The events of Sunday, December 8, 2025, in Cotonou should cause any right-thinking African to pause. Something darker, more devastating, and more frightening is happening in our region today, and we seem too afraid to name it.
Look at self-governance in this region from either side —military or civilian— and it is unmistakable that African societies’ ability to govern themselves has never been under this much strain. Very few governments in our region today could survive without foreign intervention.
In Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and elsewhere, the president’s security is handled by foreign soldiers. Are we so savage that we must import protection for leaders against their own people?
Take even Senegal, one of the few countries whose democratic tradition dates back to 1960. The Senegalese presidency has never had a second-in-command who dismisses the mandate of the people the way Prime Minister Sonko does with President Faye. Here is a man who has never won an election telling a president who won convincingly how to govern. Power has never been so personalised by an unelected official in Senegal as it is now.
Ghana is struggling under a debt it cannot service. Nigeria is firing missiles into corners of its own territory.
The challenge of this moment is not banditry. It is not kidnapping. It is not terrorism. The challenge is whether we, on this continent, can form large structures of authority to govern our affairs without our governments needing foreign aid to survive.
I am a democrat, and I believe democracy is more African than many would want us to believe. But that African democracy is not this democracy.
Yet every statement from ECOWAS since the beginning of this unprecedented regional crisis reads like that of a man too drunk on ideology to benefit one iota from the discomfort of reality. “Restoration of constitutional order.” “Democratic legitimacy.” “Unacceptable seizure of power.” The words repeat while three member states walk away — and the institution has no response except to repeat the formula louder. ECOWAS speaks of elected government. But the reality is that in this region today, we are not capable of creating a coherent peaceful society even with the help of foreigners.
The real crisis in this region is not coups d’état. The crisis is that our elite cannot be African elite without constant babysitting from Western powers to solve the foundational problem of any society: establishing structures of authority strong enough to nudge most people towards peaceful, cooperative, mutually beneficial interactions instead of violence, kidnapping, and killings. Even ECOWAS itself is an institution so disconnected from the lived reality of most people in this region that part of its founding had to be foreign.
If our independence is to serve for nothing more than to cry out for foreign aid — like babes who refuse to grow — not to deal with another foreign power but simply to remain a peaceful and coherent society, where is authority? When we send missiles instead of schools to the farthest parts of our own country, where is authority?
Where is authority when the poor begin to prefer robbing the rich instead of working for them? This does not happen by accident. It happens when the covenant is broken — when labour produces nothing but more poverty, and the rich offer no protection in exchange for service.
And what have our leaders been doing while this covenant collapses? What is remarkable is that the most important legislative achievements of our so-called democratically elected leaders — laws that do exactly what their designers intended — have been those aimed at making subsequent elections less competitive than the ones
