The recent rash of African military coups may have started in Chad with the 2021 shoehorning in of Mahamat Déby Itno after his father Idriss Déby died of wounds sustained in battle against rebels, but the face of the new anti-democratic wave is 37-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the “interim president” of Burkina Faso, who is hailed by many Africanists as the “new Sankara”.
With his youthful good looks, camouflaged muscle-tops, and no-nonsense attitude, Traoré, who came to power by coup in 2022, certainly reminds one of the compelling figure of Captain Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s first president, who, as revealed in Ernest Harsch’s 2015 biography, dramatically transformed his country, formerly Upper Volta, from a French stooge into an independent nation, and who himself was transformed by his 1987 assassination into a Guevara-styled martyr.
Sankara cleaned house after he seized power in August 1983, disciplining the civil service, embarking on public works projects that delivered services to poor and rural people, and turning the economy around from extractives to local beneficiation.
As an avowed anti-imperialist, he tried to establish with France under François Mitterrand “a relationship of equals, mutually beneficial, without paternalism on the one side or an inferiority complex on the other”. But those who lionise him ignore that he opposed independent trade unions and that he corporatised Burkinabè society through his vigilante-like Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. In short, he was no democrat.
Although Africa has by far the world’s worst record for coups, with some 109 successful and an almost identical number failed since 1950, they were actually relatively rare in the post-Soviet era as Cold War contestation ground to a halt, so the eight seizures of power across the Sahel and West Africa – Chad, Mali, Guinea, and Sudan in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, Niger and Gabon in 2023, and Guinea-Bissau in 2025 – took many observers by surprise. An exasperated UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called the trend an “epidemic” in which military leaders felt they had “total impunity”.
The instability and lawlessness in the region are largely occasioned by the utter inability of these very poor states to allocate resources to far-flung, semi-desert provinces, plus embezzling and ennui in democratic institutions and the rise of Islamic and Christian fundamentalist militias, which have taken advantage of that vacancy, germinating and arming other destabilising players in turn, such as cattle-herding gangs and secessionists.
The common thread in all successful putsches has been military support. Typically, militaries are able to wrench the levers of power not only because they are obviously the most heavily armed and better-funded forces – it helps to be able to take a tank to a knife fight – but also their political and strategic yet highly mobile nature puts them ahead of potential competitors such as more sedentary and locally-focused gendarmerie, paramilitaries, or criminal gangs.
According to a 2022 study by US professors Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, a welter of coups erupted across the continent in the immediate aftermath of many countries’ independence, peaking in 1966, a year in which only two in Sudan and one in the Republic of Congo failed, while an unsurpassed seven were successful: the Central African Republic, then Upper Volta, Nigeria, Ghana, Burundi, Nigeria again, and then Burundi again. This putschist storm was enabled as much by domestic political struggles on the open fields left by vacating colonial regimes as by rearguard attempts by former colonial powers, especially France, to maintain informal influence.
Nigerian-American academic Prof Ebenezer Obadare detailed the evolution of Africa’s military putschists for the liberal US think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2023, describing it as consisting of “three, progressively deteriorating, generational lines…”
The first generation of coup leaders in the immediate post-independence era, he contends, “comprised ‘officer-gentlemen’ who, on the whole, were more educated, more polished, more articulate, and, for all intents and purposes, closer to the classic ideal of a military officer… this family of putschists was drawn largely from the [foreign-trained] upper echelons of the military.”
This was followed by coups initiated by a generation of “under-professionalised” men, a “semi-organised, rugged, and semi-literate soldiery”, which actually formed a unique new African class, wittily termed the “lumpen militariat” by Kenya’s Prof Ali Mazrui in an influential 1973 paper.
The number of attempted African coups rose sharply in 1991, amid immediate strategic disorientation and a patronage vacuum caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR), but seven plots died on the vine, with successes only in Mali and Lesotho.
Obadare argues that the current crop of adventurists is cruder and even less accountable: he terms them the “gangsta militariat”, all swagger, dark goggles, and combat gloves. These pretenders spout “the now standard denunciation of ‘western neocolonialism’ and a promise to impose law and order amid chronic instability and lawlessness.” He says that what links these three degenerating lines is “a delusional saviour complex whereby military intervention in politics is whitewashed as a nationalistic rescue effort, which is then used to sanction the illegitimate deployment of legitimate violence.”
