In addition to being an anxiety-provoking geographical area, West Africa is also homogeneous in its political and security dynamics. The crises that have shaken it for more than three to four decades have not been localized in a single country.
They had ramifications between several States until they became conflict dynamics with an arc of crisis crossing the entire sub-region. At the beginning of the 1990s, a process of democratization was initiated, following the La Baule Conference, where the President of France at the time, François Mitterrand, urged the continuation of development aid for a democratic opening. What followed was the era of National Conferences which allowed many in this geographical area to breathe the air of democracy. At the same time, on another side of West Africa, the Mano River area will experience bloody rebellions and repeated coups d’état in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone.
We had to wait until the beginning of the 2000s to see another process of democratization initiated in our sub-region with democratic alternations and peaceful political transitions following elections. Senegal will thus set an example with the coming to power of Me Abdoulaye Wade. In Guinea-Bissau too, the same process is noted, as well as in Côte d’Ivoire with Laurent Gbagbo.
This period seemed to anchor our sub-regional space in a democratic dynamic which was growing. Today, all these efforts carried out for three decades by the internal dynamics of a strong civil society, the media, committed youth and also external pressures, risk being in vain. As since 1990, the political and security dynamics are of such homogeneity and anxiety that we must fear for our sub-regional space.
In 4 years, four coups d’état, in Mali, Burkina, Niger, Guinea, have been counted. This outbreak of hemorrhagic fever presents with the same warning signs, the same symptoms. Thus, a real phenomenon of communicating vessels. From Mali to Niger via Burkina Faso, the same reason is given to justify the takeover of power by the military: the deterioration of the security situation in the face of jihadist terrorism. As if this issue is not the responsibility of the Defense and Security Forces whose main mission is to defend territorial integrity.
These putschists, as if they had spread the word, evoke the evils of foreign interference, mainly from France, under sovereignist overtones. This sovereignism is thus of variable geometry with the invitation of other powers such as Russia via its paramilitary groups and mining companies, to come and supplement in the same forms, what the putschists denounce in the approach of their countries “to have at their disposal ‘themselves “.
The other discovery of these military juntas is to have totalitarian thrusts by stifling all discordant voices. This is why it is not surprising to see all these countries banning the broadcasting of foreign and national media as well as the entrapment and recruitment of any political or opinion leader with contrary positions. It is necessary, today, to seek to know how to find the tourniquet which will stop this hemorrhage of putschism which risks making us return to a state of democratic coma.
For the implementation of democracy in West Africa, it took long struggles led by certain political groups, civil societies, the media, with support from outside. The same must be true to put an end to the putschism, with the combination of internal dynamics aided by international pressure. Otherwise our sub-regional space will sail and sway between putschism, sovereignism (with variable geometry), populism, and if we do not take care, towards totalitarianism.
