As President Mohamed Bazoum himself said, ironically: “We must not allow the military to take power because they have setbacks on the front where they should be and the colonels become ministers or Heads of State (…) Who is going to wage war in their place? It would be easy if each time an army of our countries has a failure on the ground, it comes to take power! This is what happened twice in Mali (...) These are not acceptable things”.
July 26-August 26, 2023, it has been exactly one month since General Abdourahamane Tchiani and his men of the Presidential Guard Presidential guard kidnapped and put under house arrest President Mohamed Bazoum of Niger Republic. An unprecedented coup in a West Africa plagued by unprecedented turbulence, but which says a lot about the intentions of certain soldiers who want to put the military at the top of the pyramid of political governance. Instead of being content with the power of the barracks. Not without the connivance of the Wagner Mercenary Group of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) now knows what it has to do: Restore constitutional order in Niger or simply disappear by scuttling itself. President Mohamed Bazoum will have to be reinstated in office, no matter what it will cost ECOWAS. They may well threaten, blackmail, involve Burkina Faso and Mali, it is out of the question to let a regime, military or civilian, settle permanently in Niger. And it would be a very nice way to say: “Never again in West Africa”.
But it is beyond West Africa that we must display this manifest will. The African Union (AU), at the same time, must take the appropriate texts and provisions so that coups d'Etat are never again tolerated within the African continent. It goes without saying that an adequate response is proposed at the same time so that Respect for Democratic Rules is not only convergent but also binding vis-à-vis all Member States. It is a question of definitively discouraging unscrupulous heads of state who would parasitize the socio-political life of their country.
What should be a luxury for Africa is by no means Democracy, it is rather coups d'Etat and other instabilities that Africa no longer has the means to afford for more than sixty years of independence. Indeed, when a person does not become mature at sixty, it is not at one hundred that he will still become so. Too much is too much and enough is enough!
Pahimi Padacket Albert, former Prime Minister of Chad, knows what he is talking about when he says: “It is true that African democracy is experiencing a deep crisis, punctuated by untimely constitutional revisions which violate the limitation of mandates in a general complicit indifference. In this context, military coups are often felt by our populations as remedies for failing democratic governance and misguided institutions. In reality, the medicine always turns out to be more harmful than the disease.”
The question is not only to release President Mohamed Bazoum, it is above all that he be reinstated in his functions as President of the Republic, and that the soldiers return to their barracks to let the civilians animate sociopolitical life serenely. This is the only condition to avoid an ECOWAS military intervention in Niger Republic. And it is also the sine qua non condition for ECOWAS nationals to continue to extend credit and respect the sub-regional organization before conferring on it its right to continue to exercise fully. Otherwise, what use would it still be to West Africans? It would only, by its inability to impose the force of law, if necessary, ratify the open door to chaos in West Africa. If the military must arrogate the right to burst onto the political scene when they want to, it's a safe bet that this will not be the last coup. On the contrary...
The refrain according to which it is France and the West who manipulate or exploit here and there and tutti quanti cannot continue to allow those who set themselves up as self-proclaimed pan-Africans, allegedly defenders of African interests, even when they only defend their own interests and those of Wagner included. Even if it means mobilizing naive minds or those who have scores to settle with the West.
Nobody wants a war in Niger Republic. But ECOWAS must impose itself on the putschists, including by force in desperation. There are peaces which are much more dangerous and catastrophic than wars. In that they engender the seeds of other wars whose consequences can extend over decades and decades and generations. The history of Chad is littered with such examples.
By Marcus Boni Teiga
