Across Africa, militaries have long been more than mere instruments of state security. Among the most cohesive and disciplined institutions on the continent, they have often shaped the course of nations, particularly when civilian leaders prove feckless, corrupt, or unable to meet public expectations. Since 2020, coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Niger have shown armies increasingly willing to step out of their barracks, claiming the mantle of governance in times of crisis and promising to steer the country back to safe shores.

African militaries, unlike those on any other continent, appear bolder in their willingness to take the reins when things go wrong—either to reset their political systems and steer them back on course, or to seize control directly or through proxies. A recent study found that while coups have become less frequent globally, Africa remains a “high-risk” region for coups. These interventions—varied in their causes but concentrated across what has now been dubbed Africa’s “coup belt,” a swathe of military-ruled states stretching from Guinea to Sudan—reflect both the growing confidence of uniformed leaders and the normalization of their presence in politics in recent years. After Niger’s coup in 2023—the eighth in three years—Aïssata Tall Sall, Senegal’s then foreign minister, declared it “one coup too many.” But the trend didn’t stop there. Gabon followed, and most recently, Madagascar, bringing the total to 10 coups in five years and showing contagion outside the core coup area.

In Madagascar, we got to see the normalization of military rule on full display in mid-October. Colonel Michael Randrianirina’s overthrow of President Andry Rajoelina came after weeks of youth-led protests over water and power shortages. The coup reached its dramatic climax when Randrianirina undermined Rajoelina’s authority by appointing a new army chief and then declaring himself president. He traded his military fatigues for a dark suit as he was sworn in before Madagascar’s High Constitutional Court as head of a “refounded” republic. The colonel has promised up to two years of military stewardship in which he has vowed to take the country in a new direction. “We are committed to breaking with the past. Our primary mission is to profoundly reform the country’s administrative, socio-economic, and political systems of governance,” he declared.

This is not Madagascar’s first military intervention. In 2009, the same elite unit, CAPSAT, orchestrated the removal of President Marc Ravalomanana and installed Rajoelina in his place before stepping back into the barracks. The crucial difference this time is that Randrianirina has made himself head of state, buoyed by public sympathy after he intervened against police during the protests, publicly condemning the violent crackdown. What we know from Randrianirina’s biography suggests that his rise to the top was not merely a quirk of being one of the country’s most senior military figures. Randrianirina had previously been arrested for plotting against Rajoelina and was a long-standing critic of his administration, clearly exhibiting strong political convictions of his own.

Another recent coup leader with strong political convictions is Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso. While at the University of Ouagadougou as a geology student, he was a member of the National Association of Students of Burkina Faso (ANEB), an organization with pronounced Marxist, anti-imperialist, and pan-African leanings. Traoré’s trajectory suggests those formative years stayed with him into adulthood. His chance to act on his convictions came when he overthrew his superior, Paul-Henri Damiba, just eight months after Damiba had seized power in a coup. But not before his convictions were likely hardened by his own lived experiences.

Napoleon is said to have remarked that to understand a man, you must understand what was happening around him when he was 20. Traoré spent those years in peacekeeping operations, battling an insurgency that arose after a Western intervention in Libya flooded the Sahel region with arms and militants. Despite the seriousness of the threat Burkina Faso faced at the time, and continues to face, in an interview with French daily Le Monde, he bristled at the fact that Burkinabes fighting the al-Qaida-affiliated insurgents were “four to five soldiers for one Kalashnikov,” whilst civilian leaders handled “suitcases of money.” “It really hurts soldiers to see that. Worse, we were taunted,” he said.

Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who led before the brace of coups, was dubbed the “diesel president” for the lethargy of his response and perceived inability to meet the moment. Traoré reached a similar verdict on the first coup leader, Damiba, whom he swiftly deposed. The country needed a serious wartime leader, he told the public, and he was the man for the job.

This is where a key theme in the rise of several African militaries becomes clear. Traoré and his fellow plotters dismissed the civilian leader (and his successor) as incompetent and broadened their own sense of duty to include defending the country through direct political intervention, much like in Madagascar. Traoré—or IB, as Burkinabès call him—has since become an internet sensation, blending a slick yet hard-edged military aesthetic (he has never been seen in a suit). Even the Financial Times has conceded that he is an “icon.”

The inability of his regime to push back armed groups—which are believed to control more than half the country and have propelled Burkina Faso to the top of the Global Terrorism Index—has done little to dent his appeal. None of his fans around the world care because that appeal doesn’t come from what he does, or who he is, but his ability to put into words what a lot of people think, and the viral nature of many of his remarks slamming the West and comprador elites across Africa.

Not all coups are created equal, however. In some cases, they are simply power struggles among elites, as seen in Niger and Sudan. Though it has since been largely buried, Niger’s Abdourahamane Tchiani did not initially overthrow President Mohamed Bazoum for being too pro-Western. In fact, Tchiani was close to Bazoum’s predecessor, whom The Economist described as a “staunch ally of the West.” Bazoum sought to replace Tchiani, who believed he knew better what was needed for Niger than a newbie president and decided to pull the plug on his boss. The anti-Western rhetoric probably came after Tchiani realized that he wouldn’t receive support from Paris, the US, or the EU due to the coup against an elected leader. There is little evidence that he held strong beliefs about the West before assuming power.

