To be sure, there were a handful of cases during this period in which the military voluntarily withdrew so that electoral democracy and civilian regimes could be restored (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Sudan). These restorations were either brief or, as in Sierra Leone, soon degenerated into personal rule. In a half dozen cases, an incumbent military regime was ousted by another army ruler (Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria). Throughout the quarter century between 1965 and 1990, at any given point, by my calculation, 30 to 40% of African states were headed by rulers of military origin. Still, worth noting is the fact that nineteen states have never experienced a successful military coup since independence.27
As the foregoing suggests, a number of predisposing factors produced the wave of military interventions. A frequent precipitator was paralyzing political impasse, all but beyond resolution by the existing rules. Disillusion with the first-generation regimes was general, whether or not military intervention occurred. Developmental performance, though often respectable in the first independence years, usually fell short of the promises on the campaign trail, especially for the poorer segments of the population. Whispers of corruption in high places began to circulate, and direct experience of extortion by police agents or other officials started to enter daily experience. In a number of countries, European officers had been still atop the military command structure in 1960; by 1965 nearly all were gone.
The spread of discontent was well known to the young officers through their own social networks. In addition—a factor stressed in the influential monograph of Samuel Decalo—corporate grievances on the part of the military along with personal discontents frequently entered the equation.28 In Ghana, for example, the creation of the President’s Own Guard outside the military structure, with special perquisites, angered the regular officers.29 The small independence militaries were lightly armed infantry units; appetites for more exotic armament—aircraft, tanks, and naval vessels—naturally outgrew budgetary possibilities. Factionalism within the military, personal and ethnic, complicated civilian control. Even if the most senior officers maintained regime loyalty, their junior counterparts might not; the original Nigerian coup was carried out by a handful of mostly Igbo majors. An important dimension of the drama of military intervention was the role of very junior or even noncommissioned officers in power seizure; Sergeant Samuel Doe of Liberia in his 1980 coup is a prime example of what Jimmy Kandeh calls the “lumpen militariat.”30 He cites other examples of subaltern coups in Sierra Leone (1968, 1992, 1997), Ghana (1979, 1981), Burkina Faso (1983), and Gambia (1994).
The lessons apparent from the earliest military takeovers now seemed applicable on a continental scale. Swift nocturnal seizure of the capital was unlikely to be resisted by the civil population; indeed, with rare exceptions coups were welcomed. Bureaucracies could be expected to transfer their loyalty to the military regimes. Another critical lesson: there was no international sanction. Cold war competition was already intense by the 1960s in Africa; great powers supported their clientele with security assistance while they held office but surrendered to new realities if a successful coup produced a change in external orientation. The French were an exception; with military detachments in place in the countries most critical to French interests, such as Ivory Coast, Gabon, and Senegal, and the capacity, clearly demonstrated in Gabon in 1964, to intervene and reverse a coup, visible French backing for a regime was effective inoculation against conspiracies. So also was the pervasive reach of French intelligence into the security apparatus of states within the Françafrique orbit, making plotting difficult without discovery.
Success for army conspirators was not automatic. The risks of discovery were substantial, requiring that plotter confine the circle of conspiracy to a narrow set of participants strategically situated and possessing the power to move key units. Defectors might reap attractive rewards for denunciation of the plot. State security organs were on the alert, and foreign intelligence services often had their own networks that might catch the scent of a budding plot. Patrick McGowan has created a data set of all sub-Saharan African coups and unsuccessful coup attempts from 1956 to 2001. He enumerates 108 failed coups, a total that well exceeds the 80 successful ones.31
TABLE 4.1. Successful Coups in Africa, 1952–70
Country Year
Algeria 1965
Benin 1963, 1965, 1965, 1967, 1969
Burkina Faso 1966
Burundi 1966
Central African Republic 1965
Chad 1965
Congo-B 1963
Congo-K 1960, 1965
Egypt 1952, 1954
Gabon 1963
Ghana 1965
Libya 1969
Mali 1968
Nigeria 1966, 1966
Sierra Leone 1969
Sudan 1958, 1969
Togo 1963, 1967, 1967
Uganda 1970
Once coups had succeeded, a standard playbook emerged for transforming the entry legitimacy that disaffection with incumbents usually provided into more enduring patterns of public acceptance. A comprehensive listing of the failings of the outgoing regime normally accompanied the proclamation of the new order. Such rosters of iniquity inevitably included accusations of abuse of power, incompetence, and corruption. A frequent mechanism for translating the coup justification into a veritable “black legend” of the former regime was the swift creation of a commission of inquiry into corruption; inevitably there was ample material to document past predatory behavior, which distracted attention from whatever predatory behavior the incoming rulers might be engaging in. The conspicuous search for the overseas assets of their predecessors accompanied by demands for their return helped keep the misdeeds of their predecessors in the public eye.
