It is difficult to have a clear opinion on whether to say yes or no to coups for the simple reason that there have been various types of coups in Africa!
Comrade H-Alpha Traore
President of the Youth of the African Democratic Revolution (JRDA) of the Democratic Party of Guinea-African Democratic Rally (PDG-RDA)
Nothing could be further from my mind than to[1] defend a coup d’état here and reject another there. It is my duty to place each coup d’état in its real context so that everyone can make their own choice or analysis and add the piece they consider missing to the puzzle.
At this point, it is worth remembering that Africa, our continent, has known three types of coups d’état to date.
1. Coups d’état plotted by imperialism or colonialists against the African peoples
The coups d’état plotted against the African people since the dawn of independence were nothing more than the reaction of imperialism to effectively question the sovereignty and prospects for emancipation of the vast majority of the African continent, but also to demonstrate the inability of our States through the instability it causes, to demonstrate that our people, the African people, were wrong to take their sovereignty and their designs into their hands.
It must be recognized that imperialism, with its rapid reaction, has managed to regain control of the majority of our States at that time: just look at Togo, where Africa registered its first coup d’état in January 1963, that immediately slowed down and disoriented this young nation! The same can be said of other States such as Dahomey, today Benin, which suffered its first coup d’état in November 1965; the Central African Republic in December 1965, Upper Volta in January 1966, Nigeria and Ghana in the same year, to name just a few.
Needless to say, these coups d’état contributed to slowing down or even stopping the progressive momentum of these countries. Worse still, at the head of all these countries, imperialism has been represented by stateless people being paid y and has established this system of flawed democracy that I call demonocracy[1] because it contains all the forms of debauchery and debasement that lead to the second type of coup d’état commonly known as a constitutional coup!
These types of coup d’état deserve to be condemned with the utmost energy by a revolutionary who must, through the people and all the working masses, prepare an instant reply, as our predecessors taught us when they learned the lessons of previous coups d’état throughout the world, particularly in Latin America, in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, in all the dark massacres in Nigeria, those in Patrice Lumumba’s Congo, in the assassination of Captain Thomas Sankara, etc.; to name just a few, and they have worked their entire lives to launch popular, coordinated, instantaneous and effective responses.
2. “Constitutional” coups d’état
This other type of coup d’état, like the first, is equally anti-popular and perpetrated against the people by “democratically elected” presidents that imperialism appoints to defend its interests. Once their mandate has ended, they are normally forced by their supposed democracy to hand over power to remain in it; something that we understand perfectly, since in their positions, at the risk of having to show their faces for their catastrophic balance sheet and due to the fear of being judged by the people, they have to remain in power.
In this category are Paul Bya, from Cameroon; Alassane Ouattara, from the Ivory Coast, and Alpha Condé, from the Republic of Guinea, to name just a few. These shameless leaders have manipulated and modified constitutions, obtained illicit profits at the expense of the people, bought the consciences of the people to remain in power for their own selfish interests and, worst of all, they have disoriented the youth of the continent, our continent, the African youth!
These henchmen in the exclusive pay of imperialism confiscate the powers of the people for the benefit of a small group to which they do not even belong, and they continue to lie and manipulate the popular masses! But as the responsible comrade Ahmed Sékou Touré said: “You can deceive an individual and a part of the people for a moment and all the time, but as for the entire people, you can only deceive them for a moment, but never all the time.” They will discover the truth and realize the manipulation, deception and false pretense of which they have been a victim all this time; I can assure you with certainty that, from that moment on, nothing and no one will be able to stop them! And this is certain: no matter how powerful the firepower of the reactionaries is, no matter how complex their destabilization strategies are, they will no longer be able to stop the march of conscious peoples in struggle!
Today, you don’t need a drawing or a graphical table to understand that the vast majority of the African continent is in this last phase, which we call the reaction of the people to the government of the reactionaries.
3. Reaction of the people to the government of the reactionaries
This third type of coup d’état differs from the previous two in subject and object.
This other type, unlike the other two, is carried out by the people, who, as we have said, come to a point when they can’t take it anymore, rejecting the realities with which they are confronted, realities, of course, wanted and carefully prepared by imperialism and neocolonialism with the sole objective of getting the best out of it; realities, no matter how simple and basic, that reactionaries and stateless people turn into mystics to deceive the people! But as we have said, once the masks are removed and the objective conditions are met, then the reaction of the people will be so spontaneous and so brutal everywhere and at all times that they will wonder which of their parts has become defective.
Alpha Condé of the Republic of Guinea and his government will not tell us otherwise, will Mohamed Bazoum of Niger and his government? And Burkina Faso or Mali? To name just a few.
These neocolonialist turncoats have been guilty of the highest treason against their people, and at some point the people naturally decided to take their destiny into their own hands, hence the multiplicity of coups d’état in Africa in recent times!
However, although these coups d’état are the expression of a popular will, should we support them or fight them?
As patriots, revolutionaries, socialists and friends of the people, in order not to find ourselves in the position of having to choose between a good coup d’état and a bad one, we must avoid coups d’état at all costs because, in any case, they are a brake on the development of a nation!
Let us not lose sight of the fact that, in most cases, popular coup plotters have all the objective conditions, but they cruelly lack subjective conditions, control or even knowledge of the systems; because they lack ideological training and, therefore, revolutionary consciousness!
That is why it is the duty of all militants of the Socialist Revolution, of all progressive peoples, to arm themselves with the most formidable weapon, political, ideological, scientific and technical training, and with the most ardent desire to rehabilitate African history, to save the Africa of today and serve the Africa of tomorrow!
Finally, we must mobilize and unite all progressive revolutionary forces, and prepare ourselves in all fields to be able to control our systems and prevent Africa from any form of coup d’état, this must be the position of a revolutionary!
[1] Empire of a demon.