TL;DR
In the face of coups in African governance, the author argues that while governance in Africa is broken, coups are not the solution. Coups can lead to instability, dynamic power structures, and suppressed dissent, undermining the purpose of government. Instead, the author calls for exploring alternative, organic, and sustainable approaches to governance while cautioning against expecting quick fixes from coups or ‘strongman’ leadership.”
It is a sunny Wednesday afternoon, and I am just rounding off readings for my Quantitative Analysis & Algorithmic Trading class. A friend, whose face so clearly betrays exhilaration, walks up to me and very euphorically declares that the remnants of French colonial activity on the continent are on the verge of total annihilation. It is a day like the one we witnessed just a couple of weeks ago when a military junta topples another African leader; another day, another fall of a detested leader. I am unsurprisingly - at least to me - indifferent. My indifference emerges from two beliefs, which, albeit smeared with a semblance of incompatibility, are, in my view, totally tenable. Let us be clear: governance in Africa is broken, and at the same time, coups are not the conduit of progress that their undertakers would have us all believe.
I take the position that coups are not the solution to Africa’s problems because they create a second - and perhaps more daunting - problem without offering any clear path to change and improvement. I would like to contend that the purpose of government is twofold: to provide stability and to foster debate on the nature of the good society while pursuing the same. Coups, by their very nature, create new and highly dynamic power structures and a need for coup executors to protect themselves from counter-coups, a need that often results in less stability and reduced freedoms to disagree over the organisation towards the good society while at the same time offering no improvements to the status quo. These consequences undermine the two essential roles of government, and on that basis, I do not cheer for coups.
Coup d’etats are an exciting subject, anathema in some circles and vehicles of hope in others. In the face of broken governance, the recent wave of African coups seems to have been received predominantly by euphoria; freedom is coming tomorrow! I fear that we are not being critical enough of these coups and that while our mothers pour into the street to hug the men and women in arms and proclaim “down with the dictator”, no dictator falls and we only get their cousins and former erstwhile friends and collaborators. Our energies are diverging from exploring better solutions that can improve our countries. Coups are not the solution to Africa’s problems, and we should be able to assert that even if we do not know the solution precisely.
Before I set out to defend my position, let me state some primitives that I hope we agree on so much that there is no need to establish them by means of argumentation. Firstly, governance in Africa is broken. It is a failure of governance that a continent with such natural resources, vast arable land and human potential is still the world’s poorest continent. Secondly, we have made progress, however slowly that has come. While it is common knowledge that our station could and should, as a matter of fact, be better, there is no denying that we are better off than we were three decades ago. Thirdly and lastly, the system of democratic governance is not a result of an organic process on the African continent but rather an attempt to copy systems that have worked elsewhere. Seen together, the above primitives provide ample explanation for why many parts of Africa are fertile ground for coups and the seeming popularity they enjoy. Every coup executor knows so much to start by deriding corruption and the failure of the incumbent government to serve the people. As though compelled by an invisible hand of folly, the people who are justifiably fueled by the realisation that things could be better chastise democracy as a Western relic and proclaim the junta liberator.
Are coups the solution to Africa’s problems? There is only insufficient debate on this rather critical question. Why do we so fervently embrace a thing of whose worthiness we do not inquire? As previously stated, my position on this question is that coups are not the solution to Africa’s problems. They undermine the two-fold purpose of government - stability and the pursuit of the good society - yet offer no plan for improving the status quo, assuming it will be changed.
The first way coups undermine stability is by creating environments for more coups, sometimes not immediately, but eventually. Coups create and legitimise an additional manner for ambitious persons to acquire political power. While many people would think that the immediate challenge facing a freshly ascended junta is to effect political change, it is, in fact, to protect themselves from a counter-coup seeking to either re-establish the old government or to establish a different junta. This idea of watching one’s back is not a new concept, as it is only the ability to keep power once it is obtained that renders it useful, and the means by which power is obtained may very well be the same means by which it is taken away. In democracies, this idea manifests when governments have to make concessions on challenging policy issues to appease the electorate in view of a desired re-election. While in democratically stable systems, the exact time to expect a power challenge is set by the electoral cycle, in the context of a coup, the timetable for power challenges is set by the diligence with which new usurpers can organise and mobilise. Most coup executors know this all too well and often attempt to protect themselves by reorganising the defence forces or appeasing friends and suspected usurpers with positions of power in the new order. Whether or not a junta protects itself successfully, little is left to be desired by the people. Whenever the dynamic is such that a junta should fail to protect itself from a coup, we find ourselves in situations similar to Nigeria’s experience between 1966 and 1979 and in other brief moments in its history. This stream of successive coups creates so much instability that very little progress is made, and the politic of power grabbing overrides the politic of the good society. On the other hand, a junta that succeeds at watching its back eventually resorts to such suppression that the people are left wanting their freedom, and there is no room for disagreement.
Coups also undermine stability by creating very dynamic and unpredictable power structures, which greatly hinder progress. One of the many reasons why most organisations have organisational charts is because when you want to get things done, knowing who influences several stages of the intended process and to what degree such influence can be exercised is invaluable. In a consensual form of government, by virtue of the fact that there is public participation in deciding the nature of government, we know to whom we must address specific issues. In the aftermath of a coup, that will be determined by which co-conspirator eventually wrestles more influence and the whims of the junta. In the same way that achieving grand ambitions in an organisation with no clear organisational chart will be hell, achieving grand - and sometimes little - goals in the pursuit of the good society is hell. I do contend that coup leaders often move swiftly to announce a new order and that they know so much as to abandon things to a free flow. However, That does not undermine the point being made, as the very nature in which power is dolled out in the aftermath of coups is based on fragile friendships and loyalties subject to the unchecked ambitions of men who must sleep with a pistol at hand. It is not far-fetched to imagine that after a coup, the question that drives the power arrangements is one Stalin will ask yet another pope, “How many divisions have you?”.
