The head of Guinea’s junta said Thursday that the recent coups in Africa are attempts by armies to preserve their countries from presidents’ “broken promises,” as he rejected the West for attempting to box in the continent of more than 1 billion people.
Following the coup in 2021, Col. Mamadi Doumbouya was sworn in as Guinea’s interim president. He reminded the U.N. General Assembly that in addition to denouncing coups, world leaders must also “look to and address the deep-rooted causes.”
“The putschist is not only the person who takes up arms to overthrow a regime,” he told the gathering of world leaders in New York. “I want us all to be well aware of the fact that the real putschists, the most numerous, are those who avoid any condemnation – they are those … who cheat to manipulate the text of the constitution in order to stay in power eternally.”
Eight coups have taken place in West and Central African countries since 2020, including two recently (in Niger and Gabon). Guinea is one of these countries. The military takeovers, which have sparked concern about the stability of the continent, whose young population of at least 1.3 billion is expected to double by 2050 and make up a quarter of the world’s population, have occasionally been celebrated by citizens in those countries and condemned by international organizations and foreign countries.
Doumbouya charged that certain African leaders were harming their people in order to hold onto their positions of authority, frequently by changing the constitution.
He said that in Guinea, he organized soldiers to overthrow Alpha Conde as president in September 2021 in order to save the nation from “slipping into complete chaos.” He claimed that other countries that had experienced coups had comparable situations, which were caused by “broken promises, the people’s complacency, and leaders tampering with constitutions with the sole concern of remaining in power to the detriment of collective well-being,” among other factors.
Attempts by the West and other developed nations to address Africa’s political problems were also rejected by Doumbouya, who claimed that Africans were “exhausted by the categorizations with which everyone wants to box us in.”
“We Africans are insulted by the boxes, the categories which sometimes place us under the influence of the Americans, sometimes under that of the British, the French, the Chinese and the Turks,” the Guinean leader said. “Today, the African people are more awake than ever and more than ever determined to take their destiny into their own hands.”
Although the leader of Guinea supported military takeovers worldwide, there are still questions about how well they work to address the problems they claim prompted them to “intervene.”
According to U.N. experts, the Islamic State group nearly increased the area it controls in Mali, where military have been in charge since 2020. Additionally, Burkina Faso’s economic growth fell to 2.5% in 2022 from a strong 6.9% the year before despite having seen two coups in 2020.
“Military coups are wrong, as is any tilted civilian political arrangement that perpetuates injustice,” said Nigerian President Bola Tinubu. As the leader of West Africa´s regional bloc of ECOWAS, he is leading efforts of neighbors to reverse the coup in the region.
“The wave crossing parts of Africa does not demonstrate favor towards coups,” He said. “It is a demand for solutions to perennial problems.”
