The eight coups that have rocked Africa’s Sahel region since 2020 are a wake-up call: Washington’s efforts to stabilize the region have failed. For too long, the U. S. has acted on the premise that jihadist terrorism is at the root of crises in the Sahel and has therefore funneled military assistance to governments fighting it. But Washington will have to abandon this misconception. The extremist violence and wave of coups that have swept the region are two symptoms of a deeper problem: corrupt and damaged governance that radicalizes civilians and foot soldiers alike. External efforts for Sahel crises will have to move away from security assistance aimed at strengthening countries’ capacity. and focus on building responsive governance that holds Africans, especially young people, the promise of a better future.
The military assistance that the United States and Europe have given to Sahel governments that are unresponsive to their people’s basic needs has contributed to the region’s rise in violence, including coups. These aid programs have too often allowed corrupt regimes to enrich themselves and prioritize their own security at the expense of their societies. Assistance must instead aim to protect the population and counter deprivation and radicalization. Tackling corruption and repression would also pay economic dividends, as the rule of law is a precondition to broad, stabilizing prosperity. Moreover, to thwart coup attempts in the near term, Western partners must support an African-led plan—a so-called short game—that can assemble regional governments, African multilateral organizations, and civil society to immediately counter attempts to overthrow legitimately elected leaders. The prerequisite for these changes is a shift in mindset: the United States and its European allies should treat Africans as valuable partners in regional policymaking rather than as the targets of solutions shaped in Washington or Paris.
A shift toward partnerships with West Africa is important for the security of the United States and the foreign community. In the coming decades, Africa is likely to overtake other regions of the world in terms of population growth, vulnerability to climate change and development prospects. economic development. This increases the threat of crisis and the option to cultivate stronger democracies. The U. S. government declared a move toward partnership at its U. S. -Africa Leaders’ Summit in December 2022. Washington will now have to live up to this commitment and implement this change of mindset in all its policies.
Although many African countries experienced widespread democratic progress beginning in the 1990s, the past decade has seen a decline in the effectiveness of governance and security across the continent. These erosions are not universal or inevitable; According to Freedom House, 11 African countries experienced innovations in political rights in 2022, compared to nine states that experienced declines. But those limited innovations, measured through the Ibrahim African Governance Index, have stalled since 2019, and the decline in security and the rule of law is only accelerating. Corruption and authoritarianism – masked behind a so-called democracy characterized by rigged elections, passed legislatures and corrupt judicial systems – are so widespread that it is estimated that some Africans live in countries that Freedom House considers “not free. “Moreover, the destabilizing damage caused by unresponsive governance, adding to excessive poverty, lingering political grievances, and widespread despair, has only been exacerbated by global wrongs like COVID-19, climate-related wrongs, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The catastrophic multiplier of Africa’s governance failures—and the source of hope for solving them—is the continent’s massive, booming youth population, which by 2030 will constitute a projected 42 percent of the world’s young people. Where democratic openings allow, youth fuel civil society demands for change, as in the case of Nigeria’s 2020 protests against violence by state security forces, Ghana’s 2023 anticorruption rallies, and courageous grassroots pro-democracy movements in Burkina Faso in the mid-2010s and in Sudan beginning in 2018. But where corrupt authoritarianism blocks avenues for peaceful change, diverts national resources, and stifles economic opportunity, the despair of youth can ferment into a social explosive, erupting into extremism, secessionist movements, criminal gangsterism, and even military coups. The chaos that has overtaken the Sahel illustrates both the continent’s rise in instability and the misguided nature of the international community’s military-dominated response. For over a decade, unresponsive, undemocratic governance has bred violent insurgencies throughout the region. Libya’s collapse in 2011 exacerbated communal and jihadi uprisings in nearby Mali that then spread into Burkina Faso and Niger. All told, the wave of coups, jihadi attacks, militia insurgencies, and civil warfare have since turned the Sahel into the global epicenter of terrorism, a crisis zone vastly larger and more populous than other areas of U.S. concern such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But the estimated $3.3 billion that the United States has spent on weapons, training, and other military aid to prevent or contain uprisings over the past 20 years has not addressed the root of the problem.
Instead, such U.S. aid has repeatedly enabled authoritarian regimes to wield deadlier force against civilians, heightening the violence. This aid has also tilted the balance of power away from civilian governments and toward militaries. Recent experience in the Sahel, as well as a 2017 study by scholars at the U.S. Naval War College, suggests an unsurprising outcome in countries where civilian governance is failing and foreign aid is focused on building military muscle: an increased chance of coups. Around the western Sahel, at least seven coups since 2012 were led by military officers or units that had received U.S. training—three in Mali, three in Burkina Faso, and one in Guinea.
