Ivory Coast’s President Alassane Ouattara has removed the prime minister and dissolved his government, the presidency’s secretary general Aboudramane Cisse said on Friday.

No reason was provided for the move.

“The president expresses his gratitude to Prime Minister Patrick Achi and to all members of the government for their commitment to serving the nation over the past years,” Cisse said.

They will remain in temporary charge until a new prime minister and government are appointed, he added. Ivory Coast will hold a presidential election in 2025.

Source: REUTERS

France’s ambassador to Niger landed in Paris Wednesday, the foreign ministry said, after weeks of tensions between Paris and the post-coup regime in the West African country who demanded his expulsion.

It comes two months after a coup in Niger ousted its pro-Paris president and prompted a souring in relations between France and its former colony.

On Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced in a TV interview that Sylvain Itte would leave “in the next hours” but gave no details.

Niger’s military leaders – who overthrew the democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum on July 26 – welcomed the announcement but said they were waiting for it to be followed up by official actions.

They had told Itte to leave the country after they overthrew Bazoum and took away the envoy’s diplomatic immunity and visa.

But a 48-hour ultimatum for him to go, issued in August, passed with him still in place, as the French government refused to comply or to recognise the military regime as legitimate.

Paris had said that only Bazoum’s deposed government could order the envoy out.

Born in the Malian capital Bamako in 1959, Itte has been in the post as ambassador to Niger for a year.

His diplomatic career spans 35 years and he was previously ambassador to Uruguay and Angola.

Military pullout

Macron also announced in his Sunday TV interview that French troops would withdraw from Niger in “the months and weeks to come” with a full pullout “by the end of the year” – another demand of the Niger regime.

The French president, who had sought to make a special ally of Niger, said military cooperation was “over”.

France keeps about 1,500 soldiers in its former West African colony as part of an anti-jihadist deployment in the Sahel.

The coup against Bazoum was the third such putsch in the region in as many years, following similar actions in fellow former French colonies Mali and Burkina Faso in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

They too forced the pullouts of French troops.

Macron said on Sunday that Niger’s post-coup authorities “no longer wanted to fight against terrorism”.

He also reaffirmed France’s position that Bazoum was being held “hostage” and remained the “sole legitimate authority” in the country.

The elected president has remained confined in the presidential palace with his wife and son.

Niger welcomed Macron’s announcement on Sunday as “a new step towards sovereignty” but has said the timeframe for the pullout “must be set out in a negotiated framework and by mutual agreement”.

Niger, like Burkina Faso and Mali, has been targeted by jihadist attacks for several years.

In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people have joined demonstrations and gatherings in Niamey calling for the withdrawal of the French troops from the country.

The United States, which has some 1,100 military personnel in Niger, has said it will “evaluate” its future steps on the crisis following France’s announcement.

Source: AFP

Cameroon’s president Paul Biya spends so much time at Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel that dissidents routinely picket the opulent lakeside premises to voice their discontent at his 40-year rule.

From his suite overlooking the Swiss city’s pristine lake, Biya will have had ample time to ponder the wave of coups that have swept western and central Africa and ask himself who might be next.

Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, Sudan, Niger and now Gabon have all faced the upheaval of military takeovers over the past three years, removing democratically elected presidents and tainted family dynasties alike.

It is impossible to say which country — if any — will follow, but deficiencies in the political systems of several countries offer a guide to which leaders are vulnerable, analysts said.

Biya, Cameroon’s head of state since 1982 and prime minister before that, is high on the list.

“There’s an unpopular president who’s been there for decades,” François Conradie, an analyst at the Oxford Economics Africa consultancy, said. The Cameroonian president, 90, is “widely seen as corrupt” and is said to want his son Franck to succeed him, which would be an unpopular move, added Conradie.

“He’s also very old, with the people around him limiting access to him and running the state while he’s more or less absent,” the analyst said. Biya spends months at a time away from the central African country, much of it at his European hideaway.

Each of the recent African coups has had unique characteristics, but an increasingly common theme has been emboldened militaries realising that they are likely to face little effective resistance for their actions.

