Fighting a coup abroad, while grappling with terrorists at home

There are many ironies to Nigeria’s intervention to foil a coup attempt in neighbouring Benin Republic. Alarm bells rang on Sunday when some soldiers in the next-door West African country announced on national TV that they were seizing power from the talons of President Patrice Talon. As it turned out, these soldiers only succeeded in […]

There are many ironies to Nigeria’s intervention to foil a coup attempt in neighbouring Benin Republic. Alarm bells rang on Sunday when some soldiers in the next-door West African country announced on national TV that they were seizing power from the talons of President Patrice Talon. As it turned out, these soldiers only succeeded in taking over the TV station, not the government. This is largely thanks to the poorly executed coup, the resistance of Beninois troops, and the intervention of the Nigerian military, whose fighter jets swooped in and bombed the coup plot out of the waters.
Since this intervention, many Nigerians have been asking what business Nigeria has to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state. Haven’t we been crying wolf since U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to interfere in what he termed a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria with “guns ablazing?”
The questions are valid. Yet to understand and answer them, we must consider the context from which they are drawn and the context from which Nigeria’s intervention was borne.
First, the question is framed by the irony of Nigeria’s intervention. The swiftness of the action, which, according to reports, took about 30 minutes, made many question where this efficiency has been when hundreds of students are abducted by bandits and marched en masse into the forest or when hundreds of gunmen, be they terrorists or bandits, begin their march to raid villages and towns in Nigeria, or even after the many mass massacres we have witnessed over the years. This irony is not isolated. This intervention is one of many that Nigeria has undertaken in the subregion. Each intervention has been paradoxical. For example, when Major Paul Koroma ousted the elected government of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah in Sierra Leone in May 1997, Nigeria mobilised troops who invaded the country, fought street by street, dropped tons of bombs on Freetown, and finally succeeded in ousting the junta in March 1998. President Kabbah was reinstated, and Nigeria was hailed as the African champion of democracy.
The incongruity in this narrative, however, is that at the very time the country was saving democracy elsewhere, it was being led by a military junta of its own. General Sani Abacha was suppressing democratic voices in Nigeria and was in the process of conducting an election in which he would be the sole candidate—except for the dogged M.D. Yusuf, who refused to be railroaded off the election track, even if he had no realistic chance of winning it. The other irony is that this same Nigerian military that foiled a coup attempt in Benin Republic in December was, in October, enmeshed in rumours of a coup plot within its ranks that resulted in some arrests and the purging of the military.
In 2023, when Nigeria, supposedly speaking with the voice of ECOWAS, threatened to do the same thing in Niger Republic to restore the democratically elected government that had just been supplanted by another junta in that country, it was premised on poor intelligence analysis. The diplomatic fallout from that misstep has been catastrophic for the region. ECOWAS has since been splintered as a result, with juntas in Niger Republic, Burkina Faso, and Mali leaving to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES, by its French initials), complete with a military accord whose objective is to protect the junta in each of these countries. Any attack on one junta would be treated and responded to as an attack on all. As noble as the idea of restoring democracy is, it is not worth a World War in West Africa, and Nigeria quietly backed down.
If the overthrow in Benin had succeeded, there is almost no doubt that the junta would have allied with the AES to secure itself and firm up the horseshoe of hostile juntas on Nigeria’s border. It is not in Nigeria’s interest for this alliance to expand for several reasons.
First, the proliferation of coups and the expansion of the West African coup belt is a danger to democracy in Nigeria itself. It is a replication of the 1960s coup wave that swept across the continent, toppling one democracy after another and stagnating political and economic growth. It is the 2020s, and West Africa simply cannot afford to regress.
The second concern is that the coups in all these countries in West Africa over the last few years have had at the heart of them one key element—complaints over deteriorating security in each of these countries. The large-scale insecurity is caused by jihadist terrorist attacks in these countries, something that Nigeria, too, is grappling with even more than Benin Republic, which the mutineering soldiers claimed is one of their reasons for acting.
For perspective, though, data has shown that since the military takeover in these countries, the security situation has only worsened. Today, the regime in Mali is barely standing, with terrorists tightening their hold across the country and closing in on the capital, Bamako.
The other reason is that Nigeria must be more deliberate about stabilising the region. The destabilising of Libya, which played out while African countries stayed aloof, has had dire consequences for both Libya and West Africa. The flow of weapons from the Libyan conflict has continued to embolden terrorists and criminal groups across the subregion. If there is any lesson to learn from that, it is that one destabilised state may trigger a chain reaction of chaos in others.
Benin Republic has had a longer history of military intervention in its democratic sphere compared to Nigeria. The first military coup in Sub-Saharan Africa was the January 1963 intervention in Togo. Ten months later, the Army Chief of Staff of Dahomey, Christophe Soglo, ousted President Hubert Maga in the first coup in the country that would later become known as Benin Republic. This was a couple of years before Nigeria’s 1966 coup.
However, since Mathieu Kérékou’s 1972 coup, Benin Republic has largely remained free of military interventions. President Talon, since being elected in 2016, has grown the country’s economy and expanded its GDP through infrastructure projects and cotton sector reforms. However, while he has publicly announced no interest in extending his tenure beyond April 2026, he has jailed key opposition figures and disqualified some from the next election. Some of his democratic reforms, such as extending presidential terms from five to seven years, have not gone down well with critics. Growing terrorist violence in the north of the country has caused disaffection in the country and within the military.
So while Nigeria’s intervention in Benin, which occurred at the behest of the country’s president, is being questioned, Nigeria has reasons to be wary of the expanding coup belt. To lose another government to a junta directly as a result of terrorist activities in the subregion is not a victory for revolutionaries, as most people think, but a derivative victory for the terrorists. Their goal remains to destabilise regions, and unintentionally triggering coups in various countries serves that purpose. We can’t allow terrorists victories in any way.
Beyond that, what Nigeria’s intervention has demonstrated is that the country still has the capacity for rapid response, and considering the security threats we are facing, we must see more of this rapid response deployed to protect Nigerian lives, prevent mass kidnappings, and terrorist incursions that leave hundreds dead. Our effective handling of our security situation will not only save Nigerian lives and endear the administration to the people, but it will save Nigeria from the recurrence of Trump’s misreading of this situation and his verbal abuse he unleashed on Nigeria.
In the same vein, Nigeria must be very deliberate about its national security and its interests, keep a close eye on situations in neighbouring countries considering how closely knit the region is and the centring of this region in global terrorism discourse. Nigeria must, therefore, be able to predict and preempt how events in other countries will affect Nigeria and its citizens and take necessary measures to address these threats.
Having said this, Nigeria’s actions going forward must be prudent and measured. While the miscalculated talks of intervening in Niger were belated after the regime had stabilised, the prompt intervention in Benin prevented a similar situation from evolving. However, Nigeria ought to utilise intelligence and diplomatic channels as instruments for this objective, limiting military interventions to the last resort.
While we may want to compare Nigeria’s intervention in Benin to Trump’s threat to intervene in Nigeria, the parameters are simply not the same. One is an example of international cooperation—the Benin president invited Nigeria to intervene; the other is a case of unilateralism based on a misreading of the situation that, in all honesty, Nigeria should have handled better.