Mid-week, Burundi gave East Africa heartburn after President Evariste Ndayishimiye brought out the long knives. Ndayishimiye booted Prime Minister Alain Guillaume Bunyoni, and his Cabinet chief Gen Gabriel Nizigama, after warning of a “coup” plot against him.
He took the matter to parliament, where legislators were more than happy to finish the purge, approving the appointment of Security minister Gervais Ndirakobuca to replace Bunyoni as PM in a unanimous 113-0 vote. It was ruthless.
The last time East Africa had a coup scare, it was again from Burundi when a third term grab by then president Pierre Nkurunziza nearly went horribly wrong. It plunged Burundi into a political crisis, and a faction of the military exploited it and briefly seized power. In the end, they were foiled, and a wounded Nkurunziza visited hell on his enemies.
If there are coup plotters in Burundi, they are likely exploiting a shared pool of discontent with the state of their nations and a desperate surfeit of opportunities, especially among young people, that is now widespread across Africa.
In February this year, Republican Guard troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo put on a show of strength through the streets of the capital Kinshasa following rumours of a failed coup against President Felix Tshisekedi and the arrest of alleged perpetrators.
Even in Uganda, where President Yoweri Museveni runs a tight ship and otherwise has the security apparatus under his thumb, in recent months, there have been murmurs and drunken talk of an attempted coup against “Mzee.”
In Kenya, one of only two countries in East Africa with Tanzania, that have never had a successful military coup, the picture is more complicated. One of the most striking features of the recent August 9 election was how many young people stayed away.
Tanzania’s former president Jakaya Kikwete, who led the East African Community observer mission to the Kenya polls, said gloomily that the low turnout was worrying for Kenya.
“We were concerned about the low registration of younger voters. We were expecting six million new registered voters, but only three million turned up. Probably there are concerns among the youth that participating in elections is not worthwhile,” he said.
Former Sierra Leone president Ernest Bai Koroma, who led the African Union and Comesa observer team, piled on, blaming the low turnout at the election on the youth and lack of confidence in the political process.
“Only 39.84 per cent (8.8 million) of the total registered voters were youth, a decline of 5.17 per cent from the 2017 figures,” Koroma mourned.
Speaking to young people in East Africa, what is striking is how much they are dissatisfied with old-school multi-party democracy and the extent to which they favour “enlightened dictatorship”. Their enlightened dictator, who will kill off or imprison the corrupt and incompetent crop of the current political class, invariably wears a military uniform, carries a gun, or at the very least, a big stick.
Like in West Africa, the ground is fertile in many corners of East Africa for a soldier president; especially if he is tall, dark, handsome, and talks the talk, like Guinea’s junta leader Col Mamady Doumbouya, who seized the crown in September last year. One of these days, they will get lucky somewhere.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. [email protected]