“Would-be coup leaders look at this as a proof of concept,” said Kholood Khair, director of Confluence Advisory, a Sudanese think-tank. “These things happen and there’s very little pushback.”

The removal of Gabon president Ali Bongo last week underscored this point. Coup leader General Brice Oligui Nguema has faced little domestic or international criticism since detaining Bongo, a distant cousin, and dissolving his government. Nguema was on Monday sworn in as interim president and the end of the Bongo family’s five-decade dynasty has been celebrated on the streets of the capital Libreville.

The threat from Nigeria to use force to overturn the coup in neighbouring Niger that removed president Mohamed Bazoum was not followed with military action. As far back as 2017, Zimbabwe’s generals faced little or no censure for removing Robert Mugabe.

“It’s just a question of ‘coup’s next’?” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, research analyst at the Centre for Democracy and Development think-tank. “In an era of controversial elections, it’s clear that the military and political elites see alternatives. The question is now how accepted, effective and sustainable these changes are — for better or worse.”

The regimes of Denis Sassou Nguesso, Republic of Congo president who seized power in a 1997 coup; Teodoro Obiang, the world’s longest-serving president who has ruled Equatorial Guinea since ousting his uncle 44 years ago; and Togo’s Faure Gnassingbé, president since 2005 who succeeded his father after another long reign, are all at risk if their country’s generals moved to capitalise on popular discontent over their prolonged rule.

Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, Chad’s president who took over from his father, is another under threat, according to analysts. Déby is widely seen to lack the charisma and grip on power of his father, a feared soldier killed during an offensive against rebels in 2021.

A rebel group with links to the Central African Republic and supported by Russia’s Wagner Group has been plotting against him, according to leaked US intelligence documents reported this year. General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the paramilitary leader fighting on one side of Sudan’s civil war, also has designs on Chad, according to analysts.

Relatively stable west African democracies such as Senegal and Ivory Coast are considered less vulnerable. Yet analysts say that discontent against French influence in Senegal, which has witnessed political unrest this year, and in Ivory Coast, where president Alassane Ouattara is an ally of Paris, could be a motivating factor for would-be mutineers.

Many of the governments that have fallen to coups have been one-time French colonies while coup leaders in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have all ridden to power on a rising tide of anti-French sentiment.

Paul Melly, an expert with the Africa programme at the Chatham House think-tank in London, said vulnerable leaders would now be considering how to better distribute state wealth to other parts of their elite to keep them from fomenting revolt.

Yet sometimes, even a share of the spoils is not enough. The coups that removed Bongo — which Melly called an “inside job” — and Bazoum were led by the heads of their presidential guards whose main job was to protect them.

There are signs that the message has begun to sink in. Cameroon pushed through a significant reshuffle of its military top brass on the same day Gabon’s Bongo was deposed. This was seen by many as a signal that Biya was aiming to coup-proof his regime.

A person with knowledge of Cameroon’s politics dismissed that suggestion and claimed the changes were long-planned but conceded the timing could be interpreted as regime protection.

Such pre-emptive moves are a reminder to would-be plotters that there are risks to pointing tanks at the presidential palace, as militaries come under renewed scrutiny from leaders who might themselves have come to power via a coup, and so are perpetually worried about being ousted.

When a dozen members of the Gabonese Republican Guard stormed the premises of the state radio station in 2019 as part of a plan to “restore democracy” it was swiftly put down by special forces. Two of the soldiers were killed and the others arrested.

Sassou Nguesso in the Republic of Congo is another leader who has been put on his guard. The 79-year-old, a former military officer, is known as “The Emperor” by fellow African leaders due to his strict demeanour and the firm grip he exerts on his country.

“You’d have to be a brave man to challenge Denis,” said one analyst who is a frequent visitor to Brazzaville. “He’s terrifying.”

Culled from The Financial Times

The Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) has suspended Gabon’s membership during an extraordinary summit in Djibloho, Equatorial Guinea, and condemned the use of force to resolve political conflicts.

