The Alliance of Sahel States must reread the history of dictatorships in Africa – and learn from it.
By Wonderr K. Freeman, Attorney, CFCS
The Alliance of Sahel States must reread the history of dictatorships in Africa – and learn from it.
By: Wonderr K. Freeman
There is a particular kind of political blindness that afflicts men who seize power at gunpoint. It is the conviction that, somehow, they are different — that history’s long, blood-soaked catalogue of military rulers who overstayed their welcome, hollowed out their nations, and met ignominious ends simply does not apply to them. The generals and captains now governing Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, bound together in their Alliance of Sahel States (AES), appear to suffer from precisely this affliction. The record of African history — ancient, recent, and contemporary — suggests they should think again. Those who forget history tend to repeat it!
A Confederation Built on Broken Promises
The Alliance of Sahel States (est 2024) is the political child of a wave of military coups: Mali in 2020 and again in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and Niger in 2023. Each seizure of power came wrapped in the language of necessity — the old civilian governments had failed, corruption was rampant, jihadist insurgencies were metastasizing, and France, the old colonial master, was more of a hindrance than a help. In some of these grievances, the populations recognized genuine truths. Popular frustration was real. The coups, in their early days, drew crowds into the streets.
But frustration with the past is not a governance plan for the future. And the juntas have made one thing unmistakably clear: they have no interest in returning power to the people who cheered them. And that is where things start to get messy!
Mali’s military government, initially pledging elections in February 2022 under pressure from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), extended that timeline repeatedly. By September 2023, Mali’s elections were postponed indefinitely for “technical reasons” — marking the second extension of a deadline already broken once[i]. The junta then proposed a staggering five-year transition plan, drawing condemnation even from domestic opposition parties[ii]. In Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized power pledging to restore civilian government by July 1, 2024. By May 2024, that promise was quietly buried, with the transition period extended by another five years.[iii] Niger’s military ruler, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, went further still: in March 2025, he named himself president and extended his rule by five more years[iv]. And in late January 2026, Burkina Faso’s junta announced measures to dissolve all political parties — erasing even the architecture of a future democratic transition. At every level, these juntas seem to be taking the well-beaten path to dictatorships.
A Society Does Not Belongs to Just One Group
There is a principle as old as political philosophy itself, confirmed repeatedly by the worst experiments of the twentieth century: no single segment of society — not the military, not an ethnic group, not a vanguard party, not a revolutionary council — can govern a complex, plural nation to the exclusion of everyone else without catastrophic consequences. The Sahel’s three juntas are testing this axiom in real time. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger are extraordinarily diverse societies — multilingual, multi-ethnic, with deep traditions of community governance, Islamic scholarship, pastoralism, and trade. The idea that a military officer class, however earnest its initial intentions, can substitute for the full participation of farmers, women’s groups, religious leaders, merchants, civil society organizations, and political parties is not merely undemocratic. It is legally and administratively delusional.
What the AES has produced instead is a shrinking circle of legitimacy. Journalists, human rights defenders, political opposition, and civil society actors across all three countries now face arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and, in Burkina Faso, unlawful forced military conscription. The civic space that makes collective problem-solving possible — the space where communities negotiate competing interests peacefully — is being methodically dismantled. Activists have risen to condemn the juntas and call for a return to civilian rule, but in an environment of intimidation, their voices carry at great personal cost. A government that silences its critics does not become stronger. It becomes weaker and it amasses enemies from within and without. Sooner or later they will face the brutal reality that many other dictators have faced.
The Insurgency Seems to be Spreading
Recall that the juntas came to power promising to do what the civilian governments could not — defeat the jihadists. They expelled French forces, ejected the United Nations peacekeeping mission, closed American drone bases, and invited Russian Wagner Group paramilitaries (now rebranded as Africa Corps) in their place. They formed a new confederation, launched a joint military force, and wrapped it all in the rhetoric of sovereignty and decolonization. The results have been devastating. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 3,737 security incidents resulting in 9,362 deaths across the Central Sahel in 2025 alone[v]. Burkina Faso now ranks as the country most affected by terrorism in the entire world.[vi]. In that country, about 60 percent of the territory is reportedly outside government control, with jihadist groups launching coordinated attacks on military bases, civilian populations, and key infrastructure. In Mali, jihadists fighters are having a field day in an orgy of violence, blockading the capital and other coordinated attacks on military facilities. Mali’s military is struggling to mount a counter.
Fatalities linked to militant Islamist violence in Burkina Faso nearly tripled in three years, from 6,630 to 17,775 deaths.[vii] Entire communities have been emptied in Burkina Faso, northern Mali, and western Niger. The Sahel accounted for 55 percent of all terrorist-related deaths across the African continent in 2024[viii]. And, in a particularly damning indictment: since 2023, civilian fatalities perpetrated by AES army units have been reported to be equally large as those attributed to jihadist groups. This is a serious security mayhem unfolding in the Sahel states. This is, ipso facto, state collapse. To save their respective states they must included other sectors of society. The jihadists have proven that the army does not have a solution. They must stop pretending!
The Sad, Sordid Tales of African Dictatorships
The generals of the Sahel did not invent military dictatorship. Africa’s post-independence history is littered with the wreckage of strongmen who were certain that guns, ideology, and foreign patronage could substitute for the consent of the governed. The fates of those men — and the countries they left behind — deserve careful study in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey. If they fail to learn history, they are bound to pay a steep price.
