Fractured Continent: Africa’s Endless Season of Uniforms
Since the twilight of 2022, Africa has entered what historians may one day call the Third Wave of Coups. From the arid dunes of the Sahel to the humid archipelagos of the Gulf of Guinea, the sound of marching boots has drowned out the ringing of parliamentary bells. Between January 2023 and November 2025, no fewer than nine successful military seizures of power have occurred: Sudan (April 2023), Gabon (August 2023), Niger (July 2023), Burkina Faso’s second putsch (September 2023), Guinea’s consolidation under Mamady Doumbouya, Chad’s dynastic-military hybrid, Mali’s slow-motion junta entrenchment, Madagascar (October 2025), and now Guinea-Bissau (26 November 2025). Attempted coups, mutinies, and palace shootings add another twenty incidents to the ledger.
This is no random scatter. A crimson belt of instability now stretches from the Atlantic shores of Guinea-Bissau through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sudan to the Red Sea. Common threads bind them: youth bulges without jobs, armies that see themselves as the only functioning institution, predatory elites who treat the state as private property, and external powers—France, Russia, Turkey, the United States, China—fishing in bloodied waters. Guinea-Bissau’s latest rupture is therefore not an exception; it is the most precise distillation yet of a continental syndrome.
Eternal Return: Guinea-Bissau’s Half-Century Under the Shadow of the Barracks
Few nations on earth have suffered so many coups in so short a lifespan. Independence arrived in 1974 after one of Africa’s most heroic anti-colonial wars, led by the martyred Amílcar Cabral. Within six years, the revolutionary dream lay in pieces. The coups, in chronological torment:
- 14 November 1980 – João Bernardo “Nino” Vieira overthrows Luís Cabral
- 1998–1999 – Civil war triggered by an attempted dismissal of General Ansumane Mané
- 2003 – General Veríssimo Correia Seabra ousts erratic President Kumba Ialá
- 2009 – Assassination of Vieira by soldiers avenging the killing of army chief Tagme Na Waié
- 12 April 2012 – Military seizes power days before the presidential run-off
- 1 February 2022 – Failed palace attack leaves eleven dead; Embaló calls it a “coup.”
- Multiple aborted plots in 2022–2024
- 26 November 2025 – “High Military Command for the Restoration of Order” deposes President Umaro Sissoco Embaló
Ten convulsions in fifty-one years. No elected president has ever completed two consecutive mandates. The army is not merely praetorian; it is the state’s nervous system. Factionalism follows ethnic, generational, and narco-financed fault lines. The Balanta, the largest ethnic group, dominate the officer corps; the minority Pepel and Mancagne feel perpetually sidelined. Cocaine transiting from Latin America to Europe has, since the early 2000s, turned senior officers into millionaires and the country into “Africa’s first narco-state” (UNODC, 2010). Politics is therefore not about ideology; it is about who controls the ports, the cashew warehouses, and the clandestine airstrips.
The Spark of 2025: An Election That Was Never Allowed to Breathe
The November 23, 2025, presidential election was meant to be historic—the first time an elected president might hand power to another elected president through the ballot box. It lasted exactly three days before collapsing.
President Umaro Sissoco Embaló, a former brigadier general who won a bitterly disputed 2019 election, sought re-election against twelve challengers, the strongest being Fernando “Nando” Gomes da Silva and the perennial opposition leader Domingos Simões Pereira (whom Embaló had defeated in 2019). Parallel vote tabulations on election night showed a razor-thin race. By Tuesday, 25 November, the National Electoral Commission (CNE) was still silent. Rumours swirled that Embaló’s camp was pressuring commissioners to announce a first-round victory (avoiding a run-off that the opposition believed it would dominate).
At dawn on 26 November, heavy gunfire erupted around the CNE building, the presidential palace, and the interior ministry. By midday, Colonel Tomás Djassi, spokesman for the self-styled High Military Command, appeared on national radio and television. His statement was chilling in its brevity: the president and prime minister had been detained “for their own safety,” the election was suspended sine die, borders closed, a nationwide curfew imposed, and all political activity banned until further notice. Embaló’s whereabouts remain officially unknown, though sources inside the Amura Fortress confirm he is held there alongside Domingos Simões Pereira and several ministers.
Youth in the Crossfire: When Gen Z Rage Meets Barracks Ambition
Across Africa in 2024–2025, a new actor seized the stage: Generation Z. Leaderless, digital-native, and allergic to the old liberation parties, they brought down governments in Kenya (June–July 2024 finance-bill protests), forced policy reversals in Nigeria (#EndBadGovernance, August 2024), and triggered the collapse of the Malagasy state in October 2025.
