Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: African politicians claim that Guinea-Bissau’s coup was staged, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda are set to sign another peace deal, and a Tunisian court sentences opposition figures to years in jail.
Faux Coup?
Guinea-Bissau’s military installed Gen. Horta Inta-a as interim president last Thursday after seizing power in a coup that many observers and politicians are calling a “sham.”
Inta-a and Finance Minister Ilidio Vieira Te, who has been newly appointed as prime minister, are set to lead a one-year transition period in the country. Both men are close to the deposed president, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who claimed victory in the country’s contested November elections before he was ousted. Te led Embaló’s campaign, and Inta-a was promoted to chief of staff of Guinea-Bissau’s army by Embaló in 2023.
Former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who was in Guinea-Bissau for the November vote as a regional observer, suggested that Embaló knew he had lost and arranged a “ceremonial coup” one day before the official results could be announced.
“This was not even a palace coup,” Jonathan said. “It was a ceremonial conducted by the head of state himself.”
Meanwhile, Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko told Senegalese lawmakers that “what happened in Guinea-Bissau was a sham.” And Fernando Dias—Embaló’s main challenger, who also declared victory in the election—has claimed that the coup was “fabricated.”
Critics point to Embaló having declared his ouster to various media outlets after soldiers announced their coup on state TV. “A military doesn’t take over governments and allow the sitting president that they overthrew to address press conferences,” Jonathan said.
Guinea-Bissau has faced five coups and several attempted coups since it gained independence from Portugal in 1974. The country’s opposition-dominated parliament has not been in session since 2023, when Embaló dissolved it after an alleged coup attempt.
There had been concerns around the ballot’s legitimacy months before the vote. In March, Embaló threatened to expel a delegation from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) after the regional bloc called for timely and democratic elections. The opposition maintains that Embaló’s term should have legally ended on Feb. 27, but presidential and parliamentary elections were delayed until late November.
After his ousting last week, Embaló briefly sought refuge in neighboring Senegal before arriving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Meanwhile, Dias—who was backed by Guinea-Bissau’s main opposition party, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, after it was barred from the ballot—has been granted asylum in Nigeria.
ECOWAS leaders are set to meet on Dec. 14 for an emergency session on tackling the coup after its delegation on Monday failed to convince soldiers to hand back power. ECOWAS and the African Union have threatened sanctions and suspended Guinea-Bissau from their blocs, but given that leaders of several member states have retained power through constitutional coups without repercussions, the threats are unlikely to have an impact.
The putschists claim that they were acting to foil a plot by drug traffickers to “destabilize” the country. Guinea-Bissau is known as a transit stop for cocaine trafficking from Latin America to Europe, a trend that experts say has fueled its political crises, with some presidential campaigns financed by facilitating trafficking.
In 2024, a U.S. court sentenced Malam Bacai Sanha Jr., the son of former Bissau-Guinean President Malam Bacai Sanha, to more than six years in prison for leading an international heroin trafficking ring. Three years earlier, Embaló refused to extradite Gen. Antonio Indjai, a former coup leader who had been indicted by the United States on charges related to cocaine trafficking linked to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
But some critics maintain that this was a manufactured coup rather than an attempt to subvert drug groups. The Front Populaire, a coalition of Guinea-Bissau’s opposition and civil-society organizations, has argued that the coup was staged to help clear a path for Embaló to appoint a proxy interim leadership before running in another election.
Regardless of the coup’s nuances, the fact remains that Guinea-Bissau has become yet another West African nation now under military control—and if it was indeed staged, then this only affirms that African leaders are finding ever more convoluted ways of staying in power.
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, Dec. 3, to Thursday, Dec. 4: Accra, Ghana, hosts the Renewable Energy Forum Africa, an annual gathering of clean energy investors.
Egypt holds a first-phase runoff for parliamentary elections.
Tuesday, Dec. 9: Nationwide protests are planned on Tanzania’s Independence Day.
What We’re Watching
Nigeria beefs up security. Last week, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ordered police officers who were protecting VIPs to refocus on normal policing duties. The move came amid a wave of mass kidnappings for ransom by armed gangs in the country, as well as claims that security personnel guarding a school were withdrawn shortly before children were abducted.
An estimated 100,000 officers had been assigned to politicians, businesspeople, celebrities and their families, leaving many ordinary citizens, especially those in rural areas, without state security.
According to a report published last month by the European Union Agency for Asylum, “this shortage in manpower, as well as corruption and insufficient resources have resulted in delayed responses to crimes and numerous communities being left without protection.”
Tinubu said that the government will also recruit 30,000 additional officers to address the country’s security challenges. The Nigerian president is currently under domestic pressure to act on decadeslong insecurity, particularly as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens the country for allowing what he has called a “Christian genocide”—a claim that experts have widely disputed.
Tunisian repression. On Friday, a Tunisian court handed out prison sentences of up to 45 years to 40 individuals—including opposition leaders, businesspeople, and lawyers—who were charged with conspiring to overthrow Tunisian President Kais Saied. Around 20 had fled the country and were sentenced in absentia.
“This is a judicial farce. … There is a clear intent to eliminate political opponents,” said Mokthar Jmai, a lawyer for the defendants.
On Nov. 22, thousands of protestors marched in the capital of Tunis against Saied’s one-man rule. Saied took office in 2019 and has since jailed dozens of his critics. As Saied has escalated repression, only a few counters to his presidential power remain—including the Tunisian General Labour Union, which the government has been trying to weaken.
Another Congo peace deal. On Thursday, Trump is set to host the Congolese and Rwandan presidents in Washington to sign another peace agreement to end the fighting in eastern Congo.
Despite other recent peace deals and frameworks—including one signed in Doha last month and another brokered in Washington in June—the situation on the ground so far remains the same: Rwandan troops have not withdrawn from Congo, while Rwandan-backed M23 rebels remain in occupied areas and continue to launch offensives in the region.
Tanzanian investigation. A coalition of human rights groups and lawyers has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the reported killing of at least 1,000 people during crackdowns on protests following Tanzania’s Oct. 29 election, which incumbent President Samia Suluhu Hassan won with nearly 98 percent of the vote after key opposition figures were barred from running.
A CNN investigation last month said that satellite imagery in the aftermath of the protests showed bodies overflowing in morgues and evidence of mass graves.
Tanzania’s opposition has called for mass protests on Dec. 9, the country’s Independence Day. Meanwhile, the European Parliament has called for the European Union to freeze $181 million in aid to Tanzania pending an investigation.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Can Chinese Authoritarianism Stay Smart? by Jennifer Lind
- India’s Strategic Autonomy Is Now Reading as Aloof by Chietigj Bajpaee
- The United States Is Moving Through the Stages of Grief Over China’s Rise by Robert A. Manning
What We’re Reading
Sexual violence in Egypt. In the Continent, Faten Sobhi reported on a new scholarly investigation into marital rape in Egypt. Like nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations, sexual violence within marriage in Egypt is not criminalized or considered rape by law.
“We fought a similar battle over the term ‘harassment,’ which was previously dismissed as mere ‘flirting,’” one analyst told Sobhi. “The battle for recognition of marital rape as a serious crime has only just begun.”
South African exhibition. In Africa is a Country, Bárbara Rousseaux wrote about Rwandan artist Serge Alain Nitegeka’s new exhibition in Johannesburg. Nitegeka became a child refugee during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and fled to neighboring Congo, eventually making his way to South Africa.
The large-scale geometric installations echo “the hurdles migrants have to go through as they move from country to country,” Rousseaux wrote, and Nitegeka “thinks about his work as a celebration of the endurance of the human body and the human mind.”