A growing number of nations have criticised Africa’s latest coup, this time in Gabon, experts have said that democracy is under pressure on the continent because elected leaders are failing to deliver.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who is chair of the West African regional bloc ECOWAS, is monitoring the development in Gabon with deep concern, presidential spokesman Ajuri Ngelale has said.
Tinubu is worried about the seeming “autocratic contagion” spreading in Africa and is working with world leaders and the African Union to resolve it, Ngelale said.
Outside the continent, European Union foreign and defense ministers have been preoccupied with a wave of coups in western African countries, notably in Niger but most recently in Gabon, that underline the bloc’s waning influence and policy failures in the Sahel region and beyond.
The bloc is reckoning with a significant spike in anti-French sentiment in formerly colonised countries. At the same time, the Russia’s Wagner Group is expanding its presence, now on the ground in Mali, Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic.
