Why are Citizens in Parts of West Africa Supporting Military Coups Over Elected Governments?
Citizens in parts of West Africa are supporting military coups largely due to long-term frustration with corruption, insecurity, weak democratic institutions, and governments that fail to deliver basic services.
When democracy does not improve daily life, people begin to see the military as a corrective force rather than a threat. This is not an ideological shift, it is a practical one, born out of exhaustion.
Executive Summary
In August 2020, soldiers surrounded the presidential palace in Bamako, Mali, and President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta appeared on national television to announce his resignation. He looked tired. So did the country.
Within hours, crowds had gathered, not to protest the coup, but to celebrate it. People danced in the streets of a capital city that had just watched its elected president removed at gunpoint.
That image should trouble anyone who believes democratic governance is self-evidently desirable. It does not mean those citizens were wrong. It means something had gone seriously, structurally broken long before the soldiers moved.
This case study examines two countries, two collapse points, and one central question: why do people cheer when democracy ends?
Core Findings at a Glance
| Finding | Detail |
| Primary driver | Governance failure, not ideology |
| Key trigger | Security collapse + visible corruption |
| Public sentiment | Frustration with elected governments, not love of military rule |
| Post-coup reality | Violence worsened, governance declined |
| Underlying pattern | People abandoned a system that stopped working |
The Two Cases: Mali and Burkina Faso
Case 1: Mali (2020 & 2021)
President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (IBK) had won in 2013 with genuine popular support. By 2020, that support was gone.
What happened in the seven years between:
- Jihadist insurgency spread from north to centre, killing hundreds per quarter.
- The 2020 legislative elections were openly manipulated, the Constitutional Court awarded seats to IBK allies that independent observers said had not been won.
- Public funds allocated for military procurement disappeared into private accounts.
- Soldiers fought militants with outdated weapons. Their families sometimes went unpaid.
The protest movement that followed, the M5-RFP coalition, drew hundreds of thousands into the streets over several months. Their demands were not anti-democratic. They wanted accountability. When the military moved on 18 August 2020, a significant portion of public consent was already there.
A second coup followed in May 2021, when Colonel Assimi Goïta removed the transitional president in an internal power struggle. International condemnation followed. The streets were quieter this time, but the underlying sentiment had not changed.
Case 2: Burkina Faso (January & September 2022)
Two coups in nine months. If Mali was a slow unravelling, Burkina Faso was a faster one.
By early 2022:
- ~40% of the country’s territory was beyond effective government control (UN estimate).
- Over 5 million people had been internally displaced.
- Entire communities in the Sahel, Est, and Nord regions were surviving under siege conditions.
January 2022: Coup 1: Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba overthrew President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. Spontaneous celebrations broke out in Ouagadougou. Some demonstrators carried Russian flags, a signal of deeper disillusionment with Western security partnerships.
September 2022: Coup 2: Captain Ibrahim Traoré removed Damiba, accusing him of insufficient progress against militants. Crowds celebrated again.
The key observation: People were not celebrating specific leaders. They were expressing a desperate hunger for change, any change, after years of watching security disintegrate.
Ground Reality: What Citizens Were Actually Living Through
A. The Security Collapse
| Indicator | Data |
| Share of global terrorism deaths in Sahel | Over 50% (Global Terrorism Index 2023) |
| Political violence increase in Burkina Faso (2019–2022) | Over 400% (ACLED) |
| Territory outside government control in Burkina Faso | ~40% (UN, 2022) |
| Internally displaced persons in Burkina Faso | 1.5 million+ |
Security failure was not a policy debate. It determined whether your family ate, whether your children could attend school, whether you buried a neighbour this month.
Farmers could not reach their fields. Teachers fled rural schools. In parts of northern Burkina Faso, communities had been without food supplies for weeks due to road blockades. When a government cannot provide physical safety, its legitimacy erodes in the most fundamental way possible.
B. Corruption That Became Personal
Mali ranked 129th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2020, the year of the coup.
But aggregate rankings rarely capture the texture of lived experience. What Malians were watching was more specific:
- Military procurement funds, for equipment, vehicles, salaries, disappear into private accounts.
- A 2019 investigation by Malian civil society groups documented systemic fraud in military contracts.
- Soldiers dying in the field while political elites built houses and drove imported vehicles.
In Burkina Faso, the government’s failure to properly equip its own Volunteer Defenders of the Homeland (VDP), a civilian self-defence force, was widely documented. These volunteers were expected to face militants with minimal training and unreliable weapons.
Corruption in a functional system is an irritant. In a country at war, it is a death sentence, and people know exactly who signed it.
C. Democracy Without Delivery
Both countries had transitioned to multiparty systems in the 1990s. For a generation, elections were held, constitutions maintained, international partners praised the progress.
What did not follow:
- Youth unemployment across the Sahel is estimated at over 30% in urban areas, higher in rural zones (ILO).
- Basic service delivery, water, electricity, healthcare, improved marginally at best over two decades.
- Political systems focused on managing discontent through patronage, not solving it.
- Trust in national governments, parliaments, and electoral commissions hit some of its lowest recorded levels by 2020 (Afrobarometer).
The cycle was predictable and exhausting: vote, wait, watch nothing change, vote again.
