This bazaar is not so bizarre

If you’ve been following West African headlines recently, you might feel like you’re browsing a bizarre marketplace of political satire. The latest item on offer? An unsuccessful coup in Benin, where a group of soldiers briefly seized the state TV station to announce the dissolution of the government before being swiftly dislodged. This event is not an isolated oddity but part of a sprawling “coup bazaar” stretching from the Sahel to the Atlantic. As of late 2025, seven African nations are under military rule, with Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Sudan, Madagascar, and Guinea-Bissau forming a grim roaster of interrupted democracies. To the outside observer, this epidemic might seem reactionary,  irrational… and bizarre. But a closer look reveals this bazaar is not so bizarre at all. It is, rather, a logical, almost inevitable, reaction to a toxic cocktail of malignant leadership, enduring neo-colonial control, and a profound generational awakening that has run out of patience. Far from bizarre, this coup bazaar is the logical haggling in a marketplace long rigged against the buyers. The failed coup in Benin is a perfect microcosm of the region’s wahalas. This is a nation once hailed as West Africa’s democratic darling… now it is auditioning for the coup chorus line. The plotters, calling themselves the “Military Committee for Refoundation,” cited the deteriorating security situation and the neglect of soldiers as their motivation. Comical? Sure, in its brevity: it was a coup that lasted shorter than a Super Story plot twist. Their attempt triggered a now-familiar regional script: the immediate deployment of an ECOWAS standby force, with troops from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone rushing to “preserve constitutional order”. On Tuesday, the bloc followed that up with the declaration of a state of emergency to somehow manage the spiral through methods that are by and large mere harm reduction regimens. Notably, Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, in a decisive move, ordered Nigerian fighter jets into Beninese airspace to help dislodge the mutineers. This rapid international response underscores the contagious fear among regional elites. Yet, it does nothing to address the root causes that make such putsch attempts thinkable in the first place. The background sequence to this crisis has clear, compounding layers. The first is the abysmal failure of the political class. Across the continent, almost every African country is under siege by leaders who are corrupt, visionless, and spectacularly inept at delivering basic security or prosperity. This creates a vacuum of legitimate authority. The second, deeper layer is the stubborn reality of neocolonialism. As Kwame Nkrumah noted decades ago, political independence has mostly  been followed by a new form of economic and strategic subjugation. Control over critical resources, foreign policy alignment, and even domestic social policies as well as security arrangements often remain tethered to former colonial powers or new external actors, operating through subterranean channels that offer plausible deniability. The result is a frustrating paradox… because these are sovereign nations whose economies are in the hands of the largest conglomerates of Western countries, leaving their youthful populations hungry, unemployed, and disillusioned. This is a recipe for disaster. This brings us to the pivotal third layer–a seismic generational shift. Africa is the world’s youngest continent, and this demographic is not just growing in number but in consciousness too. Connected to global livewires through technology, young Africans are being disabused of the myth of innate Western superiority and their own supposed inferiority. The coups are not mere military mischief; they are the birth pangs of a generational rupture. Africa’s youth—over 60% under 25—have come of age not in the shadow of independence anthems, but amid smartphones streaming the world’s inequities in real time. They’ve scrolled through the rabbit holes of TikTok exposés and Twitter threads, unmasking the myth of Western infallibility. Once, subliminally, many bought the colonial script: Europeans as enlightened overlords, Africans as eternal apprentices, backwardness a congenital curse rather than a contrived one. But now? They’ve seen the West’s hypocrisies, incompetence and even sheer idiocies laid bare—murderous wars for “democracy”, the economic wars that had the net effect of creating the BRICS bogeyman and handed back the “Trump” cards the West, particularly the US, held against China and Russia back to these countries and to the larger Global South. The new Africa now identifies its backwardness not as a racial destiny but as a direct result of poor governance and exploitative international systems. This awakening has dramatically shaped the African political culture. It is clear as day that there is a move away from formal democratic participation towards direct, issue-based protest. Young Africans are today demystifying complex things like tax laws and mobilising without central leaders, a powerful statement that this generation is no longer willing to suffer in silence. When the ballot box seems rigged or irrelevant, and protest is met with repression, like we’ve seen recently in Tanzania and Cameroon, the desire for change does not evaporate—it seeks another outlet. In most African states, that outlet has only one door: the military… yes, that iron-fisted uncle everyone resents but relies on. In Africa’s fractured polities, the armed forces remain the sole institution with the tanks to back up the tantrums. And it’s not really about altruism most of the time; it’s opportunism dressed in fatigues, generals cashing in on the crowd’s roar like savvy market traders spotting a riot at the livestock shed. Therefore, the military becomes the involuntary, and often unwilling, vehicle for popular discontent. Coups rarely occur in a vacuum; they are usually heralded by widespread agitation. The soldiers who step forward are, in one sense, an extension of popular desperation. However, to view them as altruistic patriots is naive. The military brass is adept at leveraging this latent popular sentiment as a currency they can cash in for power, blending opportunism with a narrative of salvation. This dynamic turns the coup into a paradoxical “referendum”—a violent, unconstitutional poll on the government’s performance. The paranoia this breeds among sitting leaders is perhaps the most telling indictment of the status quo. Consider our own President Bola Tinubu. In October 2025, rumours of a failed coup plot by mid-level “fellow Nigerians” sent shockwaves through the country’s security apparatus, prompting fierce denials from the Defence Headquarters. The government’s frantic response to these whispers, alongside the lightning-fast military assistance to Benin, reveals a leader mortally terrified of military adventurism. This fear is a confession. It admits that the social contract is frayed, that economic pain and perceptions of exclusion are feeding dangerous ideas within the very institution meant to protect the state. A leader secure in his popular mandate and the health of his nation does not govern in the shadow of such dread. There are, of course, those who stubbornly hold out for hope, and I am one of them. It is arguable that the Timubu government is painstakingly laying an administrative foundation for a rapid, Asian-tiger-style takeoff. The recent elevation of the immediate past CDS, Gen. Christopher Musa as the new Minister of Defence is one very clear signal of a genuine desire for positive impact. This is the optimistic script: that reform from within can preempt the lure of the barracks. Yet, for millions, patience has expired. The coup bazaar is their brutal, messy, and dangerous marketplace of last resort. It is a symptom of a quiet mass enlightenment that has diagnosed the disease but is forced to consider risky, invasive surgery because the statutory doctors have failed. Therefore, to find this wave of coups so strange is to misunderstand Africa’s current historical moment. There is a grim recalibration happening, and each tank rolling into a capital, each soldier on state TV, is a desperate signal that the old order—of both domestic misrule and international manipulation—is intolerable. The phenomenon is tragic, as coups often bring their own forms of repression and instability. But the popular applause that sometimes greets them is a deafening critique of what came before. This bazaar is open for business not because Africans are inherently chaotic, but because they are finally, fully awake and out of palatable options. Until the roots of disillusionment are addressed, this market will have plenty of customers.

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