One week after a coup ousted Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, little has been said about him and he hasn’t been seen since a video in which he was pleading for international help.

Monday’s extraordinary summit was held under the presidency of Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

Obiang said ECCAS wants Gabon to return to constitutional order so that all the institutions in the country can function. ECCAS said it expects the international and regional communities to help Gabon out of difficult times, but gave no details.

ECCAS said Gabon was suspended from proceedings because of an unconstitutional power change.

Chad’s foreign affairs minister, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, read the summit’s resolutions on Equatorial Guinea’s National Television.

He said ECCAS leaders are asking the military junta in Gabon to guarantee the physical integrity, safety and security of ousted President Bongo and his family. He said Gabon has an obligation under international law to protect all citizens and ensure a quick return to civilian rule.

Annadif said the summit designated Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadera to negotiate with Gabon’s military junta to hand over power.

Etienne Ngola, an international affairs lecturer at the Omar Bongo University in Libreville, said via a messaging app that the coup in Gabon was one of the most peaceful in the world with no bloodshed. He said ECCAS should allow Gabon’s military junta, which has much internal support, enough time to bring back order and prepare civilians for democratic rule before handing over power.

Gabon’s ousted president has not been seen in public since August 30, when a group of Gabon military officers appeared on national television and announced that they had seized power and put Bongo under house arrest.

But an audio extract from a video of Bongo has gone viral on social media platforms. In the video, Bongo cries for help, asking people he calls his friends to come to his rescue.

“I am Ali Bongo Ondimba, president of Gabon, and I want to send a message to all the friends that we have all over the world, to tell them to make noise for the people here have arrested me and my family,” he said on the video. “My son is somewhere and my wife is in another place and I am at the residence, nothing is happening, I don’t know what is going on so I am calling you to make noise. I am thanking you.”

Shortly after the coup, Bongo’s son, 31-year-old Noureddin Bongo Valentin, was arrested and accused of high treason and corruption.

The ECCAS summit did not make any public statements regarding the arrest of Bongo’s son.

The military junta led by General Brice Oligui Nguema, a former commander of the Republican Guard, who was sworn in on Monday as Gabon’s transitional president, has not commented on his predecessor’s family situation.

During the summit, Niger-born Abdou Abarry, who is the special representative of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for Central Africa and Head of the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa, pleaded for the establishment of rules and strong institutions he said will consolidate Gabon’s democratic foundations at the end of a transition within a reasonable time.

Abarry also expressed hope that ECCAS and the regional office of Central Africa would equip themselves with what he called adequate instruments to deal with the resurgence of unconstitutional changes.

Presidents Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, Joao Lourenco of Angola, Faustin-Archange Touadera of the Central African Republic, as well as Sao Tome and Principe Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada and a representative of Cameroonian President Paul Biya were present at the ECCAS summit. ECCAS also has Chad, Burundi, Gabon, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo and Rwanda as members.

The summit said all member states agreed that more sanctions will be meted out on Gabon should the military junta fail to hand over to civilian rule soonest.

During his swearing-in ceremony on Monday, Nguema said he would hand over civilian rule, but did not say when.

Source: VOA

General Brice Oligui Nguema has taken the oath of office as Gabon’s interim president, less than a week after he led a coup that toppled the 55-year-old ruling dynasty.

Oligui, the head of the republican guard, led officers in detaining President Ali Bongo Ondimba in the early hours of July 30, moments after the election body announced President Ali Bongo had won a third term.

Hours later, the president appeared in a video and called on his “friends” to “make noise.” He said he was under house arrest at his residence and that his wife and son were being held separately. In a speech after taking the oath, General Oligui promised “free, transparent and credible elections” to restore civilian rule.

He said he was seeking the participation of all “core groups” in the country to draft a new constitution, which “will be adopted by referendum.”

The general did not give a timeframe for election though.

“When the people are crushed by their leaders … it’s the army that gives them back their dignity,” he said. “People of Gabon, today the times of happiness that our ancestors dreamt of are finally coming.”

