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Showing posts from December, 2025

Coup by orchestration?

Military coups, in countries where stuff happens, ordinarily are vicious power grabs by armed usurpers to displace sitting governments. These, of course, don’t belong with civilised people. They are a function of political underdevelopment and peculiar to backwater regions of the world. Even in Africa, categorised in the Third World, there is a region notorious for volatility and designated the coup belt. Office holders against whom coups are staged get typically shortchanged and could be in mortal danger, depending on the ruthlessness of those staging the coup against them. There, however, seems to be some novelty to coup making in Guinea-Bissau – a notoriously unstable country in West Africa that has experienced four coups since independence from Portugal in 1974, besides multiple attempted coups. Sandwiched between Guinea and Senegal, it is one of the world’s poorest and most fragile countries with a population of approximately 1.9million. Its poll results are often contested, and t...