In Guinea-Bissau, the youth voice was audible but faint. Internet penetration hovers below 25%, and the state telecom company routinely throttles WhatsApp and Facebook during tense moments. Still, small protests erupted in Bissau and Bafatá in the week before the coup, organised under hashtags #KontaKriol (#CountInCreole) and #BissauDesperta (#BissauWakeUp). Young people demanded transparent vote counting and an end to the “cashew mafia” that enriches a tiny elite while 70% of the population lives on less than $2 a day.
The tragedy is that these same youth now watch their demands hijacked by men in uniform. The junta’s communiqué mentioned neither poverty nor corruption—only the need to “prevent civil war” and “restore institutional normality.” In private, officers speak of “correcting” an election they believed the opposition had rigged with foreign help. The youth who wanted neither Embaló nor the old guard are left with the oldest guard of all.
From Street to Barracks: The Familiar African Sequence
Africa has perfected a grim choreography:
- Economic pain → youth protests
- State repression → escalation
- The military claims to “save the nation from chaos.”
- Initial popular relief → rapid disillusionment
- Junta entrenchment → new cycle
Mali 2020, Burkina Faso 2022, Madagascar 2025, and now Guinea-Bissau 2025 follow the script almost perfectly. The difference this time is velocity: the interval between protest and putsch is shrinking. In Madagascar, it took six weeks; in Bissau, six days.
The Helpless Giants: AU, ECOWAS, and the Limits of Pan-African Mediation
Within hours, the African Union condemned the coup and suspended Guinea-Bissau’s membership. ECOWAS activated its 2001 Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, threatening sanctions and possible military intervention (though the Niger debacle of 2023–2024 has made the latter unthinkable). A high-level delegation—led by Cape Verde’s President José Maria Neves and including Senegal’s Macky Sall as ECOWAS mediator—was dispatched.
History is not encouraging. Every previous Guinea-Bissau coup has seen the same ritual: condemnation, suspension, mediation, an accord signed in Abuja or Lomé, soldiers returning to barracks, elections promised within 12–24 months, and the cycle restarting before the ink dries. The 2012 coup led to a transition that returned Embaló himself to power. Today’s plotters are yesterday’s “transition guarantors.”
The deeper problem is structural. ECOWAS has no army capable of enforcing its will after Niger exposed the bloc’s divisions. The AU’s Peace and Security Council can bark but rarely bites when powerful member states (Algeria, Egypt, South Africa) prefer non-interference. Russia and China, both with growing influence in Bissau (Russian “advisers” were spotted at the port in 2024), have already recognised the junta “as the de facto authority.”
Narco-Shadows: The Invisible Hand That Pays the Soldiers
No analysis of Guinea-Bissau’s instability is complete without mentioning cocaine. The country’s 88 islands and thousands of kilometres of unguarded coastline make it an ideal transshipment hub. UNODC estimates that 30–50 tonnes of cocaine pass through annually, generating revenues that dwarf the national budget. Senior officers are directly implicated; several have homes in Lisbon and Dakar that no army salary could buy.
The 2025 coup may have been, in part, a pre-emptive strike to protect these networks. Opposition leader Domingos Simões Pereira had promised, if elected, to request a UN-backed anti-narco task force modelled on Guatemala’s CICIG. Embaló, despite occasional anti-drug rhetoric, was widely believed to have reached an accommodation with the cartels. The junta’s first quiet move was to replace the head of the Judicial Police’s anti-narco unit.
Paths Out of the Labyrinth: A Continent at the Crossroads
Guinea-Bissau’s tenth coup forces Africa to confront uncomfortable truths:
- Elections without economic redistribution breed cynicism, not legitimacy.
- Armies that are better paid and better armed than teachers or doctors will always be tempted.
- Regional bodies that cannot enforce their own charters become theatre.
- Youth who see no future in ballots will eventually cheer rifles—or pick them up themselves.
A radical agenda is the only one with a chance:
- Professional, ethnically balanced, externally audited armed forces under civilian control (the old AU formula, but this time with teeth).
- A permanent ECOWAS rapid-response mechanism funded by a 0.5% levy on member states’ GDP.
- Debt cancellation is tied explicitly to democratic conditionality and anti-corruption courts.
- A continental Youth Service Corps that channels the energy of the continent’s 600 million under-25s into infrastructure and climate adaptation, giving them stakes in stability.
Until such measures are taken, Bissau will not be the last capital to wake to the sound of gunfire. The continent that taught the world how to defeat colonialism has yet to learn how to defeat itself. In the narrow, humid streets of the old Portuguese quarter, where soldiers now patrol past shuttered shops, the question is no longer whether the next coup is coming—but only where, when, and under what hashtag the youth will first cry “Enough.”
