Attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau thwarted

Security forces in Guinea-Bissau have thwarted a coup after gunmen attempted to overthrow the west African country’s government, President Umaro Sissoco Embaló said in a video address.

Heavy gunfire had erupted on Tuesday in the capital Bissau near the Government Palace, where Embaló was presiding over a cabinet meeting, according to news agencies. The attempt follows a surge in coups across the region: soldiers in Mali, Guinea, Chad and — last week — Burkina Faso have seized power amid rising insecurity and economic malaise.

Embaló said “many” security personnel had died but did not specify how many, in what he called a “failed attack against democracy”.

“The ‘coup’ virus is now airborne across the subregion,” W. Gyude Moore, former Liberian public works minister and senior policy fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, wrote on Twitter. Unconfirmed videos on social media showed heavy fire in Bissau on Tuesday afternoon.

The Economic Community of West African States earlier on Tuesday condemned what it referred to as an “attempted coup”. In a statement, the 15-member regional bloc said: “Ecowas asks the military to return to their barracks and maintain a republican posture.”

The group issued a nearly identical statement last Sunday, when gunfire erupted in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou. The next day, soldiers announced on state television that they had overthrown President Roch Kaboré, suspended the constitution and dissolved the government; coup leader Lt Col Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was this week named interim president and head of the armed forces.

A spokesman for António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, stated that he was “deeply concerned with the news of heavy fighting in Bissau. He asks for an immediate end to the fighting and for full respect of the country’s democratic institutions.”

The move by Burkina’s junta followed a pattern set by Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goïta, who led the overthrow of the democratically elected government in August 2020 and fully seized power in May 2021, naming himself interim president.

Ecowas has repeatedly condemned the coups among its members, suspending and taking sanctions against those countries where governments have fallen. But Moore said the bloc was “overwhelmed”.

“It doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle so many crises, in the midst of a pandemic, while every member faces huge domestic issues,” he said.

The juntas now leading Guinea, Burkina Faso and Mali all enjoy strong public support from citizens fed up with corrupt leadership, lack of development and the widespread insecurity that democratic elections have brought them.

“Public distrust in civil governments is clearly on the rise, as shown by the popular support for unconstitutional change of power,” said Eric Humphery-Smith, Africa analyst at Verisk Maplecroft. “This is a major reality check for the region’s rapidly declining list of democratic leaders.”

Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony that has at times been referred to as Africa’s first narco state because of the control drug traffickers have exerted over it, has suffered nine attempted or successful coups since independence in 1974.