Reassuring declarations of the interim, temporary nature of the military mission were also standard fare. The public was usually promised that, once the Augean stables left by the former regime were thoroughly cleansed, a new constitutional order would follow, accompanied by elections and a restoration of civilian rule. The military as national saviors were mere temporary caretakers. To preserve an appearance of continuity, the junta permitted prominent figures from the ousted government, if they immediately rallied to the new order, to hold high office. In Congo-Kinshasa, for example, Mobutu kept the former parliament on salaried employment for a year following his November 1965 coup. Interested external actors, especially those who had the capacity to intervene, were also assured that their interests would be protected. Promises of salary increases for the civil service were likewise a frequent device to consolidate acceptance.
Ideology supplied another avenue for securing legitimacy. New military regimes invariably invoked nationalism as the central dimension of their renovating ambitions. Often, as with Nasser, this reaffirmed nationalism was elevated into a discourse of revolutionary change. The year after seizing power Nasser published his ideological testament as “the philosophy of the revolution.”32 The discursive credibility of the new regime won enhancement when it confronted the British, when it succeeded in nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956, and when it instituted increasingly radical land reforms. For a time the current of Arab socialism linked to Nasser enjoyed commanding political prestige throughout the Middle East.33
Another intriguing use of ideology as a weapon of military legitimation is found in the realm of the Afromarxist state, at one time an important category. The first countries that formally adopted Marxism-Leninism as doctrine—Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Somalia, Madagascar, and Ethiopia—were all headed by military regimes in search of extended legitimacy. To boot, as noted, the five leaders concerned had no prior known intellectual engagement with Marxism-Leninism; however, the concept of the Leninist state with a security infrastructure at its core was a serviceable vessel for military ambitions. In addition, in all these cases the new military rulers confronted a large and assertive intelligentsia for whom Marxism was orthodoxy. This nettlesom
e group was outflanked by regime declaration of Marxist-Leninism as official doctrine, which enabled the regime to deftly purloin its ideological clothing.34
MILITARY AS RULERS
In the outside academic and policy worlds, a mythology of the unique qualifications of the military as custodians of development took form. However retrograde army rule might be in Europe, the argument went, in the developing world the military had several special institutional characteristics that fashioned armies as midwives of modernization. This thesis had five main components.
First, the mission of the army was to be supreme servant of the nation. More than any other institution, the military was imbued with a national ethos. In the context of the perceived fragility of new African states and their susceptibility to ethnic and religious tensions, the resolute territorial commitment of the military was a critical safeguard against fragmentation.
Second, the army was a more highly professionalized institution than its civilian counterparts. Many of its officers had been trained in military academies or advanced training centers abroad and had internalized a culture of technocratic performance. Action-oriented by nature, the military responded with brisk purpose to the challenge of assigned missions.
Third, armies were based on hierarchy, unity of command, and strict discipline. Thus they were less hampered by onerous procedures and inertial tendencies than bureaucracies. These virtues translated into more energetic and efficacious developmental management.
Fourth, military experience was an academy of leadership. Promotion criteria and processes were strictly merit based, which guaranteed the ability of those rising through the ranks to command positions. These selection procedures rewarded superior talents and screened out the incompetent. High military rank was a certificate of leadership competence.
Lastly, and most importantly, all these qualities permitted armies in power to establish stable patterns of rule, which in turn created the conditions for economic development. The technocratic managerial style of the military organization translated to efficient operation of the state. Stability promoted confidence and the predictability conducive to investment flows.35
None of these claims stood the test of time or were borne out by actual experience of military rule. Along with an undoubted national ethos within the military there were ethnic imbalances and tensions mirroring those in the larger society. Colonial constabularies frequently had been recruited primarily from areas lacking in educational infrastructure, especially from certain communities in the hinterland, such as the Tiv in Nigeria, the Kabre in Togo, the Acholi in Uganda, and the Kamba in Kenya. The British in particular imported from India a “martial races” theory for rank and file soldiers, holding that particular communities had special military aptitudes. African officers, late to be recruited, required some secondary instruction and were often of different regional provenance than the rank and file. Thus the new postindependence armies had sharp ethnic imbalances, both in terms of overall demographic composition and representation in the officer corps. Such ethnic disparities were critical factors in the 1955 mutiny of the Sudan Equatoria Corps and the 1966 Nigerian military coups, events leading directly to civil wars. The imbalances in recruitment often increased when armies took power; the top leaders were then influenced by what Cynthia Enloe terms an ethnic security map and favored recruitment in those zones whose loyalty to the military hierarchy might be presumed by their identity affinities.36
The professionalism, discipline, and leadership talents of African militaries varied widely. Those armies rarely or never exposed to the temptations of power exercise, such as those in South Africa, Tunisia, Senegal, Botswana, and Zambia, perhaps correspond to the admiring portrait drawn by analysts touting the benefits of military rule in developing countries. In its first years of rule, the Nigerian military drew positive reviews, particularly in its management of reconciliation following the brutal 1967–70 civil war. After extended periods of power, particularly under the rule of the last military autocrat and the most deplorable one, Sani Abacha, it was inevitable that the army leadership would end up being guilty of colossal corruption. Indeed, former U.S. ambassador John Campbell has argued that the key figures in recent decades of Nigerian politics, in particular Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, Yakubu Danjuma, and Shehu Yar’Adua, all were positioned following their leadership in the 1967–70 civil war and subsequent rise to general rank to accumulate huge fortunes that would ultimately finance their role as candidates, godfathers, and rainmakers in competitive politics.37
Stability as a benefit of army rule is likewise problematic. Some military rulers remained in power for very long periods; Qadhafy in Libya ruled for forty-two years, Eyadéma in Togo for forty, Mobutu in Congo-Kinshasa for thirty-two, and the military lineage in Egypt (Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak) for more than a half century, but such longevity usually coincided with gradual corrosion of the state. Though Ellen Trimberger might celebrate the Nasser regime as a prototype of revolutionary development from above in 1978, almost no one would advance a comparable claim for Mubarak in his twilight years.38 But military regimes by their nature choke off all normal possibilities for leader succession, leaving only a new army coup, revolt in the periphery (Chad 1982, 1990; Ethiopia 1991; Congo-Kinshasa 1997), or eruption of the urban street (Sudan 1964, 1985; Benin 1989; Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya 2011) as a remedy for the inevitable corrosion of power. Of the thirty-four countries experiencing at least brief periods of army rule, only in Gambia was there a successful military intervention whose leader retained power thereafter without further forcible displacement (and in this case dates only to 1994).
