EVENING STANDARD
A special broadcast on national television shows men in berets, body armour and fatigues. They gather around the podium. The announcement is brief: the armed forces are taking over. Gabon today, Niger last month. It’s the eighth coup in Francophone Africa in three years.
There’s a discernible attitude in Britain to all this — not just in the streets, but in the editorial suites. Who cares? Barely covered, barely reported, the coup wave sweeping West Africa — that is remaking West Africa — is being ignored.
Gabon matters because it is another tombstone for the old world order. That military men can imprison a leader like Ali Bongo shows how times have changed. Gabon’s ruling family who have controlled the country for 56 years thought nothing could challenge them. Running a country so rich in oil it was a member of the OPEC price-setting cartel, the Bongos felt they had fossil fuel security. Ruling with exceptionally close ties and stationed troops from the former colonial power, France, they thought they had Western security. And they felt, given the country has — at least on paper — some of Africa’s highest incomes, they had economic security.
But they weren’t living in that world anymore. Written on Bongo’s political tombstone are three lines about Western power. The first, a military failure. Western powers, spearheaded by France, correctly foresaw the risks in the desertifying Sahel region and West Africa and redoubled their efforts. Interventions, special missions and train-and-equip programmes followed. But the 21st century is not the 19th nor even the 20th. Pinprick interventions mostly fail. Internet-connected and IED-armed insurgents usually win. Not only did the West fail to stem jihadist violence, its support empowered the people now executing these coups: the militaries themselves.
Ali Bongo, the Western partner, was no democrat but a dynastic oil-rent syphoning kleptocrat
The second was a developmental failure. Despite decades of programmes and promises for Africa’s development, the money has simply failed to arrive in anything near the quantity needed. To meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (the minimal standards of a decent life) by the end of the decade, markets and governments need to generate $272 billion a year in loans or aid in Africa as a whole. Not only is Western aid and lending insufficient, the Western powers have failed to reform the IMF to allow poorer countries to borrow more. The Western system, seen from a junta’s committee, looks like a bare minimum machine, not a ticket to transformation. Why not simply shrug at the coup if you live in an impoverished Western ally?
