France Decides Which African Coups Deserve Saving

Who decides when an African government is worth saving? For decades, the answer came down a line from the Élysée. A president who signed the right contracts and voted the right way got protection. A people who wanted their leaders gone got silence, or worse. We have lived under that arithmetic for too long, and the men who ran it still speak as if they were our teachers.

Consider what France did in December 2025. Benin's army tried to overthrow President Patrice Talon. According to RFI's Christophe Boisbouvier, France supplied intelligence and logistical support, while Nigeria, at Benin's request, sent air strikes and ground troops. Talon survived. The coup failed. Many Beninese will say that is a good outcome, and they may be right. But ask yourself the harder question: why did Paris act in Cotonou when it had spent years refusing to intervene elsewhere?

Recall what Emmanuel Macron said in June 2025. He told the world the post-colonial system had stopped, that France no longer does "that sort of thing," meaning staging or stopping coups. Six months later, France was doing exactly that. A government that claims to have renounced interference, and then interferes in the same breath, is not principled. It is improvising, and the people paying for the improvisation are African citizens.

Look at Chad. In 2019, a French air strike hit rebel forces advancing on N'Djamena. Macron came to regret it, fearing accusations of neo-colonialism, and decided France would stay out of African political crises. Two years later, President Idriss Déby was killed while visiting troops at the front. A military council then installed his son, Mahamat, in place of the constitutional order. France's retreat did not produce democracy in Chad. It produced a dynasty in uniform. Caution became its own form of complicity.

Gabon tells the same story in a different key. In August 2023, General Brice Oligui Nguema seized power and ended the Bongo family's 56-year grip on the country. Boisbouvier argues that French intelligence services were aware of the preparations, though he acknowledges there is no proof of France's explicit role in organising the coup. Whatever the truth, the Gabonese people were not asked. The Bongos deserved to lose, and the ballot box was the instrument that should have removed them. A tank is not a democracy, no matter whose uniform it wears or who applauds its arrival.

Now look at the Sahel. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have forced French troops out, and their military governments have turned to Moscow. Russia's Africa Corps, the rebranded Wagner network, now sells itself as the answer to jihadist violence. Yet in Moura, Mali, in 2022, hundreds of civilians were killed in an operation involving Russian forces and their Malian partners. Mothers in Moura did not care whether the men who killed their children wore French or Russian boots. Boisbouvier notes that Moscow once enjoyed a kind of "historical virginity" because it had no colonial record in Africa. That virginity is gone, and it was never a virtue. Russia's record of mercenary massacres, looted mines and state propaganda is the same extractive script with a new actor.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Ankara, Abu Dhabi and Doha all prefer we not say aloud: the new scramble for Africa is a scramble for our gold, our oil, our ports, our votes and our silence. The actors have changed. The appetite has not.

Still, France is not the only actor that must answer. Senegal shows what a sovereign relationship looks like. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, elected in 2024 on a platform of sovereignty, forced France to withdraw from its last two military bases in Dakar in July 2025. Did Senegal break with France? No. It kept the economic partnership and ended the military dominance. That is the template. Partnership on equal footing is not a slogan. It is a choice that Senegalese voters made at the ballot box.

Africa is also no longer the supplicant it was in 1960. Boisbouvier reports that Africa's combined economy is set to outgrow France's this year, reaching roughly €3 trillion. Read that number slowly. A continent of more than 1.4 billion people, once treated as a warehouse of raw materials, is now an economic power whose governments can say no. That shift should embolden us to demand better governance from our own leaders, not merely better manners from foreign capitals.

The solutions are not mysterious. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies on diamond revenue, and it did so by insisting on transparent institutions and disciplined public finance. Mauritius turned a sugar economy into a services and finance hub by protecting property rights and rule of law. Ghana and Senegal have shown that power can change hands peacefully, through elections the losers accepted. These are not Western gifts. They are African achievements, and they prove that coups are not inevitable.

So what must happen? First, the African Union must enforce its own rules without fear or favour. The Lomé Declaration of 2000 and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance of 2007 already forbid unconstitutional changes of government. Apply them to Gabon, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea with the same rigor. Second, ECOWAS and the AU must make suspension meaningful, with clear benchmarks and dated timetables for elections. Third, every foreign military agreement signed by an African government should be tabled in parliament and published in full. If a deal cannot survive daylight, it should not be signed.

France must also stop pretending that it can be the democratic conscience of a continent while quietly choosing whom to protect. If Paris believes in democracy and human rights, as Boisbouvier reports its officials insist, then it must apply those principles to Libreville and N'Djamena as readily as to Cotonou. Selective democracy is not democracy. It is a rented one.

And we, the citizens, have work to do. Demand independent electoral commissions with real budgets. Demand enforced presidential term limits. Demand parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies and foreign security pacts. Demand that your MP tell you who your country is arming, training and protecting, and why. Foreign powers will always chase our resources and influence. Our job is to make sure they cannot buy our leaders' loyalty with guns or loans.

Let us be clear about the stakes. Every coup that succeeds teaches the next colonel that the barracks, not the ballot, decides who rules. Every foreign intervention that saves a friendly president without asking his people teaches us that our sovereignty is a favour granted from abroad. We have heard enough speeches from European capitals about our future. It is time we wrote that future ourselves, in our constitutions, our courts and our voting booths. France has finally admitted that Françafrique is dead. Now we must make sure that what replaces it is not a new master with a new flag, but a continent that answers to its own people.

Based on reporting by RFI