The leader of the Alliance for National Transformation,Gen. Mugisha Muntu has explained that military coups are back in Africa because most of the current African leaders have failed to politically manage their countries.
The former presidential candidate noted that Africa has had a severe history of bloody coups but it’s unfortunate that all African leaders don’t learn from history because what caused military coups in Africa in the 1980s is the same reason for their cause in the 21st century.
“Political mismanagement is at the core of everything we are facing, this is simply a leadership problem. Even when there are historical problems, leaders are meant to draw the attention of people to the causes of historical conflicts and also to draw their attention to the common needs and focus them on the future and enable them to understand that there were mistakes in the past which caused conflicts that cost them badly and therefore they need to build a better future where everybody is entitled to better services,” he said.
He noted that once people trust their leader, and the leader also leads them in the right way, there will never be such conflicts as coups that can stand because even where there is a conflict, they will simply be resolved, once people do what is right.
The former Chief of Defence Forces also asserted that there is no country in the world whose citizens will engage in war when they get better services from hospitals and schools, have good roads, better employment levels, an equal share of the national cake, and farmers have markets for their produce.
“In a country like that, it’s very difficult to generate a conflict of any nature not even ethnic or religious because if everybody who is in a society regardless of their gender, ethnicity and religion can access equal opportunities without any sense of being marginalized, how on earth can anybody mobilize them to go and die for example in the war for what? Even if they don’t like the leader for example, the reality of the matter is that as long as citizens can access opportunities, they don’t care who is in charge as long as he delivers. Therefore, the problem for coups is leadership and that’s what we must focus on,” he said.
Muntu also cautioned that the causes of military coups in Africa are the same and Uganda also suffers from the same, therefore there is a need to fact-check Uganda’s leadership structure because that’s where all problems start.
“Because we have more natural resources than most other countries; is not that we are even lacking, we just need to have them for the good of all Ugandans, not a small fraction but all Ugandans,” he said.
Gen Muntu, a former military man, asserted that not all coups are the same but they do have some important commonalities.
Gen Muntu’s comments come at a time when Africa as a continent has had six military coups since 2020 in countries like Niger, Mali, Chad, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Gabon.
However, according to research by political scientists Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, it’s useful to think about coups and other non-democratic power changes as part of a broader, global turn away from democracy, especially in the context of a great power struggle between the United States of America and authoritarian governments like Russia and China.
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