Africa’s Military Moment: Between Popular Urge and Civilisational Return
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Across Africa today, a political phenomenon is unfolding that cannot be dismissed as coincidence, contagion, or mere instability. Since 2020, a visible rise in military takeovers has swept through the continent—Mali, Chad, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, and most recently Madagascar. Each case is shaped by its own national context, yet together they form a continental signal: the people are no longer emotionally invested in post-colonial republicanism as it currently exists.
This does not mean Africans have suddenly fallen in love with military rule. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is something far more complex and revealing: an urge for rupture, not an urge for uniforms. The rallying around military takeovers is not an endorsement of soldiers as rulers; it is a mass rejection of a governing architecture that has failed to deliver security, dignity, economic justice, or sovereignty.
The people cheer not because tanks roll in—but because something old and detrimental to our collective survival and economic autonomy is being pushed out.
1. Why the People Applaud the Fall, Not Always the Replacement
In nearly all recent cases, military interventions were preceded by the same symptoms:
- Chronic insecurity and insurgency.
- Endemic corruption.
- Electoral manipulation or leadership succession crises.
- Governments perceived as foreign-managed rather than people-anchored.
- Economic structures prioritising resource extraction over welfare.
When civilian governments lose legitimacy, they create a vacuum. The military, already armed and organised, steps into that vacuum—not as a philosophical solution, but as a transitional shock. Popular support emerges not from ideology, but from exhaustion.
However, a crucial contradiction now stands exposed: not all military takeovers represent the same future.
2. Africa Still Divided: Casablanca versus Monrovia–Brazzaville
At the heart of this contradiction lies an unresolved post-independence fracture in African political philosophy. Africa remains divided between two ideological camps that emerged in the early independence era:
1. The Casablanca Vision
- Collectivistic.
- Corporatist in economic orientation.
- Pan-African.
- Rooted in indigenous social organisation.
- Oriented toward ethnopublic unity and shared destiny.
2. The Monrovia–Brazzaville Vision
- Individualistic.
- Capitalist.
- Western-republican in structure.
- State-fragmented.
- Economically dependent and class collaborations.
- Often dressed as “sovereignty” while preserving neocolonial pipelines.
What recent events have made unmistakably clear is this: the African masses are emotionally aligned with Casablanca, but institutionally trapped in Monrovia–Brazzaville.
3. The Sahel Exception: Why Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger Feel Different
Among all recent military takeovers, only the Sahel States—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—have visibly begun leaning away from inherited republican shells and toward something recognisably ethnopublic in spirit.
They are not yet ethnopublican States in the full sense advanced in this manifesto. But they are the closest approximation Africa has today. Why?
Because their transitions have been framed not merely as changes of leadership, but as rejections of foreign command structures, especially where security, currency, and resource control are concerned.
This is why Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso commands such popular affection—not because he is militarily unique, but because he was swift and unambiguous in signalling alignment with:
- Regional solidarity.
- Sahelian unity.
- Economic self-definition.
- Rejection of external custodianship.
He did not hesitate. And in Africa today, hesitation is read as betrayal.
4. The Message from the Streets: Support Is Conditional
A new governing consciousness is emerging across the African continent, particularly among the youth. It is direct, impatient, and historically aware. The message to all military takeovers is now unmistakable:
We support you only insofar as you return governance to our ancestral united Africa ethnopublics.
This support is:
- Temporal, not permanent.
- Conditional, not blind.
- Collective, not personal.
The people are no longer interested in recycled elites—whether civilian or military—who maintain foreign-designed structures that extract our economic value while pacifying the population with nationalist rhetoric.
Uniforms do not grant legitimacy. Alignment does.
5. The Moral Test for Africa’s Militaries
Every military that takes power in Africa must now confront a moral and historical test:
- Will you dismantle foreign-imposed governance structures—or simply occupy them?
- Will you reorganise society around collective socio-economic interests—or preserve extractive capitalism with new faces?
- Will you return authority to a united Africa ethnopublic formations—or centralise power under a different banner?
The people are watching, and history is unforgiving. To rule without returning power to the people is not transition—it is occupation by another name.
6. Unity or Repetition: The Choice Ahead
The Sahel States have shown the direction, even if not yet the destination. Their insistence on federation, solidarity, and autonomy signals where Africa’s future legitimacy now lies. Any military takeover that refuses to align with this trajectory will find its popular support evaporating—slowly at first, then suddenly.
Africa does not need more divided “independent” States. It needs reassembled ethnopublics, federated into a unified socio-economic destiny.
The Monrovia–Brazzaville path has run its course. What remains is either courage—or repetition.
Conclusion: A Warning and an Invitation
This is the cry of the current African generation:
Check your hearts and your souls before you govern us.
We will not oppose change—but we will no longer sanctify false transitions. The era of borrowed structures is ending. The era of a united Africa ethnopublic return is beginning. Military rulers who understand this will be remembered as bridges. Those who do not will be remembered as delays.
Africa’s future does not lie in more uniforms. It lies in unity, collective sovereignty, and the restoration of our ancestral govoxical logic—updated for a modern world, but anchored in our own civilisational ground.
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