as the Transitional President on the 4th of September. Though General Nguema has promised to return power to civilians and organise free elections, he has yet to set a date and has called for slow transition. Unsurprisingly, this has raised suspicions around the authenticity of this promise.
Some analysts have pointed to a recent clustering of coups in the Sahel region, sometimes referred to as the ‘coup belt’, suggesting that economic issues and security concerns have led to a destabilisation of the region. Over the last three years there have been coups in Niger, Sudan, and Guinea, with two putsches each in Burkina Faso and Mali within periods of just 9 months. Many argue that these coups have a cumulative effect, with military intervention becoming an increasingly common alternative, and threat, to democratic elections.
Reactions to the coup have been notably mixed. The UN, EU, US and France have all quickly condemned the coup. This has also been true of the key nations around Gabon, notably Nigeria. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the main economic and political body in the region, has similarly condemned the situation, with its chair, Bola Tinubu fearing that “copy cats will start doing the same thing until it is stopped”.
Within Gabon itself, however, the picture is more complex. Many have welcomed the coup, arguing that Ali Bongo’s Gabon was no democracy, with one person stating: “for the moment we don't need unity…Justice must be done”. As Comfort Ero, president of the International Crisis Group, recently explained in the Financial Times, “it’s not that people are anti-democracy, they’re pro-democracy”, but increasingly they are not seeing any tangible benefits to democratic processes, which many feel to be not very democratic at all. Ero suggested many in Gabon and the Sahel are arguing that “[they] can’t eat [their] civil and political rights. What [they] need is bread and butter”.
Our analysis:
The key question hanging over Gabon at the moment is: where will it go? At the moment, it is very hard to tell. General Nguema’s position looks reasonably secure for now, so much of Gabon’s future will hinge on what he intends for it. While many are hoping this will be a positive change for Gabon - ending what many saw as an era of corrupt rule by the Bongo family - a BBC source stressed this would not be the case. They argued instead that "General Brice Oligui Nguema is a direct product of the Bongo clan", referring to the allegation that General Nguema may be a cousin of Bongo himself. Nonetheless, it is interesting that Nguema has recently turned down the presidential salary and his appointment of Raymond Ndong Sima as Prime Minister is similarly hard to place. Sima was once part of Bongo’s government before becoming a critic. As such, he is not an obvious departure from previous Gabonese governance, yet he is not a clear continuation of it either. Given these uncertainties around General Nguema’s intention, it remains hard to know what the future holds for Gabon.
As for the case of the ‘return of coups to Africa’, there do seem to be some commonalities and relationships between the coups of the last few years. Commonly cited causes include weak democratic traditions, high inflation and unemployment, corruption and growing threats of terrorism against civilians. Perhaps more significantly, the occurrence of these coups over a relatively short span of time in the same region may have a knock-on effect, threatening other governments in the region that might not have had prior reason for concern. International bodies like ECOWAS, which until recently had projected a sense of order and continuity throughout the region, now appear significantly weakened.
A full examination of these coups’ individual causes is beyond this article, but it is perhaps worth briefly situating recent events in their long-term context. The most directly impactful period for understanding these coups is not the period of decolonisation following the Second World War, but rather the period of imposed democratisation and marketisation in the 1980s and 1990s. With the rise of neo-liberal economic policy, and economic crises in many African nations, Western nations made the continuation of loans conditional on the adoption of rapid transitions towards democratic elections and free-market economies. For many complex reasons, many African nations had come to depend on such loans, and as such had little option but to accept their terms. These loans were known as ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ which have since been noted as economic failures that have played a role in undermining political structures across Africa. Though there are many more causes behind the current political instability, it is worth highlighting this as an often neglected aspect of recent political developments in many African nations.
Though the current rise of instability is concerning, we should be cautious in making and accepting generalised narratives about a ‘coup belt’ in Africa. The Sahel region is vast, and each coup has roots in domestic issues that cannot be easily lumped together, nor reduced to simplistic narratives regarding problems related to colonialism, though these are present.
Indeed, much of the focus on this narrative stems from a pervasive tendency to cast ‘Africa’ as a continent of failing nation-states, incapable of democracy on some deep, essentialized level. Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay ‘How To Write About Africa’ is an excellent sardonic critique of exactly this. When it comes to critically understanding recent discussions by journalists and politicians around these coups, her following contrarian advice is crucial - “Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”
Recent signs are not good in the region, and these recent coups may well have common roots and begin to influence one another. Yet, it remains important to avoid assuming their character and to cast them as an ‘African’ problem. European history is just as filled with coups and putsches in nations where democratic institutions were then recent developments. Africa is thus not to be exceptionalised.