By contrast, U.S. efforts to help Africans build the effective, democratic governance essential for political stability are marginal. Aid that is flagged for this purpose constitutes only five percent of the United States’ main development assistance spending for Africa, according to the Congressional Research Service. (Seventy percent of U.S. nonhumanitarian aid to Africa over the past decade has promoted health programs, overwhelmingly to counter HIV/AIDS.)
Since 2005, the United States has implemented the so-called enhanced edition of its security assistance through the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership. It is commendable that this program meets some requirements for a broader policy. Its goal is to integrate defense, international relations and progress efforts across all US agencies. It operates regionally in 11 countries in northwest Africa. And it works for a long period of time. But it suffers from asymmetric implementation, poor budget management and a lack of mechanisms to compare progress, according to tests by the State Department and the General Accounting Office. A more serious challenge is that the program remains a military-focused effort with a patchwork of incremental activities that do not seriously address the basic challenge of governance failure. Like France’s ill-fated nine-year military project in Mali (Operation Barkhane, which ended with France’s withdrawal in 2022), the TSCTP was never a true partnership with Africans. that they can simply help shape and lead. Instead, it follows the style of almost all Western aid, treating the Africans it claims to assist as passive beneficiaries of programs designed abroad.
This absence of Western-African partnership does not simply permit policies to miss their target; it guarantees it. The misplaced focus on military responses to governance-induced upheaval has coincided with an increase in violence. In 2007, in the early years of the TSCTP, the Sahel suffered one percent of the world’s terrorism-related deaths. Over 15 years, those fatalities surged tenfold to constitute 43 percent of the world’s total, according to the Global Terrorism Index. The military forces on which the West has showered training and equipment helped accelerate this collapse in security with abuses of civilians that human rights monitors say may amount to war crimes—and, since 2020, with coups d’état.
The threat of instability and military takeover extends beyond the Sahel and extends to other African countries where the West has tolerated venal and autocratic governments. Many countries whose security is deteriorating fall within France’s classic sphere of influence, known as Françafrique. In September 2023, for example, a junta overthrew President Ali Bongo of Gabon, whose circle of relatives had ruled the country for 55 years with French support, destroying democratic institutions such as elections, parliament, the judiciary and the media, which are helping to shape a buffer. opposed to army coups d’état. The coup in Gabon and the turmoil in other countries that have not experienced extremist uprisings, such as Gambia, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, highlight that the real root of Africa’s instability is not jihadism, but authoritarian and corrupt governments.
To help end the continent’s coups, extremist movements, and other democratic erosions, Western policymakers must work with African partners to address each country’s specific failures of governance. But even as states will require different policy prescriptions, several principles will apply universally.
First, Western governments will have to act together as partners with their African counterparts. The efforts of the U. S. and European governments to promote democracy in Africa are hampered by the withdrawal of those governments from the continent and their long agreement with the brutal bureaucracy of authoritarian governments. as colonizers, buyers of dictators, or both. To help stabilize countries facing coups, the United States and its allies will need to build relationships with their African peers and neighbors that can carry out diplomatic interventions, sanctions, and other measures to prevent coups. The partners’ own international relations will have to magnify the influence of individual African states, regional blocs such as the Economic Community of West African States, known as ECOWAS, and devout and cultural leaders.
Since 1990, ECOWAS has used mediation, political and economic sanctions, and even armed peacekeeping operations to defuse or salvage violent conflicts, adding insurgencies and coups. But its failure to salvage the recent spread of violence across the Sahel (and the recent announcement that Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are contemplating leaving the bloc underscores its existing limitations. The West can assist ECOWAS and other regional establishments that have shown an interest in countering coups d’état by helping them to develop capacities and ongoing processes of mediation and intervention. ECOWAS would also help rebuild its credibility with citizens across West Africa.
Second, the governments of the United States and Europe will have to offer a new type of pro-democracy security assistance that improves not only the kinetic functions of security forces, but also their governance and culture, to ensure that they protect The residents’ rights. boy and respect the laws of war. TSCTP monitoring and evaluation was insufficient and deserves to be reviewed, in part by applying a full diversity of accounting equipment now used in progress assistance, adding public budget reviews, aid packages based in beyond functionality and telephone programs to develop the skills of citizens. to report abuses. Western donors will have to more rigorously condition their aid on smart governance of security forces. The African Union and the continent’s regional blocs will also need to take the lead in creating regional mechanisms for mutually intelligent security governance, human rights protection and anti-corruption efforts, including within military regimes. The European Union is in a particularly strong position to assist in this effort, given its long experience in developing civil-military coordination at a regional level.
