West Africa’s Slow-Onset Crisis

This is, however, merely the latest stage of violence in West Africa. The region was the epicentre of military-led political instability (military coups) in Africa between 1956 and the 2000s and had the largest share of Africa’s military coups. That period ended with the inauguration of the practice of national conferences for transitioning to democracy. Benin’s National and Sovereign Conference of the Bone and Sinew of the Nation became, as the African Peer Review Mechanism argues, ‘the first of its kind in Africa’ which a number of other African states subsequently followed.

It then became the site of one of the world’s most devastating regional conflicts – the Mano River region crisis. It comprised the Liberian Civil War (1989-2003), the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002), Guinea-Bissau Civil War (1998-1999), and the Ivoirian Civil War (2002-2011). It resulted in a severe humanitarian crisis, the creation of Africa’s first regional military intervention force in 1990 (the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group), and the world’s largest peacekeeping operation at the time.

When the Mano River region crisis died down in the early 2000s, terrorism spiralled in the Lake Chad region (Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon), producing Boko Haram, the world’s deadliest terrorist organization by 2015. As the violence committed by Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin has declined in relative terms, the intensification of terrorism in the Central Sahara and Sahel (now concentrated in the tri-border area of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger) has outweighed Boko Haram’s decline. The sub-region has now become a major player in the global epicentre of violent extremist activity.

These fragilities are connected by West Africa’s ‘malformation’—a concept I introduced in an earlier article and a major component of which is coastal-interior material inequalities.

Before 1989, civil wars were relatively uncommon in post-colonial West Africa, save for the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) and the smaller-scale first Tuareg Rebellion (1962-1964). The instability that prevailed was military coups. Not only did sub-Saharan Africa’s first successful military coup occur in West Africa (in Togo), but the region made up the largest share of the sub-continent’s subsequent military coups. As the political scientist Patrick McGowan has documented, out of the 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa that suffered at least one successful coup between 1956 and 2001, 18 have suffered multiple coups, with Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria topping the ranking.

Despite comprising one-third of all independent states in sub-Saharan Africa, West Africa makes up 45.2 per cent of the sub-continent’s failed and successful coups and is the African region most prone to elite political instability. Moreover, out of the six countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have been free of military intervention events, besides the small island of Cabo Verde, not one of them is from West Africa.

The role of coastal-interior inequalities—a primary feature of West Africa’s malformation—in the region’s history of military rule is evident. In the case of the first successful coup in sub-Saharan Africa, which occurred in Togo, the country’s first president, Sylvannus Olympio ‘was a scion of a commercial family from coastal Togo. His government included mainly people who came from southern Togo and belonged to the same ethnic group,’ remarks John Heilbrunn, a professor of international studies. This was until 1963 when the coup brought to power a regime that was more sympathetic to the northern population’s needs. Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who was implicated in the 1963 coup, took power in 1967. As Frédérick Madore notes, Eyadéma claimed ‘to have “saved” the country from an ethnically unbalanced government in which the Ewé and Mina people from southern Togo were overrepresented.’

Similar coups and counter-coups reflecting north-south cleavages occurred in Nigeria (1966), Benin (1967), Sierra Leone (1968), Liberia (1980) and eventually Côte d’Ivoire (1999). In Mali, it was the military mobilization against the first Tuareg rebellion (1962-1964) in northern Mali which placed Mali on the path towards military rule in 1968.

Nigeria and Benin were the poster children of frequent coups. Between 1960 and 1972, Benin experienced eleven presidents (five civilians, six military men), six different constitutions twelve coups d’états, of which five were successful, and a level of political instability earning it the sobriquet enfant malade de I’Afrique. In the background of this instability was enduring rivalry between three political leaders representing the three major political regions of the country (Justin Ahomadegbe in the Southwest, Sourou-Migan Apithy in Porto-Novo and Hubert Maga in the North).

Democratization occurred widely in the 1990s, partly driven by economic difficulties, frustration over the ineffectiveness and instability of military rule and international pressure for democratic rule. Nonetheless, among the fewer coups that have occurred in twenty-first–century Africa, West Africa retains prominence with the failed and successful coups in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau and Niger.

Relative regional stability was maintained between the 1960s and 1970s through state patronage in a period of a growing global economy and commodity prices. This allowed regimes to distribute public funds, political appointments, public expenditure and state parastatals to secure a modicum of inter-regional stability. When commodity prices crashed and the Third World debt crises occurred in the 1980s, these systems of patronage collapsed.

It was in this general context that the Liberian Civil War occurred. It began with Samuel Doe’ military coup in 1980 which ended 133 years of coastal Americo-Liberian rule in Liberia and engaged in systematic killings of prominent members of the Americo-Liberian political class and forcing the majority of them into exile. In 1989, Charles Taylor (an Americo-Liberian with support from the Liberian community in exile) began a rebel assault from the north-eastern province of Nimba, reaching Monrovia by September 1990.

The Liberian Civil War had some spill over effects on Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, amplifying the effects of their own structural vulnerabilities. The large-scale migration of labour from Côte d’Ivoire’s northern region and from neighbouring Sahel countries fuelled economic growth based on cocoa and coffee cultivation in the forest frontiers in the south, leading to a xenophobic backlash. As political scientist Elliot Green observes,

The Mano River region crisis resulted in a severe humanitarian crisis, the creation of Africa’s first regional military intervention force in 1990 (the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group), and the world’s largest peacekeeping operation at the time.