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The history of our region, in particular, tells us that one of two things is supposed to happen during a mass youth uprising such as has been witnessed in Kenya starting from late June: a military-led coup toppling the incumbent and his cronies with significant concessions being made to the agitators. If that does not happen, then the country may or may not burn down, as the mass unrest boils over.

Neither has happened in Kenya. Instead, there seems to be a kind of stalemate; the issues that gave rise to the revolt have not been resolved, but at the same time the regime has done enough political manoeuvring, killing and bone breaking to slow the momentum of the protests for now while continuing to push the neoliberal envelope with all its attendant corruption.

It may not look like it, but Kenya is fortunate. It has a long history of civic-based activism going back several decades. This, combined with a military less inclined towards political experiments, seems to have helped them a great deal, much as it may not seem that way at present.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many parts of our continent saw the rise of political soldiers who decided that the best and most efficient way to finally implement the post-colonial demand coming from the ordinary folk was to seize state power and then run things according to “military discipline”. Or at least that is the reason they gave.

Notable were the old Sudan and Ethiopia which between them had the longest-standing and most militant student movements at the time. But as is easily forgotten, there were also violent coups – sometimes in tandem with uprisings – in Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Ghana, Liberia and elsewhere.

These are now divided into “good” coups and “bad” coups, but the reality is that in either scenario, these actions led to an eventual breakdown of whatever passed for constitutional order, a culture of coup-making amid declarations of good intentions, followed by a bad period either because the intentions were never good to begin with, or were betrayed.

The tragic story of Capt. Thomas Sankara is well known: betrayed and done in by one Blaise Compaore, his closest confidante, in the latter’s bid to return, or turn the country back, or take it further into a neoliberal economic playground. Compaore’s regime lasted another 27 years before in turn being overthrown in 2014 by a coup that followed – yes, you guessed it – a youth revolt.

A lot less universally acclaimed is the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who came to power through a coup, and eventually went in a similar although much more chaotic manner.

Over in Uganda we had the inimitable General Idi Amin, whose record has in the last few years or so been undergoing something of a rehabilitation by way of a continual re-examination and comparison to the present, especially among the younger generation of Ugandans.

In the end, the record may be showing us that African military coups ultimately end in disaster; the coups that brought the regimes of Amin (Uganda), Samuel Doe (Liberia), Juvénal Habyarimana (Rwanda), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Gaafar Nimeiry (Old Sudan), Omar al-Bashir (Sudan), and others did not end well.

None of this has ever really happened in Kenya and in the other more placid (or should we say more tightly ruled?) countries further south. The country’s only fully committed coup attempt (in 1982) turned out to be as much a surprise to the population as it was to the regime it was targeting, and was soon crushed, leaving no lasting political legacy.

Nevertheless, a pattern seems clear: dissatisfaction may break out into open unrest (even as recently as in the 2018 Ethiopia Oromo youth protests). This creates the atmosphere for coups, some politically led, and others more overtly military. But here is the thing: where a coup does take place, what then often happens is that the needs, agenda and style of the military coup makers displace the overall agenda of the original youth revolt, and one then gets into the politics of disappointment, and a falling out between the soldiers and any civilian politician and activist who may have agreed to join the “revolutionary” government.  

But the more usual story is one where the national agenda of demands gets co-opted into the new government programme, often together with some of the leaders of the mass movement. What then happens is a falling out between the two sides, with the soldiers now being able to persecute and suppress the mass leaders who no longer have the mass movement to fall back on, and no credibility left among its remnants that would enable it to rebuild it.

This is what happened with Ethiopia’s Colonel Mengistu; after overthrowing the sclerotic regime of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, he presented himself very much as the embodiment of the radicalism of the student protests that had charged the political situation. Among the radical groups, some sided with his regime and even worked with it to suppress and terrorise those deemed less “revolutionary” because they persisted in their demands even after the coup. Mengistu was to eventually fall out with MEISON (the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement) and began terrorising its members as well.

The old Sudan provided a more darkly amusing example with the Islamic scholar, propagandist and ideology maker Hassan al-Turabi. Following General Omar Bashir’s 1989 military coup, Turabi, who seemed to have been one of the plotters though no youth himself, emerged as the principal ideas man for the new government. Dressing it in the language of some sort of revival of Islamic governance, he served variously as foreign minister, speaker of the national assembly, and attorney general, leveraging his better knowledge of Western society and media (he was a graduate of respected Sudanese, British and French universities) to become a very handy propagandist for the regime towards the West.

Turabi’s falling out came in the form of his dramatic removal from the office of Speaker, which he then condemned as a “coup”, conveniently forgetting that it was a bunch of coup-makers that had made him Speaker to begin with.

In the case of the Amin period, we have to make a distinction between the Amin before 1974 and the one after.

In the beginning, in a manner similar to the examples above, Amin was essentially running an unevenly assembled government of national unity in which many victims of the 1966–1971 Obote regime that Amin had toppled were working together on the idea of correcting the course the Obote regime had taken after its own 1966 coup. Amin’s coup had even been strongly telegraphed beforehand through the many displays of his popularity with the public while he was still an army commander under Obote.

Then, in my view, two key things changed.

Most of the things that Amin revisionists are now casting in a positive light were done in the early years. The turning point seems to have been 1974, which was supposed to be an election year. Nothing of the sort happened. This, together with an earlier self-awarded term extension, created dismay. And so it is from 1974 that many of the respected politicians and experienced technocrats began falling out with the Big Man, and the informal unity arrangement basically fell apart.

Equally significant was that 1974 was also the year of the Mogadishu Agreement, mediated by the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) then chaired by President Siad Barre of Somalia (himself a coup maker). Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere had to accept that sponsoring armed rebellion against a fellow member state was a violation of OAU principles, and had to stop. This is how Nyerere’s devotion to the idea of helping Milton Obote regain the presidency that Amin had taken from him in 1971 was suspended. Nyerere had also been giving Obote free rein in organising training camps and armed incursions. All this was suspended and the fighters were stood down and disbanded.

It would appear that this particular development led to Amin relaxing a little and feeling that he was now on safer ground and could therefore go it alone with his army friends without the support of other political stakeholders in the country. But this led to Amin becoming beholden to his cronies who in turn developed a lot of arrogance and a heightened sense of impunity, which led to more elite alienation and therefore technocratic deficiencies, all resulting in the setting in of a many-sided crisis by 1977.

Then it was just downhill from there, ending in Amin’s dramatic 1979 exit.

I may not be sure about other Africans, but history shows that Ugandans seem to have a preference for military “solutions” as opposed to mass mobilisation on a civic platform.

This is what makes Kenya different. It always seems to have the talent to pull back from those scenarios. On the one hand, the military never shows any sign of getting involved in political crises. There is not even the emergence of a populist military officer around whom such speculations could coalesce. On the other hand, the youth mass movement has been clever not to put forward an identifiable leadership that could then be susceptible to co-optation by the current leadership – or a new military one should it ever emerge.

This is wise because the effect of a coup, should one occur, is to basically “stand down” mass protest, as the demands are taken up by the new rulers who present themselves as the better and more rapid form of delivery. When this seems to work, it seems to work well until another coup eventually happens.