SONALA OLUMHENSE FROM PUNCH
How does a smart African leader guarantee that there is no coup d’etat against him?
In Cameroon, 90-year-old President Paul Biya on Wednesday undertook a wide-ranging “reshuffle” of his country’s defence ministry and armed forces, hours after a coup next door in Gabon, the eighth in West and Central Africa in just three years.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame deployed a similar approach that involved the retirement of about one dozen generals, 83 senior officers, six junior officers and 86 senior non-commissioned officers. In addition, 678 soldiers were let go following the end of their contracts, and 160 others were discharged on medical grounds.
In Gabon itself, President Ali Bongo, in the 56th year of his family’s stranglehold on power, seemed to have just enough in his body to cry out in one final video.
Speaking in English, he asks his friends all over the world to “make noise”—which he repeats several times—about his plight.
Noise. Think about that.
“The people here have arrested me and my family,” he laments. “My son is somewhere, my wife is in another place … Right now, I’m at the [presidential] residence and nothing is happening. I don’t know what’s going on…”
A coup is strange. Powerful and all-important one moment, a man dreaming of returning to the glamour and bombast of the United Nations General Assembly in a matter of weeks finds himself suddenly cast adrift. Nobody is accepting orders let alone implementing them.
Worse still, everyone appears not to hear the words emanating from his mouth, which is why loud banging and clanging for “noise” may be called for.
Some of Bongo’s friends heard his call last week. But just as he forgot to speak in French, they heard the message for themselves. They heard him to be saying that they must save themselves. It is why, in Cameroon and Rwanda, the presidents were rearranging the administrative furniture.
In West Africa, everyone has seen the political pantomime following the preceding coup in the Republic of Niger. The Economic Community of West African States immediately issued a threat to use force to restore constitutional order in that country.
That threat was laughed out of court: the court of public opinion, that is, first in Niger, and then all over the region. In that country, they held street protests in support of the coup, drew unflattering images of Tinubu, erected caricatures, and called him names.
The deepest guffaws were in Nigeria, which is ruled by Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a man whose grip on the political power he wields in his country is sadly as slippery as his credibility as a person.
For a people who often do not agree on anything, Nigerians presented a unanimous front before Mr Tinubu: if he wanted to go to war, it would be his war, not their nation’s. His threats quickly shrivelled.
Following the events in Gabon, Tinubu then revealed a changed worldview: that diplomatic options now have priority on the Niger issue. But apparently troubled about his own fate, he said “copycats will [engineer other coups in Africa] until it is stopped.”
He was speaking to Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, the Sultan of Sokoto, a pacifist who was already privately involved in the diplomatic chase since the coup in Niger while Tinubu was sabre-rattling.