The instability created by coups feeds directly into the reduced ability to pursue the good society by making it much more costly to disagree and to implement any valuable ideas. Inherent in the design of consensual means of government is the ability and right to disagree on the organisation and means of pursuing the good society. While this is an ideal and often only partially the case, coups make disagreeing even more expensive and less likely. While disagreement has and will always be misconstrued as some challenge to authority, in the context of a coup, it can be seen as a threat to the positions and, by implication, the lives of some actors. Knowing that any attempt to disagree will likely be responded to with a heavy hand, many choose not to disagree. A healthy and progressive society chooses to disagree on the nature and pursuit of the good society. Because there are only limited economic means and all ends are not of equal importance, we must agree to disagree on what must be pursued and how it must be done. The pursuit of the good society is a collective pursuit, and our inability to listen to different opinions without feeling threatened limits our ability to create a society that works for everyone.
To aggravate the already dire consequences of coups, they have an uncanny reputation for selling previously staunch defenders of inefficient systems as saviours. I wonder, for example, how the supporters of the coup in Gabon feel about replacing a Bongo with his cousin. In Zimbabwe, we poured out so much euphoria and rolled out a red carpet for one who thus far has only provided evidence that they may have been a clone of Mugabe all along. When coups are, as they often are, executed by senior army members, they are just a reshuffling of the old guard. People who have found their way to the top of a corrupt system that works against the citizens should have to undergo a Pauline conversion to become prophets of change. It is undoubtedly the case that even in non-coup power changes, these changes are often only a reshuffle. One can make that case about the democratic era in Nigeria. The particular case with coups is that not only do we have a reshuffle, but we also have one masquerading as a change in plain sight and bringing along with it the added challenges of dynamic power structures and less freedom to disagree.
Interestingly enough, I think coups can be an actual vehicle of change if junior officers execute them; officers who have not risen through the ranks owe their station only to themselves and do not have to preserve loyalties that have been the backbone of national dysfunction. In defining success very broadly, I will cite as examples J.J. Rawlings’s coups in Ghana and Thomas Sankara’s coup in Burkina Faso. Even then, to market coups by junior officers as the solution to our political problems will be to create a security crisis.
One particular aspect on which this challenge of coups will be itself challenged is the idea that stability is over-priced, and the cost of slow progress warrants at least that we try something different with regard to governance. Against this position, I argue that coups are not so much a change in the face of government as they are a change in the manner in which we approach government. Our problems with governance are system problems; corruption is entrenched from primary schools to ministries, and it is remarkably naive to think that once we change the face of government, we will have solved our problems.
Yes, we need to approach governance differently, but different here should mean seeking out a form of government that is organic and developed along our customs, traditions and identities, not a government of the barrel. While I am not in any way selling Westminister democracy as the fix to our problems, I am convinced that we can learn immensely from its organic development. Consider, for example, that British governance is still heavily based on customs and traditions and the result of changes made with evolution. If we attempted to provide a very condensed - and slightly accurate - overview of political history in Britain, we could say that first, we had a king who became so despotic that people asked the king to commit to protecting several rights and liberties. Then, the rich people asked for a parliament to weigh the king’s rule against their interests. Then, parliament moved on to defend the interest of more people by having citizens elect their representatives in parliament. All the while, the people who found themselves in parliaments decided that it may be more meaningful to organise themselves in groups based on shared beliefs, hence political parties, and to let the house be led by the leader of the largest party as their Prime Minister. It took them hundreds of centuries to shape their political institutions and procedures; why do we think a gun and an army uniform will do it overnight? I am not suggesting we wait for centuries, but can we start from our communities and try to build something organic and sustainable?
A second counter-argument, which is a defence of coups, is that democracy is holding Africa back and that we need the ‘strongman’ to save us. This argument is badly construed in that it combines two distinct ideas and then forces a single answer. I agree that democracy, at least as it is being practised, is a problem. However, what we need is an entirely different idea that should be compared against other ideas. To those who assert that the ‘strongman’ is our next bet at a solution, I would like them to think hard about the potential cost of picking the wrong strong man and how sustainable such an arrangement can be. Idi Amin was a strongman, but was he the type of strong man we want? In hindsight, it is straightforward to say he was an evil strongman. We must, however, realise that Idi Amin rose to his position because of the means open to him, and the very nature through which he rose made it impossible for his character to be successfully called into question. If we, many years later, still champion such a means that has proven its ability to catapult ineffective persons to absolute power, do we do ourselves any justice?
While I do not support coups, it does not imply that I endorse the prevailing political systems. As I made clear at the start, it is possible to affirm that African governance is primarily broken and yet to turn a disagreeing eye to coups. I also do not have the correct answers to Africa’s governance problems. We will only have these answers when we learn to have dialogues within ourselves and champion smaller communities and more organic processes. Perhaps I am wrong, and we need something else. I have no interest in being right. What I seek, the achievement of which should bring me immense delight, is that we are not blinded by moments of unfounded euphoria.
When I was a boy, my mother hung a poster of a chimpanzee photographed in the same posture as Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. She named this chimpanzee Shai. Any time I or my brother did something my mother was convinced we had not taken time to think about, she would say with disappointment, “Shai will have thought about it”. I want us to think critically about coups.