Oligui said he would instruct the future government “to consider ways of amnestying prisoners of conscience” and “facilitating the return of all exiles” from abroad.

The general strongly defended last week’s coup, describing it as a moment of national liberation and a manifestation of God’s will.

He said the military had acted to save lives following “an electoral process that was obviously loaded.”

After detaining the president, the coup leaders said they had dissolved the institutions, cancelled the election results and temporarily closed the borders.

In his remarks on Monday, Oligui hit out at “international organizations” for criticizing the military takeover.

“We are greatly surprised to hear certain international organizations condemn the act taken by soldiers who were simply upholding their oath to the flag – to save their country at the risk of their lives.”

The United States, Britain, France and certain other states have condemned the coup in Gabon.

Gabon joined Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger in the ranks of African countries that have undergone coups in the past three years.

Source: Presstv

Adama and Moussa Sarr had lost track of the exact number of days they had been at sea.

The brothers were drifting somewhere off the coast of West Africa, in a traditional Senegalese fishing canoe known as a pirogue. They were two of 39 passengers in total – all malnourished, many close to death.

When a fishing vessel appeared in the distance one day, Adama, 21, was so weak he could only stare, he said. Moussa, 17, slipped into the water to swim.

He would almost certainly have drowned, had the fishing crew not spotted him in the water and plucked him to safety.

When they drew alongside the pirogue, they found Adama and the rest of the survivors and seven bodies. The pirogue had set out from Senegal five weeks earlier, with 101 souls on board.

The survivors had drifted hundreds of miles on one of the most dangerous migrant routes in the world – the North Atlantic sea passage from Senegal to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago about 1,000 miles away by sea.

They had left on 10 July, from the coastal village of Fass Boye. Adama and Moussa came from a long line of fishermen in the village. The boys learned to fish together and worked a pirogue together.

But like many young people in Senegal, they felt the pull of Europe. “Everyone wants to go on the boats,” Adama said. “It’s the thing you’re supposed to do.”

He was sitting in the shaded courtyard of a family home, safely back in Senegal but noticeably thinner than before. The journey had begun at dusk, he said. He and Moussa, along with two cousins, Pape and Amsoutou, aged 40 and 20, joined the pirogue a little way off the coast as it set off into the night.

Unlike the Mediterranean, there are no patrols on the North Atlantic route – no-one proactively searching for lost or distressed boats. It is easy to founder without being seen. If you miss the Canaries, or Cape Verde, you can drift into the Atlantic and disappear.

For the first three days, Adama and Moussa’s pirogue, powered by an outboard motor, battled against strong headwinds. But on the fourth day, the wind died down and the boat began to progress, Adama said. The passengers believed they had only a few more days at sea.

When the sixth day passed with no sight of land, an argument erupted over whether to push on or turn back.

“The captain ruled that we should push on, because we had enough food and water and the wind was quiet,” Adama said.

The passengers grew confident again and began to eat lots of food, he said, and they used drinking water to wash their hands for prayers.

It was around day six that the food and water began to run out. There were four children on board, and some older people gave the last of their food to the young. Some hoarded even after people began to die.

Adama couldn’t remember the exact date of the first death, but it was shortly after the first week passed, he said – a fishing captain, used to being on the water but not young. It was six more days until the next person died. Then the deaths came every day.

“At first, we said a prayer for each dead person and laid their body onto the ocean,” Adama said. “Then later we just threw the bodies into the water because we didn’t even have the energy to pray. We just needed to get rid of the corpses.”

Back in Fass Boye, news was spreading through the village that the boat had not arrived. “We all knew it should be five or six days by boat to Spain,” Adama’s mother, Sokhna, said. “When a week had passed with no news I stopped eating. I became sick from stress.”

Nearly everyone on the pirogue was from Fass Boye or nearby, and everyone in the village seemed to know someone aboard. The families began to do anything they could, alerting local authorities and migration NGOs. The founder of one NGO even tweeted a warning that the boat was missing, two weeks after its departure, but the warning went unheeded and the boat drifted for three more weeks.

