Onibiyo Segun
West Africa is once again trapped in a familiar and troubling cycle: elected governments failing their people, soldiers stepping in, and regional institutions scrambling to defend a version of democracy that millions no longer trust.
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in Nigeria’s leadership of ECOWAS under Tinubu.
Following the failed coup attempt in the Benin Republic, ECOWAS suddenly rediscovered its voice, issuing stern warnings and recommitting itself to the defense of “democratic order.” As current ECOWAS chair, Nigeria has positioned itself as the region’s chief custodian of constitutional rule. The urgency is understandable. But it invites an uncomfortable question Nigerians themselves must ask:
where has this democratic vigilance been while democracy was being steadily emptied of meaning across West Africa including at home?
The truth is neither complicated nor convenient. The wave of coups confronting ECOWAS today did not emerge in isolation. They are the direct outcome of a crisis of trust between citizens and leaders who invoke democracy but practice power without restraint.
Across West Africa, elections increasingly resemble formalities rather than mechanisms of accountability. Presidents emerge from the ballot only to become untouchable political gods. Constitutions are bent, stretched, or reinterpreted to serve incumbency. Opposition figures are harassed, absorbed, or neutralized. Institutions that should protect the public interest are instead deployed to secure power.
Nigeria is not exempt from this regional decay.
The consolidation of political power through inducement, coercion, and strategic absorption of opposition is often praised domestically as “political mastery.” The weakening of dissent is justified as pragmatism. The moral cost is dismissed as the price of stability. In this environment, politics becomes transactional, and governance becomes secondary.
When democracy begins to resemble a cartel, where access to power is negotiated among elites, citizens stop seeing it as a system worth defending. They see it for what it becomes: organized exclusion dressed in constitutional language.
This is the contradiction confronting ECOWAS under Tinubu’s chairmanship. The bloc condemns soldiers for suspending constitutions, yet has long tolerated civilian leaders who hollow those same constitutions from within. It threatens force against juntas, yet remained largely silent while elected governments undermined judicial independence, suppressed opposition, and deepened economic hardship.
That inconsistency is fatal to credibility.
When elections no longer produce accountability, when poverty worsens despite national wealth, and when leaders appear more responsive to foreign interests and elite bargains than to ordinary citizens, frustration hardens into resentment. In such conditions, military coups however reckless, begin to appear to some not as criminal ruptures, but as blunt interventions.
This does not make coups legitimate. Military rule has consistently failed Africa, delivering neither freedom nor prosperity. But public sympathy for coups is a warning sign ECOWAS cannot afford to ignore.
The real question, therefore, is not whether democracy is suitable for Africa, but whether Africa’s political class is willing to practice democracy with integrity.
Democracy is not foreign to African societies. Accountability, consultation, and leadership constrained by collective norms predate colonial constitutions. What is foreign is a system where elections are emptied of consequence, governance is divorced from service, and power is pursued as an end in itself.
If leaders, including Nigeria’s, governed with humility, respected term limits, strengthened institutions, and reduced the crushing burden on ordinary people, no citizen would applaud the overthrow of an elected government. Soldiers would find no moral justification, no public sympathy, no political oxygen.
ECOWAS cannot defend democracy selectively. Condemning coups while ignoring democratic erosion is not leadership; it is hypocrisy. Stability cannot be enforced through threats and communiqués alone. It must be earned through credible governance, consistent standards, and moral authority.
For Nigeria, as ECOWAS chair, this moment demands introspection as much as diplomacy. Regional leadership cannot be sustained on rhetoric abroad while democratic trust erodes at home.
What West Africa urgently needs is not louder declarations about democracy, but a renewal of leadership ethics and constitutions that protect citizens rather than entrench elites. Until then, coups will remain a symptom of a deeper disease, a democracy that exists in form, but not in substance.
And no amount of regional outrage will cure it.
Onibiyo Segun
