African military interventionism and the illusion of good-fortune [Part 2] – By Dennis Onakinor

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” said the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in an address in 1962. That popular aphorism largely explains why several African post-colonial sit-tight leaders, who had sought to perpetuate themselves in power through the institutionalization of one-party dictatorship and life-presidency, saw themselves toppled by opportunistic military interventionist, although the military opportunists often turned out to be even more villainous than the sit-tight civilian leaders they had overthrown. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah presents a vivid example of such sit-tight leaders who tasted the bitter pills of predatory military opportunism.

Widely regarded as the “Father of African Nationalism” upon Ghana’s attainment of Independence from British colonial rule in 1957, President Nkrumah quickly succumbed to the lure of absolute power with sycophants eulogizing him as “Osagyefo” (The Redeemer). He muzzled the opposition and turned his country into a one-party state with himself as its “Life-President.” Little wonder, on February 24, 1966, he was toppled in a military coup led by General Joseph Ankrah, who then reversed most of the laudable socioeconomic policies and programmes he had implemented in course of his 9-year dictatorship. It was akin to throwing the baby away with the bathwater. Ghana was thus precipitated ineluctably on the path of a crippling socioeconomic decline that would culminate in the 1979 bloody purge of the country’s ruling military elite by Flight Lieutenant John Jerry Rawlings.

“Action! Action! Finish them off!” yelled the jubilant Ghanian masses as Flight Lieutenant Rawlings rounded up three former military heads of state (Generals Akwasi Afrifa, Ignatius Acheampong, and Frederick Akuffo) and cut them down in hails of bullets between June and July 1979. Several other top military officers were also sent to their early grave for their ignoble role in the country’s adversity. A fiery Airforce officer, Rawlings had been sentenced to death for plotting a coup against General Akuffo’s junta in May 1979, but he was freed in a daring rescue operation mounted by renegade military elements, who then asked him to head their putsch against General Akuffo’s junta on June 4, 1979.

Commendably, Rawlings’ quickly relinquished power to the democratically elected government of President Hilla Limann in September 1979, but two years later, on December 31, 1981, he staged a comeback, overthrowing Limann’s government in a military putsch. He then ruled the country as a military dictator for a decade before civilianizing himself in 1992, and then ruled for another eight years as a two-term president before handing over the reins of power to an elected opposition party successor, John Kofi Kufuor. His combined military-democratic rule is widely viewed as an era of good fortune, having effectively revived Ghana’s comatose economy, which had seen its citizens trooping out to seek greener pastures in other African states, especially Nigeria, in the 1970s.

In Liberia, on April 22, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe lined up and gunned down several members of the government of President William Tolbert, whom he had deposed and assassinated ten days earlier. “Freedom! Freedom! Yes, we’ve got our freedom at last!” chanted his jubilant supporters who were mainly from his Krahn ethnic group. Ten years later, they shuddered in paroxysm of fear and helplessness upon seeing gory video images of President Doe being butchered limb-by-limb on the orders of a warlord named Prince Yormie Johnson.

“Cut off his ears!” commanded Johnson as a bloodied President Doe begged for mercy, while Johnson relished every moment of the doglike slaying of the man whose 10-year tyrannical rule had plunged Liberia into a brutal civil war that lasted for 13 years and claimed an estimated death toll of 500,000. The Liberian civil war spilled over into neighbouring Sierra Leone, where proxy rebel groups unleashed unprecedented orgies of bloodletting between 1991 – 2002. It would later be revealed that Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was mainly behind the Liberian insurgency that produced a host of bloodthirsty warlords like Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson, as well as the self-confessed cannibal-militiaman named Josuah Milton Blayi, aka “General Butt Naked.”

As a 27-year-old army officer, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was committed to a radical transformation of the former feudal Kingdom of Libya into a modern “Socialist Arab Republic” following his overthrow of King Mohammed Idris al-Senussi, on September 1, 1969. Towards this end, he initiated several mass-oriented policies and programmes that were financed with increasing oil revenues, having effectively tackled the exploitative tendencies of the multinational oil corporations operating in the country. Also, in March and June 1970, he negotiated the closure of the British and American military bases in the country, prompting most Libyans to conclude that their country was destined for greatness under his junta.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote the 19th Century English scholar and politician, John Dalberg-Acton. Having consolidated state power in his hands, Colonel Gaddafi ruled imperially over his oil-rich desert country. A publicity-seeking mercurial character, he became embroiled in overt and covert conflicts with neighbouring countries, as well as the West – especially the US. It all came to an end on October 20, 2011, when he was killed by NATO-backed rebel forces in course of a raging civil war sparked off by the Arab Spring Protests. The devastating civil war, which also claimed the lives of three of his seven sons, two grandsons, and several other relatives, continues unabated as rival governments based in the city of Tripoli in the West, and the Eastern city of Tobruk, vie for supremacy and oil-rich territories to plunder.

