The khaki party is making a spectacular comeback in African politics after a long period in retreat – and there are those who believe that they are welcome

On 6 June and following a well-worn script, General Mohammed Abdelaziz is due to contest Mauritania’s presidential elections, having just cast off his uniform. With the opposition threatening to boycott, the recycled General is certain to win.

The military’s latest round of takeovers in Africa started in Mauritania last August when General Mohammed, the commander of the Presidential Guard, overthrew the elected government of Sidi Mohammed Ould Sheikh Abdullahi. 

Since then the military has seized power in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Madagascar (where they quickly handed over to an opposition leader) – and military factions were accused of plotting coups in Ethiopia and Togo. 

Coups are not remarkable in Mauritania: this is the sixteenth since independence. The take-over was more about power than ideology – several senior officers were due to be retired when the putschists struck. 

A united front

What makes it different this time is that the junta in Nouakchott faces the united opposition of the AU, the EU and the US, which have imposed sanctions and diplomatic boycotts, without discernible effect. 

Since 1999 coup-makers in Africa have faced formal sanction, initially from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and now the AU. Military regimes are to be barred from the meetings of regional organisations and to the councils of the AU in Addis Ababa. This seems to be a stricture with which the putschists are able to live.

The failure of the AU sanctions on coup-makers is partly due to the ambivalence of the organisation’s leadership. This year’s AU Chairman is Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, who celebrates four decades in power this year after toppling King Idris in a coup in 1969. Qadhafi irritated Mauritanian oppositionists when he suggested President Sidi was protesting too much. 

“He isn’t the first civilian leader to be overthrown by soldiers”, Qadhafi said as he proposed negotiations between the soldiers and the new opposition. Qadhafi has also been trying to win some recognition for the military regime in Guinea under Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. 

And Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade, a long-time opposition leader, makes the same case as Qadhafi: isolating military leaders is pointless, so someone should try to negotiate with them. Wade’s pragmatism towards military rulers may be due to the circumstances of his winning power in the 2000 elections; then, Senegalese officers warned incumbent President Abdou Diouf that there would be a coup if he did not respect the election results. 

Uncivil relations

Yet any political role for the military cuts across the intentions of the authors of the AU’s anti-coup edicts. Former presidents of Nigeria and South Africa respectively, General Olusegun Obasanjo and Thabo Mbeki, spoke of the importance of respecting constitutional arrangements at a remarkable but discreet conference organised in Zanzibar by the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and Tanzania’s Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation in late March. 

Also in Zanzibar were former OAU secretary general Salim Salim and former UN under-secretary for political affairs Sir Kieran Prendergast. Although all four referred to the return of the military in politics, there was little consensus about how the issue might be addressed. Mediation would be needed as well as or perhaps instead of sanctions, many argued.


Most people supported the UN-backed mediation attempts in Madagascar, although many feared a rapid deterioration of the situation unless both sides participated in a national conference under the auspices of an independent organisation. That looks an increasingly forlorn hope with the new regime under Andry Rajoelina issuing an arrest warrant for the deposed President Marc Ravalomanana.


Although the crises in Mauritania and Madagascar are both regarded as military coups, their political realities are quite different. In Mauritania, it was the ambitions of a section of the officer class that prompted the putsch; in Madagascar, the opposition gathered national support after Ravalomanana’s security forces shot scores of demonstrators. Indeed, Ravalomanana handed power to the military in the hope that the opposition campaign would be seen as part of a military coup.


According to British academic Arthur Goldsmith, the number of successful coups (that is when a regime holds power for more than a week) in Africa had gradually dwindled over the last five decades: there were 27 from 1960-69; 30 from 1970-79; 22 from 1980-89; 22 from 1990-99; and just five from 2000- July 2008. Since last year, there have been four more. 


This sequence of takeovers has convinced activists such as Deo Lukyamuzi of the Uganda-based Pan African Movement that “the coup demons have come back to haunt us with a vengeance”. The reasons for the khaki party’s success, Lukyamuzi argues, are political. Few governments, elected or otherwise, have earned the people’s trust, so few feel inspired to protest when they are ousted.


For David Mark, a retired Brigadier and now president of Nigeria’s Senate, putchists in the past offered citizens a viable alternative to a bad civilian, or even a bad military, regime. “A coup can never succeed in Nigeria, and probably in most other places, unless it has a popular base for support”, Brig. Mark said before returning to the centre-stage of civilian politics. He should know: as an officer he served in successive military regimes.


But Mark and other officers who have crossed over to civilian politics in Nigeria see events differently these days. Generals Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida and Muhammadu Buhari, all of whom have participated in coups, argue the putschists have immensely weakened the military. Buhari told The Africa Report that a coup today would run the risk of “splitting the military along regional lines with incalculable political consequences.” His verdict is a salutory one for coup-makers: political ambition in the military contains the seeds of its own destruction.