In Sudan, a similar power struggle unfolded when the army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces—created and empowered by the army to do its dirty work—turned on each other after toppling civilian leader Abdalla Hamdok in October 2021. Sudan has a long and complex history of hybrid civilian–military regimes, but in this instance, as in previous coups, the military believed it knew best and forced its way into the driver’s seat.

Another notable feature is how the military often disguises itself when it seizes power. Although Egypt’s coup took place over a decade ago, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has fully civilianized his regime, as has Mahamat Déby in Chad, who succeeded his father—also a soldier—in a dynastic transition. In other countries, such as Algeria, where the military has long acted as a kind of laissez-faire ventriloquist, there has been no need to handpick rulers directly.

However, these militaries choose to rule—whether directly or through civilian proxies—they depict themselves as stepping in to save the nation from a corrupt civilian elite that has betrayed its responsibilities. This narrative resonates powerfully: from Madagascar to Burkina Faso, populations endure grinding poverty, deteriorating security, and vanishing prospects for improvement.

Daniel Paget, a scholar of African politics at the University of Sussex, has developed the concept of “elitist plebeianism” to describe how certain political leaders construct themselves not as representatives of the people’s will, but as superior guardians acting in the people’s interests, irrespective of what the people actually want. In this framework, society divides into three tiers: a “moral elite” at the top, “the corrupt” in the middle, and “the people” below. The moral elite’s role is not to respond to popular demands, but to fight the corrupt on behalf of the people, wielding authority that flows downward rather than upward.

Africa’s coup-making militaries have adopted precisely this structure, constructing what we might call “praetorian plebeianism.” They position themselves as the incorruptible guardians at the apex—disciplined, self-sacrificing soldiers who have witnessed corruption firsthand. The enemy is not “the elite” in general, but specifically the corrupt civilian political class: the politicians handling “suitcases of money” while citizens lack water and electricity.

This is why military takeovers are framed by soldiers as revolutions, while scholars often call them “coupvolutions,” a tidy portmanteau of coup and revolution that helps explain the dynamics at play. Samuel Fury Childs Daly, author of Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire, told me that the sense of responsibility soldiers feel has several important drivers, rooted in the nationalist pedagogic ethos of the military as an institution:

Their claim to be more patriotic probably has some truth to it. They’re educated in the only institution that had patriotism drummed into them from the very beginning… Armed forces also tend to be more representative of the demographic make-up of their populations, not perfectly, of course, but generally speaking. This gives them a national outlook in a way that other people in the countries they’re tasked with protecting may not. That makes them feel entitled to step in when things don’t go the way they want.

However, the military form of governance lost legitimacy in many countries, Daly adds. “The military regimes that governed at the end of the 20th century were so obviously bad that they were discredited in the eyes of many. They have a bad record on economic performance and aren’t always great at enhancing security,” he said. That verdict was delivered across the continent in the early 1990s, when a wave of democratization took hold and around a dozen nations began transitioning from one-party or military rule to some form of electoral democracy. Now, however, a reverse wave appears to be underway, a trend Daly partly attributes to Africa’s youth bulge, which means fewer people remember the realities of military rule. They hear promises of change and improvement, but are often unaware of how rarely military regimes deliver on them.

That early enthusiasm, however, tends to fade quickly. There are exceptions—such as Niger, where GDP growth officially reached 11%—but such figures have done little to improve the lives of ordinary people. As a recent UN Development Program report noted, the “ephemeral nature of the popularity” of military regimes soon becomes clear when the promised “change is not forthcoming.”

These coups stand in sharp contrast to the case of Senegal, where a popular movement organized around a political party managed to unseat entrenched elites through the ballot box in 2024. Then-President Macky Sall was replaced by a youth movement led by today’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko and President Bassirou Diomaye Faye around PASTEF. Ayisha Osori, a Nigerian lawyer and Director in the Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop, dubbed it a “people’s coup.”

What made Senegal different wasn’t the depth of popular frustration that existed across the coup belt. It was the presence of conditions conspicuously absent elsewhere: a military with an unbroken 60-year tradition of remaining in barracks, a resilient civil society capable of mass mobilization, and democratic institutions strained but not shattered. While the jury is still out on Faye’s ability to address the discontent that led to Sall’s removal from office, the Senegalese have shown that, under the right conditions, it is possible to remove an entrenched elite from the bottom up. Unfortunately, this rare example remains the exception that proves the rule.

As it stands, the fate of a large swathe of Africa rests in the hands of soldiers. Whether their particular brand of “praetorian plebeianism” will truly benefit the countries they aim to govern is hard to say, and it is unlikely that any generalizable conclusion will emerge. In the end, this period will either bring painful lessons from the past back into sharp focus or pave the way for the potential sanitization of military regimes if they succeed. I’m not betting much on the latter.