If during the 1960s the coup d'état emerged as the most visible and recurrent characteristic of the African political experience, by the 1980s quasi-permanent military rule, of whatever ideological hue, had become the norm for much of the continent. At any moment in time, up to 65 per cent of all Africa's inhabitants and well over half its states are governed by military administrators. Civilian rule is but a distant memory in some countries. Few at some stage or another have not been run by an armed-forces junta, and fewer still have not been rocked at least once by an attempted coup, putsch, or military-sponsored plot. According to one tabulation, ‘only six states have not witnessed some form of extra-legal armed involvement in national politics since 1958’.1 The phenomenon has even reached the non-state Homelands of Bophuthatswana, Transkei, and Ciskei in South Africa. Rule by civilians is very much the statistical ‘deviation’ from the continental norm, as military leaders lay a permanent claim to the political throne in much of Africa
In the past several years there has been a proliferation of studies on coup d'états in Africa and the political role of African military structures. Armies have been analysed in terms of their social and ethnic composition, training, ideology, and socialising influences. Intense debate has focused around the overt and covert reasons for their intervention in the political arena. Simple and complex typologies of civil–military relations and of military coups have been constructed; statistical data – both hard and soft – has been marshalled and subjected to factor and regression analysis, in order to validate general or middle-range theories of military intervention. And once in power, the officer corps' performance has been examined in order to generate insights into its propensity to serve as a modernising or developmental agent.
Nearly two decades ago Aristide Zolberg suggested that the most visible feature of independent Africa might well be instability and not stability, cleavage and conflict rather than unity and consensus. This observation holds equally true today. The elusive formula assuring the establishment of a viable and integrative political order has eluded many African states. Their failure politically to institutionalise themselves and to forge ahead in the direction of national integration and socio-economic development has been documented in the voluminous literature that has sprung up since Zolberg's original analysis. Ravaged now by natural disasters, international conflict or civil war, and military coups, early expectations of a relatively smooth transition from
colonialism to meaningful independence have been dashed. While striking exceptions do exist, neither the richer nor the more developed nations are necessarily assured of stability and unity, given the continental context of scarcity and conflict.
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