The related claims that political stability under military rule ensures successful economic management are likewise difficult to sustain. Any clear overall correlation linking higher levels of economic growth with military management would be difficult to demonstrate. Decalo shreds the claims for superior macroeconomic management in the case of the four countries he explores in depth (Togo, Benin, Congo-Brazzaville and Uganda).39 Admittedly, there are instances of military rulers, particularly early in their tenure, acquiring a reputation for economic renovation and renewal. Nasser in his early years won wide admiration for his radical land reforms and successful nationalization of the Suez Canal, which has remained one of the rare large African public enterprises to operate profitably and efficiently. From his 1965 power seizure till his 1979 death, Houari Boumedienne in Algeria combined a still legitimating ideology of populist socialism, the mystique of the liberation struggle, and a technocratic statism with the substantial oil revenues fueled by the 1973 and 1979 price booms to produce an image of success. In my 1982 book comparing African ideological pathways, I concluded, based partly on the views of Algerian specialists I consulted, that “the balance of evidence is in many respects positive for the radical populist—and statist socialism in Algeria.”40 Only a few years later, in 1988, this favorable reading was belied by the wave of urban riots reflecting accumulated social anger of the new generations at the stagnation of the politico-military machine and dimming the legitimacy of the liberation mythologies. Congo-Kinshasa ruler Mobutu in his early years enjoyed high prestige internationally and broad support domestically for the stabilization of the economy, the restoration of effective rule, and enchanting prospects of rapid progress.41 The early admiration for Mobutu rule long ago faded in the face of deepening corruption and public disaffection and colossal policy miscalculations bankrupting the state. There were a few other African military leaders held in high regard until late in their rule, including Sangoulé Lamizana of Burkina Faso, Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda, and Yakubu Gowon of Nigeria. But military takeovers have also placed a number of the most catastrophic leaders in presidential palaces: Idi Amin in Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central African Republic, and Samuel Doe in Liberia. Yahya Jammeh in Gambia shows signs of following in their footsteps, as he exhibits increasingly bizarre behavior. Now insisting on being addressed as His Excellency President Profe
ssor Yahya Jammeh, he claims to have a secret herbs and a banana medicinal remedy for HIV/AIDS, conducts large-scale witch hunts rounding up hundreds who are coerced into drinking a foul-smelling witch-finding liquid, threatens to behead gays, and has presided over the disappearances and assassinations of journalists.42
Despite the promises of a return to civilian rule after a period of cleansing that have normally been made at the time of power seizure from 1965 on, only rarely have army rulers fulfilled such pledges (Ghana in 1969 and 1979, Nigeria in 1979, Sudan in 1965, Burkina Faso in 1971), and in all these instances the newly elected civilian regimes were soon ousted. Rather the military regime changed clothing and ostensibly civilianized itself. A new constitution would permanently extinguish whatever shreds of legitimacy that still clung to the former rulers. A new political party would be launched, embodying the renovation program of the military. The nomenclature of power could also be civilianized; the general became the president in everyday reference. A large fraction of the political class could be recuperated, in return for a place at the table.
This script describes the pattern pursued by most regimes issuing from military coups until 1990. Indeed, it was first drafted by Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt following his 1954 takeover, through his Arab Socialist Union (which replaced two previous unsuccessful efforts to form an effective single party, the Liberation Rally and the National Union). Muammar Qadhafy initially modeled his Libyan regime in 1969 on the Nasser design, though he soon abandoned it in favor of his own quixotic “state of the masses” described in chapter 2. In three cases (Algeria, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau), the new military rulers were embedded in an existing single party and preserved it as part of the new fabric. In almost all other cases, the former dominant party was contaminated by its association with the ousted regime, and it would have implied a residual legitimacy of the old order to preserve it; dissolution and erasure were the remedies.
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