Prospects for Elective Government in West Africa

London, Britain

19 February 1985

In his book, The Discipline of Power, George Ball, United States Under- Secretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, recalled that during his years in the State Department, “he was awakened once or twice a month by a telephone call in the middle of the night announcing a coup d’′e tat in some distant capital with a name like a typographical error”. At the time, most people would have associated the phenomenon of military take-overs mainly with the countries of Latin America where it seemed to have become such an expected feature of political life that all it needed to effect a coup was a mere proclamation to that effect—a pronunciamento. However, by the turn of the 1960s, the phenomenon of military coup d’etat had made its debut in West Africa with the overthrow of Sylvanus Olympio of Togo in 1963. But it was still a new phenomenon which excited tremendous interest whenever and wherever it happened and this remained the case into the middle years of the decade. Not so any longer. Indeed it is the frequency with which coups have occurred in West Africa since then that has prompted the question about the prospects for elective government in the region.