PeeCeeJay by Jideofor Adibe

Lessons from the Recent Coup in Mali

pcjadibe@yahoo.com

 When on March 22, 2012, a group of junior soldiers in Mali led by Captain Amadou Sanogo announced the toppling of the democratically elected regime of Amadou Toumani Touré, a number of Africanists who thought that military consciousness had receded for good in the continent, had a rude awakening.  The Afro-pessimism of the 1980s and 1990s has been gradually snowballing into Afro-optimism, even if grudgingly, despite resilient challenges. Analysts who believe that Africa is beginning to get its act together and that given the current conjuncture of local and global forces, only a buffoon of a soldier would embark on a coup project, waited with suspense to see how the whole impasse would play out.

There are several lessons from the coup and its aftermath.

One, credit must be given to ECOWAS for the way it resolutely rejected the coup. The regional grouping imposed diplomatic, economic and financial sanctions against the regime just as it rejected the unilateral declaration of independence by  a Tuareg rebel group in the North.  Though it cannot be ruled out that the fear of possible domino effect and therefore threat to their own power base could have been partly responsible for ECOWAS members’ resistance to the coup, it still amounted to progress. For instance  when in early August 2005, President Maaouiya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya  of Mauritania  was overthrown by the so-called  Military Council for Justice and Democracy, international reaction to the coup, initially strongly hostile, including suspension from the African Union, quickly weakened. The AU, while formally condemning the coup also buckled and began to urge the new junta to quickly restore “constitutional order” - a euphemism indicating it would be alright for the junta to civilianise itself in a shambolic election with predictable outcome. Even the United States, which initially called for Ould Taya to be restored to power, subsequently backed away from this.  In the case of the Mali coup, President Jonathan not only indicated that the coup would not be acceptable under any circumstance, the Nigerian Senate, even proposed the use of force to remove the coup makers. This must be commended. ECOWAS’ strong resistance forced members of the junta to reach a face-saving deal whereby the junta surrendered power in exchange for amnesty from prosecution and the lifting of sanctions against the country. This is a very important victory for African diplomacy as it demonstrates that we may not always need foreign intervention to solve our own problems. 

Two, the Mali coup shows that though democratic consciousness is growing in the continent, it equally reveals that the continent does not lack adventurist soldiers who may want to exploit popular discontent to supplant legitimately constituted authority. After decades of military rule, the rationalisations for the military’s intervention in African politics no longer wash with people who are old enough to remember what it was really like under the military.  In Nigeria, after the ‘wahala’ NADECO and other civil society groups gave Generals Babangida and Abacha, people may have relapsed into complacency that the soldiers will never have the courage to attempt the overthrow of a civilian regime again. The Mali coup in this sense is a call for vigilance and the need to protect our democracy – despite its shortcomings.  The freedom of expression under our current democracy project remains infinitely better than the reign of fear and intimidation of the citizens that were the hallmarks of military dictatorships in the country.

Three,  it is true that people thronged to welcome the coupists in Mali - as they invariably did each time there was  martial music in Nigeria and elsewhere in the continent – it is wrong to use this as an index for measuring the popularity of a coup.  A coup is not legitimated simply because people trooped out to welcome a change. In fact this has been a constant feature of any regime change in Africa, including change from one civilian regime to another, and from one military regime to another.  People thronging to the streets to welcome a regime change is rooted in common people’s constant hope for salvation from their seemingly never-ending squalid conditions. As Africa’s history however sadly shows, such joy and hope on regime change is usually short-lived because discontent and poverty seem to worsen with each change. In fact, if any lesson could be learnt from the years of military rule in Africa, it is that martial music is more of a threnody to any country; each time it is played, the affected country dies a little more.

Four, Mali, a landlocked country of 14.5 million people, is a reflection of the paradox that is Africa. While today, Africa, thought to be the original ancestry of all human beings has been left behind by others in all the development indices, Mali, once part of the three West African empires that controlled the highly lucrative trans-Saharan trade from the 8th until the 16th century (the other two were the Ghana Empire and the Songhai empire), is today one of the poorest countries in the world.  Again while the University of Timbuktu, founded in the 11th century by the Tuareg Imashagan is generally thought to be the first university in the world with some 25,000 students in a city of about 100,000 people at its peak, today estimates of literacy rate in Mali are in the dismal ranges of 27–30% to 46.4%, with the rates significantly lower among women.

Five, though the declaration of  a secessionist state of Azawad by the Tuaregs in the North of the country through their National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) has been roundly condemned by the African Union, ECOWAS and the ‘international community’ in line with the African Union’s position on  the sanctity of inherited colonial borders, there is a need to revisit the conditions under which nationalities in African states should be allowed to  decide if they want to continue being part of their colonially constructed State. This should not by any means be construed to means favouring balkanization of African States but with countries like Eritrea and South Sudan achieving independence from Ethiopia and Sudan respectively after protracted armed struggle, there is a need to avoid giving the impression that prolonged military campaign is the only way to force the international community to respect a group’s quest for self-determination. The Tuaregs, a Berber people with a traditionally nomadic pastoralist lifestyle, has been fighting for self determination since Mali’s independence in 1960.  Since the 1990s, there has been a Tuareg ethnic revival with its own flag of red, white, and blue. I am not arguing for the so called Republic of Azawad to be recognised. The point is that with most African countries still unable to transit into proper nation- states after more than 100 years of forced statehood and with demands for a sovereign national conference to decide if the nationalities that make up Nigeria want to continue being together reaching a crescendo, there may be a need to evolve rigorous criteria for assessing the demand for self determination by various nationalities that make up African States. This is especially so when the crisis in the nation-building project of most Africa countries feeds into the problems of underdevelopment to create a whole range of issues for these countries. 

Though there are several successful cases of previously independent nationalities being welded together to form an ‘imagined community’  such as Germany,  there are equally several instances of nationalities which divorced or are agitating for divorce after years or even centuries of being together. Mali for instance was once part of French Sudan, then known as the Sudanese Republic, which joined with Senegal in 1959 to achieve independence in 1960 as the Mali Federation. Shortly after however Senegal withdrew from the federation and the Sudanese Republic declared itself the Independent Republic of Mali.  Similarly the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which was created between August 1 and October 23 1953 imploded on December 31 1963, giving birth to present day Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.  In the UK, Scottish and Irish resistance to being part of the United Kingdom continues despite centuries of being in the union.  My personal opinion is that instead of insisting on the sanctity of colonial borders and selectively violating that doctrine the challenge should be to evolve rigorous conditions which nationalities that want to walk away from the colonially constructed nation-states should meet. The impression must not be given by default that self-determination could only be achieved through the shedding of blood that prolonged armed struggle often entails. After all Czechoslovakia was able to achieve democracy through a ‘Velvet’ or ‘Gentle Revolution’, which subsequently enabled a peaceful dissolution of the country in 1993, resulting in the birth of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.