Idi Amin of Uganda came to power in a military coup in 1971, initially promising elections and civilian rule — language virtually identical to the AES juntas today. Within months, he suspended elections, declared military rule, and installed himself as president. His eight years in power became one of history’s most notorious dictatorships, marked by the deaths of over hundreds of thousands of people, the ethnic expulsion of Uganda’s Indian community, and an economy in ruin. After alienating his own supporters and launching a disastrous war against Tanzania, Amin was overthrown in 1979. He fled in a “ramshackle convoy” — the man who had styled himself conqueror of the British Empire — abandoning his people to the chaos he had created. He died in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003, stripped of power, property, and country, remorseless to the end. Uganda took decades to recover from the Amin’s mayhem.
Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire — now the Democratic Republic of Congo — was the original African kleptocrat. A military officer who came to power by displacing a democratically inclined leader, he renamed his country, banned political opposition, and looted public funds on an industrial scale. His personal fortune at the time of his death was estimated in the billions and reputed to exceed Zaire’s entire national debt. When Cold War patronage from Washington dried up after the Soviet collapse, Mobutu found himself without protection. Rebel forces drove him from power in 1997; suffering from advanced prostate cancer, he took refuge in Togo and died within months, a man of billions reduced to a stateless fugitive. The Congo he left behind remains, to this day, one of the most fractured and tragic nations on earth.
Muammar Gaddafi of Libya seized power in a 1969 military coup and ruled for 42 years. He expelled foreign military bases — sound familiar? — aligned himself with anti-Western powers and wrapped authoritarian control in revolutionary language. He also spent decades propping up other African dictators, including Idi Amin. In 2011, his own people rose against him during the Arab Spring. Despite decades of oil wealth, Libya had no functioning institutions, no civil society capable of managing a transition, and no political culture that had been permitted to breathe. Gaddafi was captured by rebels and killed. Built on a dictatorship, there were barely any institutions to manage the transitioned from Gaddafi’s junta rule. The Libya he left behind has not known peace since.
Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe reminds us that the downfall need not be violent to be complete. Once celebrated across Africa as a liberation hero, Mugabe spent three decades dismantling democratic institutions, suppressing opposition, expelling white farmers in a manner that collapsed agricultural production, and presiding over hyperinflation that made Zimbabwe’s currency a global symbol of economic failure. He was finally removed in a soft military coup in 2017 by the very generals he had relied upon. Zimbabwe remains one of Africa’s most battered economies.
I will not go through the gamut of African dictatorships that ended in misery for the dictators and, even more sadly, at times, destitution for their nations. The pattern is consistent across geography and generation: military rulers promise order and deliver chaos. They promise development and then they plunder and loot. They promise sovereignty and deliver isolation. They overstay every welcome, hollow out every institution of state, and when the end comes — and it always does — they leave their countries poorer, more fragile, and more divided than they found them.
The World Is Watching, and So Is the Region
The AES leaders have been skillful at reframing their authoritarianism as anti-colonialism, and they have found real audiences — both domestically and among geopolitical actors delighted to see Western influence diminished in the Sahel. Russia has provided military support and political cover. China has focused on investment and resource access. Young people who genuinely resent French neocolonialism have been mobilized by nationalist rhetoric. But anti-colonialism is not a substitute for sound democratic, political and economic governance. And the region’s neighbors are watching the consequences with alarm. Jihadist violence is now spreading southward toward West African states along the coast. The AES’s departure from ECOWAS has not freed the Sahel from its social contract to the governed. The mechanisms of peer review and accountability, imperfect as they are, provided some supranational check on unbounded military rule in the region. We cannot afford to rewind the clock in Africa.
Return to constitutional order while time is still good.
This is not written in the spirit of the Western condescension that the AES leaders so expertly weaponize. The grievances that brought these juntas to power were legitimate: decades of governance failures, corruption, predatory resource extraction, and security abandonment of rural communities are real. French military policy in the Sahel earned genuine criticism, but the medicine being administered is killing the patient.
Constitutional order, civilian governance, free expression, and the inclusion of all segments of society in political life are not Western inventions or colonial impositions. They are the hard-won conclusions of painful human experience — including African experience — about how to build states that can endure. The long roll call of dictators who believed they were the exception proves the rule with unambiguous clarity.
The people of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger deserve a government that belongs to all of them — not to the men who seized power. Generals Goïta, General Tchiani, and Captain Traoré are not navigating uncharted territory. They are following a very well-beaten path — one that ends, with remarkable consistency, in exile, disgrace, or other grisly farewells, and leaves their countries to pay the bill for decades after their departure. There is a good reason we read history. It is a teacher. It is humanity’s record based on the lived experiences of both the dictators and the societies they ravaged. Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.
Wonderr K. Freeman is a Liberian Investment Attorney, Political Economist, Accountant, and Certified Financial Crimes Specialist (CFCS) currently based in Minneapolis, USA. Mr. Freeman’s professional interests span the intersection of law and economics, including the political economy of development, economic justice, international trade/investment law, and financial crimes law. He can be reached at [email protected]. He blogs at https://wonderrfreeman.com
[i] Junta Rule in the Sahel: Decolonization and Destabilization,” Harvard International Review, January 25, 2025, https://hir.harvard.edu/junta-rule-sahel/.
[ii] Junta Rule in the Sahel,” Harvard International Review, January 25, 2025.
[iii] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-025-01154-0.
[iv] The Alliance of Sahel States, Democratic Relapse,” *Society*, Springer Nature, December 11, 2025.
[v] Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger),” Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, March 16, 2026.
[vi] www.fpri.org/article/2025/03/counterterrorism-shortcomings-in-mali-burkina-faso-and-niger
[vii] https://horninstitute.org/why-burkina-faso-and-mali-face-the-dual-risk-of-jihadist-insurgency-and-coup/.
[viii] The Alliance of Sahel States, Democratic Relapse,” *Society*, Springer Nature, December 11, 2025.