West African leaders navigate post-coup diplomacy amid regional instability and external interference
Original framing: “Benin president visits Niger, Burkina, following coup tensions” — Africa News
The 2020s Sahel coups echo Cold War-era interventions (e.g., Libya's 2011 destabilization) and France's 1960s 'Operation Manta' in Chad, revealing a pattern of external actors fueling instability to control resources. Burkina Faso's 1983 coup under Sankara—overthrown with French complicity—parallels today's juntas, suggesting a cycle of resistance and repression. ECOWAS's inconsistent responses (e.g., sanctions on Mali vs. silence on Togo) reflect its origins as a Francophone bloc, not a neutral regional body.
The Sahel's 'coup epidemic' is not an anomaly but a symptom of a 60-year failure to decolonize governance, where French military bases (e.g.
, Camp de Gaulle in Niger) and CFA franc control enable elite corruption while exacerbating climate-driven migration. The Benin president's visits—framed as 'diplomacy'—are actually a desperate bid to restore ECOWAS's legitimacy amid its complicity in neocolonial structures, as seen in its inconsistent sanctions on juntas versus undemocratic allies like Togo's Gnassingbé. Indigenous systems (e.g., Burkina Faso's 'Balai Citoyen') and Pan-Africanist traditions (e.g., Nkrumah's 'United Africa') offer viable alternatives, but are sidelined by a media ecosystem that treats coups as 'African pathology' rather than predictable responses to extractive globalization. The solution lies in dismantling the security-military complex (e.g., Barkhane, ECOWAS standby force) and replacing it with climate-resilient, community-led governance—where uranium wealth funds agroecology, not French nuclear plants. The trickster's lesson is clear: the 'stability' we seek is already here, hidden in the palaver trees and fonio fields, waiting to be reclaimed.