Third, Western countries want to step up their practical assistance to democratic establishments across Africa (legislatures, electoral systems, judicial systems, informal media, and civil society) to make the executive branches of government and security forces more accountable. Design this aid using models such as the U. S. Millennium Challenge Corporation. It involves local stakeholders as full-fledged co-designers of each project. Western governments can also play the role they play through civil society leaders when Western officials meet with African partners. for example, by offering those leaders a platform for meetings and direct dialogues with their government representatives. Such symbolic gestures would imply that Western allies are paying attention to the country as a whole, not just others with government credentials.
When failed governance has dissipated public acceptance as true or led to violent conflict, Western partners deserve to help sustained negotiations (formal national dialogues involving all local communities) as an important tool for the reset. Even if such dialogues are only partially successful, they can help. push authoritarian regimes into compromise. In Chad, for example, the army government arrested and exiled political dissidents during the 2022 dialogue, but has since appointed an opposition leader as prime minister for its planned transition to an elected government. The United States and its partners deserve to provide diplomatic and technical assistance to help African countries and regional communities facilitate those dialogues and mediation efforts.
Fourth, Western governments deserve to offer their African partners the prospect of greater Western investment to inspire them to adopt reforms toward greater transparency and the rule of law. This could simply boost democratization by expanding economic expansion, employment and human security. The United States African Growth and Opportunity Act, an industry initiative enacted in 2000 aimed at supporting expansion and encouraging economic and political reforms, has demonstrated how investment can lift Africans, especially women and youth, of poverty; however, it expires next year. . For Washington to credibly show Africans the partnership commitment it declared at its 2022 summit, it will have to design new industrial and investment vehicles before AGOA expires. The US International Development Finance Corporation deserves its loans in Africa and its commitment to potential partners in Africa. The European Union, for its part, deserves to promote its Global Gateway program, which began its promise in 2022 to invest 150 billion euros in African public and personal infrastructure. G-7 countries, led through the United States, are expected to make Africa a precedent in their Global Infrastructure and Investment Partnership, which plans to dedicate $600 billion to projects similar to energy security, generation and capacity. the climate resilience matrix until 2027. These efforts must all work in partnership with African governments and businesses as co-designers in their own right.
During the critical first hours of a coup, as armed juntas struggle to identify control, foreign governments and institutions respond in confusing and futile ways. In August 2023, for example, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, speaking as the chairman of ECOWAS, launched an ill-timed and futile risk of military action against the Nigerian junta, while other governments followed diplomatic methods. To avoid such disorganized reactions, Western partners deserve to work with African governments and regional bodies such as ECOWAS to develop capacities and systems for rapid and coordinated action against coups. These crisis interventions deserve to identify and address a board’s weaknesses and mobilize swift, unified warnings about the resistance it will face if it persists. Such a swift reaction may simply push the juntas to resign or grant a short-term transition to an elected civilian government. Moreover, such coordination systems deserve to work proactively to avoid coups by responding to events – such as stolen elections or leaders’ repeal of constitutional term limits – that provoke them.
Such interventions deserve to maximize the scale and unity of the opposition, whether within a country facing a coup d’état or in the surrounding region. A large-scale, unified reaction is essential, in part because counterstrike efforts can run into obstacles, bringing together opportunistic terrorist groups, local militias, and foreign mandated forces such as Russia’s Wagner paramilitary company. Therefore, African and Western governments will need to be prepared to confront not only a junta and its aiding forces, but also local officials, civil society groups, and devout and network leaders. They deserve to enlist help from the target country’s business network, which is sometimes overlooked but a natural ally, as coups cause economic setbacks.
Africa’s population growth, its vulnerability to climate degradation and mass migration, and its economic potential multiply the global stakes for the continent’s future. Its stability will be determined by Africans’ opportunities to build the democracies that opinion research consistently shows they strongly desire. For the foreseeable future, unresponsive governments, broken economies, and despairing, youthful populations suggest that many African nations will remain prone to coups, violence, and political instability. Yet a Western shift to full partnership with Africans, and an overdue pivot from military-led aid to promoting governance that meets Africans’ needs, can advance stability in a continent that will heavily determine the world’s prospects for peace and freedom in the coming century.