On the pirogue, the four men from the family stuck together, but they were growing weaker and weaker. The eldest cousin, Pape, died first, Adama said. “Before he passed, he said, ‘If death must happen, I wish that I die and you three survive’.”

Then Adama’s younger cousin, Amsoutou, disappeared. One morning they woke up and Amsoutou was simply gone.

Adama and Moussa hung on, sipping seawater and baking under the sun. Each night they looked for lights from the Canary Islands but the lights never appeared.

Nobody in Fass Boye seemed to blame the migrants for taking the risk. More than a third of the country lives in poverty, according to the World Bank. The young see few opportunities at home. “Macky Sall sold the ocean,” said Assane Niang, a 23-year-old fishing captain, referring to the Senegalese president. Fishermen in Fass Boye say the government has granted too many licences to foreign trawlers, which overfish their waters and deplete the catch.

Niang was sitting on the beach in the shade of a pirogue, knitting generator covers he can sell to help make ends meet. “If we had other alternatives we would stay, but we cannot sit here and do nothing,” he said. “We are trying to support our families.”

There is social pressure on the young to try to leave on the boats, and there can be stigma attached to those who fail or never try.

So much so that the sea route to Spain has earned its own grim slang in Senegal’s Wolof language: “Barcelona or death.”

The wooden pirogues the smugglers use are not suitable for the voyage. They are often poorly constructed. They lack navigation technology and are liable to run out of petrol and be pushed off course. And yet the number of migrants using the route to reach Spain has been rising every year.

According to the International Organisation for Migration, about 68,000 people have successfully reached the Canary Islands by boat from West Africa since January 2020 and about 2,700 have been recorded dead or disappeared. But the number of casualties is likely significantly higher, because fatal accidents are more likely to go unrecorded on this route.

“We call them invisible shipwrecks,” said Safa Msehli, a spokeswoman for the IOM. “A boat washes ashore with nobody aboard, or a body washes ashore not linked to a known capsized boat.”

Part of the problem was that people leaving Fass Boye, particularly fishermen, were too confident in their chances, said Abdou Karim, a lifelong fisherman and the father of Pape Sarr, who died on the boat.

“The fisherman think that, if they get into trouble, they will be able to swim,” he said. “But there is a limit. You cannot swim forever. The ocean will not hold you.”

And yet, young fishermen in Fass Boye said they were still willing to take the risk.

“I am thinking about going on a boat right now,” said Niang, the fisherman on the beach. “The tragedies will not stop us from trying.”

About a month into Adama and Moussa’s voyage, a large ship appeared on the horizon and more than 20 people decided to to take their chances in the water, Adama said. But he knew it was too far.

Many of the remaining survivors were barely able to move, he said. Then on 14 August, exactly five weeks after they had departed, they caught sight of the Spanish fishing boat that would rescue them.

The Spanish crew helped them aboard and put the seven bodies into plastic sheets. Adama and Moussa lay together on the deck of the fishing vessel.

They had survived the pirogue. But Moussa was too weak. He was the last of the 63 people who died on the voyage.

“He died right there on the deck,” Adama said. “In front of my eyes.”

The survivors were taken to Cape Verde and spent six days receiving medical treatment, before the majority were flown back to Dakar. Those who could walk were given prescriptions and sent back to Fass Boye.

When news had broken of the number of deaths, there was a brief spasm of violent protest in the village that brought the police to town. Some relatives were arrested, including a member of Adama and Moussa’s family.

The survivors were harassed in their homes by curious residents and relatives of the dead, families said. So one day after they arrived home, they were all sent back out of Fass Boye to recuperate elsewhere. Adama and his mother Sokhna went to stay with close relatives nearby. They were spending their days resting, praying, and avoiding asking Adama about his ordeal.

The family had lost three sons and got one back. Fass Boye had seen 101 set out on the water and 37 come home.

“It changes a place,” said Abdou Karim, Pape’s father, silently counting prayer beads in one hand.

“Even one soul is a lot,” he said. “And this is more than 60. It is a lot for one place.”

Culled from the BBC