The Trigger Events That Broke Public Patience
Mali: The Breaking Point (2020)
| Event | Detail |
| Rising jihadist attacks | Hundreds of civilian deaths per quarter by 2020 |
| Electoral manipulation | Constitutional Court altered legislative results in favour of IBK allies |
| M5-RFP protests | Months of mass demonstrations demanding accountability |
| Military coup | 18 August 2020 – IBK resigned on national television |
| Public reaction | Street celebrations in Bamako |
Burkina Faso: Two Breaking Points (2022)
| Event | Detail |
| Territory lost to militants | ~40% outside government control |
| Displacement crisis | 1.5 million+ internally displaced |
| January coup | Damiba overthrows Kaboré – crowds celebrate, Russian flags appear |
| September coup | Traoré overthrows Damiba – crowds celebrate again |
| Symbolic detail | Russian flags waved publicly; France 24 and RFI later banned |
Why People Backed Coups: The Psychology
- Security Over Everything When survival is uncertain, governance legitimacy collapses. Research consistently shows that terrorism and insecurity increase public tolerance for military intervention in fragile states, not because people stop valuing freedom, but because they begin to prioritise staying alive.
- The “Reset Button” Belief Coups are seen as a break from entrenched elite networks, a chance to interrupt a system that electoral processes had failed to reform. If you believe elections will simply reproduce the same power structures, the ballot box stops offering a credible path to change.
- Collapse of Institutional Trust Courts, electoral commissions, and parliaments were not seen as neutral arbiters. They were seen as tools of the powerful. Constitutional rules were manipulated openly. When institutions lose perceived legitimacy, their protection no longer feels worth defending.
- The Military as a Perceived Outsider Rightly or wrongly, the military was perceived as:
- Less entangled in political corruption networks
- More disciplined than civilian administrations
- Capable of breaking the cycle rather than extending it
Important caveat: External influence amplified coup sentiment, particularly Wagner Group-linked networks in Burkina Faso and Mali. The Russian flags were not spontaneous. But they would not have landed without genuine grievance underneath them to build on. You cannot manufacture frustration from nothing.
The Contradiction: Did Coups Actually Help?
Short answer: No. The evidence is clear and discouraging.
Security Outcomes Post-Coup
| Country | Post-Coup Security Trend |
| Mali | Violence rose sharply after 2020 and 2021 coups (ACLED) |
| Burkina Faso | 2022 and 2023 were the deadliest years on record for civilian casualties |
| Niger (coup 2023) | Insecurity continued to worsen across border regions |
Governance Outcomes Post-Coup
| Indicator | Direction After Coup |
| Press freedom | Declined: France 24, RFI banned in Mali (2022), Burkina Faso (2023) |
| Civil society space | Restricted: Organisations faced increasing limitations |
| Economic conditions | Worsened: International aid suspensions, inflation, food insecurity |
| World Bank governance scores | Declined across both countries |
The people who celebrated were not wrong to be desperate. They were wrong, it turns out, to believe the military would be the solution. But that wrongness was born from an absence of any better option that felt real.
Full Comparative Overview
| Factor | Mali | Burkina Faso |
| Democratic system before coup | Yes (since early 1990s) | Yes (since early 1990s) |
| Security crisis severity | Severe | Severe |
| Corruption perception (TI rank) | 129/180 (2020) | Bottom quartile |
| Public protests before coup | Yes, M5-RFP movement | Yes, anti-government protests |
| Coup reception | Mixed to supportive | Largely supportive |
| External influence present | Yes (Wagner-linked networks) | Yes (Wagner-linked networks) |
| Post-coup security improvement | None – worsened | None – worsened |
| Post-coup governance trend | Declined | Declined |
| International response | ECOWAS sanctions, condemnation | ECOWAS sanctions, condemnation |
The Central Insight
People are not choosing military rule. They are abandoning systems that stopped working.
Coups become acceptable, even welcomed, when three conditions align:
- Democracy feels performative, elections happen, nothing changes
- Security collapses, the state cannot protect its own people
- Corruption becomes systemic, the gap between political elites and ordinary citizens becomes impossible to ignore
This is the Sahel’s real crisis. And it is not a cultural problem or a civilisational one. It is a governance delivery problem with a very specific shape.
Implications for West Africa’s Democratic Future
The pattern is not contained to Mali and Burkina Faso. Niger fell in July 2023. Chad and Guinea have had their own military transitions. The Sahel’s “coup belt” is the geographic expression of a governance model that has hit its limits.
For democracies that have not yet crossed that line, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, the warning signs are visible:
- Large, young, economically frustrated populations
- Growing distrust of electoral institutions
- Active insurgencies in border regions
- Declining confidence in political systems among 18-35 year olds
What democracy needs to demonstrate, urgently:
| What’s Required | Why It Matters |
| Tangible security outcomes | Security is now the primary test of legitimacy |
| Visible accountability for corruption | Elite impunity destroys public trust faster than anything else |
| Economic opportunity for youth | Young populations with no stake in the system will not defend it |
| Institutional independence | Courts and commissions must be seen as neutral, not captured |
The citizens who cheered in Bamako and Ouagadougou were not celebrating authoritarianism. They were expressing something older and more elemental, the demand that whoever holds power be answerable for what happens to the people under it.
Democracy, in theory, is the best system humanity has developed to enforce that accountability.
In practice, in parts of West Africa in the 2020s, it had stopped doing that job.
That is the real crisis. And no coup, however welcomed, has yet solved it.