Obadare claims the “gangsta militariat… is the logical outcome of the African military’s involvement in politics, insofar as the latter has resulted in the militarisation of politics, the politicisation of the military, and, subsequently, the de-professionalisation of the armed forces.”
Yet who trained these military cadres and what principles were instilled in them? For the first generation in particular, one has to cast an eye on the French, for they left a dark legacy of intervening in their former colonies, with some coups executed by former Foreign Legionnaires, such as that in 1966 by Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who went on to notorious levels of insanity as self-proclaimed Central African “emperor”.
Too little, too late, the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign ministry, attempted to modernise France’s paternalistic chasse privée, or private hunting ground, relationship with francophone Africa, returning stolen items of cultural heritage and ameliorating financial controls through a 2019 agreement with eight West African nations to replace the West African CFA franc with a new currency called the Eco by 2027.
But while France attempted civilian reforms to keep its former colonies within its orbit, after the 9/11 attacks, the United States increasingly focused its military attention on the “arc of instability” across the Sahel, which it perceived as an incubator of terrorism.
Led by the US Department of Defence’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), founded in Washington DC in 1999, the ACSS established regional offices in Addis Ababa and Dakar and, in 2007, began working with the US’s newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), one of six US macro-geographic combat commands.
The layer of any military most likely to attempt to overthrow its own government is the field officer band – lieutenant-colonels to brigadiers – because they are most likely to have their hopes of advancement stymied by old-guard generals and because they can mobilise forces at brigade level. And the type of soldier most likely to seize the presidential palace is special forces operators, paratroopers, and presidential guards.
This layer and these specialities are particularly targeted by an ACSS course called “The Next Generation of African Military Leaders”, in parallel with the Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme, which provides peacekeeping and offensive training aimed at integrating African armed forces into NATO doctrine and US strategic objectives.
These all now fall under the aegis of the US Department of State’s Global Peace Operations Initiative. Ironically, among the 25 countries that had ACOTA chapters, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Gabon have fallen to military rule and have expelled US as well as French troops, as did Chad last year.
American investigative journal The Intercept revealed in 2020 that despite Africom’s claim that it had a “light footprint” in Africa, there was in fact an archipelago of 27 US military bases spread around, including “enduring” Air Bases 101 at Niamey and 201 at Agadez in Niger (the latter a 25 km² $110m drone base); at Libreville in Gabon; and at Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and “contingency” bases at Arlit, Dirkou, Diffa, and Oullam in Niger, and at Bamako in Mali.
Yet the coups have created a unique situation, with the West enlaagered by their own trainees as the coup leaders expel them or denounce their residual presence; even the “enduring” bases were vacated by 15 September 2024.
In large part, the failure of the long counterinsurgency campaign to curb the spread of radical Islam, driven by mostly French and US forces with an unfortunate proclivity to combine military aid with political demands, led to a collapse of faith in the West and the surge of coups.
The geopolitical reorientation of the new militarist regimes is often based on a misdirected nostalgia for the dead USSR, embracing a Russian neocolonialism complete with its Africa Corps, the ex-Wagner mercenary expeditionary force, to provide security after the West’s exit, with fewer obvious conditions attached.
The appeal of strongman leadership has spread far beyond the Sahel, even finding fertile soil in the continent’s most famous democracy, South Africa, where, last October, Afrobarometer reported that 49% of people favoured a junta replacing parliament and only 42% supported their hard-won democracy.
This is a country where two of the major opposition parties, the uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), describe themselves as “Sankarist”. That’s cause for concern, as the vision of muscular, camouflaged leadership sprouting across so many countries emboldens the remaking of African politics by dictate.
Michael Schmidt is a veteran investigative journalist who focuses on African affairs, a best-selling non-fiction author, and a human rights rapporteur with field experience in 49 countries. He has reported from the bowels of many corporate and artisinal mines, and writes here in his capacity as an analyst for the Pan-African Justice Initiative (PAJI).
