Gabon seems to have become the latest African country to fall victim to a coup. Military officers appeared on television in the early hours of Wednesday morning to declare that they had seized power from the country’s leader Ali Bongo Ondimba and that the disputed results of the recent election had been rendered void. Last month, the military overthrew the president in Niger, while there have been similar takeovers in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Chad.
Western powers will be nervous, not least because their enemies have sought to exploit rising levels of instability in parts of Africa. In some countries, Russia and its Wagner Group have filled the vacuum left behind by former colonial powers such as France. They have secured lucrative deals for natural resources in return for helping the new regimes maintain control. But the backdrop is an even greater battle for influence over swathes of the world between democracies and autocracies, a battle that the free world might well be losing.
These events cannot be dismissed as the usual political ructions in countries prone to disorder. In part, we may be witnessing some of the rolling consequences of the Covid lockdowns in the West, which disrupted global supply chains and by some estimates drove millions of Africans into poverty. Certainly, politicians in the US and Europe failed to question if there would be wider international implications to their rush to shut their economies.
In the longer term, this instability could rebound on the West. Parts of Africa threaten to become havens for terrorists. Moreover, if governments cannot create the conditions for the prosperity that their populations expect, the current migration crisis may be just a foretaste of events to come.
