If military coups are bad, what about despotism?

When President Mamadou Tandja of Niger was overthrown last week, the perennial question over the legitimacy of military coups returned to the fore.

Quicker than bolts of lightning, the international, regional and sub-regional organisations that interest themselves with governance expressed their condemnation. The UN, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), the European Union, as well as the United States, all more or less gave an ultimatum to the military junta that had seized power: Return Niger to constitutional rule, or you are damned. The African Union went a mile further; the organisation suspended Niger’s membership.

Should ordinary Africans celebrate that, at last, the international community is pushing its tolerance of military rule towards zero?
We assume that the main objection to military coups is because the acquisition of power by the use of force makes such power arbitrary. This assumption runs side-by-side with the one that the acquisition of power through a constitutional democratic electoral process puts on that power the seal of legitimacy; it is power mandated by the full body of adult citizens.

I have no problem with those assumptions, but I find it absurd that international organisations and (especially) Western countries place so much more emphasis on the illegitimacy of all military coups than on the lack of legitimacy apparent in so many non-military administrations on the continent.

Even when a very substantial part of the body of adult citizens in its unrefined street ways expresses approval of a military coup, representatives of the international community generally adopt the posture that they are not impressed.

For practical reasons, governments and big organisations prefer to deal in (and with) simplified situations. Complexity makes action more difficult. Take a military coup; anyone can tell when a government has been overthrown. So it is very easy to identify and confront the enemy, the new regime.

On the other hand, it is a hard task to identify the exact moment when a despotic regime has slipped to a level where it could no longer be described as legitimately holding the mandate of the citizens.

It can be said therefore that part of the problem is a kind of intellectual limitation suffered by most bureaucracies. That is why large organisations are so fond of statistics, simple sets of numbers that are supposedly an objective expression of conditions on the ground, and why those organisations are generally indifferent to more subtle critical explorations of a given socio-economic political condition.

When, for instance, there is an election theft, the degree of theft (as well as the effects of any pre-vote manipulation) often cannot be quantified. So the international community (albeit with a pinch of salt) accepts the ‘victory’, which of course is spelt out clearly in numbers of votes.

When a ruling clique uses the agencies of state power or money to ‘persuade’ legislators to overturn existing constitutional arrangements to extend their stay in power, it is virtually impossible to quantify these forms of manipulation, but the votes in Parliament can be counted. The international community may issue a variety of feeble protests, but generally lives comfortably with the status quo. That is, until there is a generalised upheaval; or... perhaps... a military coup.

It is not by accident that the harshest measure against Niger has come from the African Union. Infested by all types of despots, that organisation has to be the most hypocritical, because its members are the most threatened, and have the most to lose, if military coups were made to look like a symptom of their failure as leaders, or anything less than absolute autonomous evil.

Africa’s people must put a condition to this posturing. Either the international community commits itself to clearly ostracise Africa’s despots masquerading as democrats, or it should preserve its dignity by remaining silent when military coups take place.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator and artist
altacca@yahoo.com