During his record-setting 42-year dictatorship, Colonel Gaddafi cast himself in the mould of an ascetic revolutionary leader, only for the world to realize, upon his demise, that he was a kleptocrat like most African autocrats. Although exaggerated estimates of his wealth range from 100 to 200 billion dollars, there is no denying the fact that he and his family members had Libya’s vast oil resources at their disposal. They stashed away billions of Dollars in Western financial houses even as Gaddafi railed endlessly against Western imperialism and neocolonialism, in the usual manner of most African kleptocratic tyrants.

In Burkina Faso, on November 7, 1982, the country’s junta leader, Colonel Saye Zerbo, was overthrown by Major Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo with the help of four young army officers, including Captains Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaore. But Major Ouedraogo soon fell out with his putschist colleagues, hence he was toppled by Captain Sankara with the active support of Captain Compaore, on August 4, 1983. Seeking to live up to his revolutionary billing, Sankara changed the country’s name from “Upper Volta” to “Burkina Faso” (Land of Dignity) on August 4, 1984.

It was the Cold War era, and Captain Sankara’s strident anti-imperialist rhetoric riled the country’s former colonial master – France, and the US too, while regional conservative leaders like Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire were piqued by his infectious revolutionary zeal. Also, his domestic programmes of land reforms, universal education, and gender equality pitted him against ethno-religious interest groups. Assailed by both internal and external opposition forces, his days in power were numbered. On October 15, 1987, Captain Compaore killed him and several loyalists in a bloody palace coup. As a junta leader, Compaore went on to civilianize his rule in 1991 and perpetuated himself in power until a mass-uprising terminated his 27-year dictatorship on October 30, 2014.

Upon toppling President Dauda Jawara of The Gambia on July 22, 1994, a 29-year-old Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh proceeded to civilianize his junta and perpetuate himself in power, boasting to a BBC reporter in 2011 that he would rule the country for a “billion years if that was the will of Allah.“ In the manner of Uganda’s Idi Amin, he acquired a string of meaningless titles: “His Excellency, Sheikh, Professor, Alhaji, Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Anwal Jemus Junkung Jammeh, Nasirul Deen, Babili Mansa, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Chief Custodian of the Sacred Constitution of The Gambia, and the Grand Master of the National Order of the Republic of The Gambia.”

A self-aggrandizing fetish tyrant, Jammeh organized a national witch-hunt exercise in 2009, when he alleged that the death of a favourite aunt was the handiwork of witches and wizards. According to Amnesty International, the witch-hunt exercise claimed the lives of an unknown number of both old and young victims, who were subjected to inhumane acts of trial-by-ordeal. Earlier in 2007, he claimed that he had discovered a cure for the dreaded AIDS pandemic and compelled several HIV-positive patients in The Gambia to embrace his bogus cure, thus occasioning the avoidable death of many. He also maintained that he had cures for hypertension, high-blood pressure, asthma, epilepsy, and infertility, in what was generally perceived as a measure of his fetishism-induced lunacy.

Defeated in a presidential election in December 2016 by Adama Barrow (the country’s present leader), President Jammeh refused to concede defeat and was given an ultimatum to quit power peacefully by January 19, 2017, or be forced out militarily. And when an ECOWAS intervention force comprising Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Senegalese troops rumbled into his country on D-Day, he then realized the futility of his recalcitrance. On January 21, 2017, he proceeded into exile in Equatorial Guinea, where Africa’s longest-ruling civilianized junta leader, Teodoro Nguema Mbasogo, welcomed him heartily. Birds of a feather flock together.

When Lt. Colonel Teodoro Mbasogo overthrew President Macias Nguema in August 1979 and had him executed by a firing squad in September 1979, Equatoguineans heaved a sigh of relief. For, President Nguema, who led his country to Independence from Spanish colonial rule in 1968, was a fetish, paranoid, murderous tyrant. Bizarrely, he had declared himself the “Grandmaster of Education, Science, and Culture” in 1972. In 1978, he ordered his portraits to be conspicuously displayed in every church in the country, declaring that “There is no other God than Macias Nguema.” His 11-year tyranny saw the elimination of an estimated 80,000 citizens out of the country’s total population of about 300,000.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” observed the French journalist and novelist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in 1849. Lt. Colonel Mbasogo has also metamorphosed into a fetish maniacal tyrant like his predecessor. According to a BBC report, he has been eulogized on national radio as “God” who “has all power over men and things.” In August 2023, he became Africa’s longest-ruling head of state as he clocked a record 44 years in power. Meanwhile, his oil-rich country’s masses wallow in abject poverty as he and his family members and cronies appropriate the oil proceeds for their personal revelry.

African leadership must imbibe the example of Nelson Mandela who, against popular expectations, shunned a second term in office at the end of his first five-year presidential term in 1999. In truth, the eradication of Africa’s democratically elected leaders’ tendency to perpetuate themselves in power is a sine-qua-non for the eradication of military interventionism in the continent’s political process. (Concluded).

• Dennis Onakinor, a global affairs analyst, writes from Lagos – Nigeria. He can be reached via e-mail at dennisonakinor@yahoo.com