Time up for Africa's military?

By Kwaku Sakyi-Addo
BBC, Accra

Twenty-four years ago on Wednesday, one of Africa's bloodiest coups took place in Ghana.

On 4 June 1979, Jerry Rawlings, then a 32-year-old air force officer, shot his way to power with a band of young soldiers, furious over the corruption and economic deprivations of the time.

Rawlings (on horseback) was welcomed as a hero in 1979

Eight generals, including three former military heads of state, were executed in public and some of the clips shown on national television.

But in 2000, Mr Rawlings accepted his defeat in a multiparty election - an illustration of how times have changed in Ghana, and elsewhere in Africa.

Last week, the West African regional body, Ecowas, said it would no longer tolerate military coups and would impose sanctions on those who seized power.

Stripped naked

In Ghana, scores of senior officers were sentenced to decades-long prison terms after trials of record-breaking brevity - three minutes in some cases.

Soldiers stripped elderly market vendors naked, and whacked their buttocks in public for making a profit.

Khaki used to be a common sight at African summits

The masses cheered. Ironically, the regime that was ousted had also come to power through a military coup.

But Ghana was not the only coup-prone country in Africa in those days.

In the 1970s and 80s, many African countries were being run either as one-party de facto dictatorships, or by military regimes - Nigeria, Mali, Uganda, Ethiopia, Togo, Benin, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger and Chad, among others.

Back then, the coup plotters tended to strike when heads of state were away on foreign trips - that was the case for Ghana's founding father, Kwame Nkrumah who was kicked out in 1966 while on a trip to Hanoi.

Then in 1975, Nigeria's Yakubu Gowon suffered a similar fate while attending an African summit in Kampala.

Multiparty habits

But the putsch in the Central African Republic in March this year, the most recent on the continent, goes against the fashion.

In many African nations today, military heads have either stepped aside or melted into civilian, multiparty habits, even if with varying degrees of conviction: Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, Mathieu Kerekou of Benin, Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia, and Lansana Conteh of Guinea.

Rawlings (r) accepted electoral defeat by Kufuor (l)

Mr Rawlings, a two-time coup maker, is now retired.

Even the Comoros Islands are quiet. At one point in 2001, they had three coups in two months. In one instance, one coup-maker held power for a single day.

Even so, there are still a number of hotspots in parts of West Africa and the Great Lakes region that require sustained and delicate tinkering, massaging and goading in order to keep their armies out of the political arena.

Partly as a result of pressure and partly Western aid agency demands, coups have become less commonplace today than they were two decades ago.

Credibility

When African leaders line up on the balconies of international summit meetings nowadays, you can almost see a halo of credibility over the heads of Ghana's John Kufuor, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Joachim Chissano of Mozambique, and Festus Mogae of Botswana.

Heads of state in military fatigues dripping with self-congratulatory medals and fist-sized epaulettes are increasingly outmoded.

That is why the 4 June public holiday, once celebrated in Ghana with pomp, pageantry and pride, is now a working day like any other.