Tuggar to African leaders: Coups not regional problem — they may engulf entire continent

Yusuf Tuggar, the minister of foreign affairs, says it is wrong to blame the West Africa sub-region for the rising cases of military coups in the continent.

Tuggar spoke on Monday in Oran, Algeria, during a panel discussion at the 10th annual high-level seminar on the promotion of peace and security in Africa.

The minister said the whole continent may soon be consumed if care is not taken, adding that it may add to the challenges of terrorism and other cross-border criminalities. 

Tuggar said it is baseless to discuss military takeovers as a peculiar problem of the West African countries without citing the root causes, which he said include the proliferation of arms due to the war in Libya and other factors.

He said doing such is “escapist and a denial of what may lie ahead”.

“In examining the root causes of UCG and proffering solutions, it is important to consider just not endogenous factors of governance, and election processes but also important to consider the exogenous factors,” he said.

“Some might look at West Africa and say West Africa must have a problem and that is why it is happening there. 

“West Africa was not responsible for the implosion of Libya that brought out the proliferation of arms, West Africa was not responsible for failure of EU’s Sahel strategy. 

“It may not necessarily be responsible for climate change in the Sahel and I can go on and on and on. 

“The easier option is to ignore all these things or to wish them away and simply say there is something West Africa is doing wrong and try and accommodate the new military regimes, but that would be fatal for the whole of Africa because we want to get to the issue of fighting terrorism in the entire Africa, in North Africa and other parts.

“It is easy to think the solution is to accommodate these new military regimes and work with them because they are dear to you and that way you can continue to fight against terrorism but this would not work.

“I think the solution would be to bring life into the Africa Union body of programmes because terrorist groups and indeed other criminal gangs edging ways in border areas and West Africa has complex border areas, issues of territory are difficult to manage and the African Union body of programmes bringing about development, bringing about infrastructure would be more coercive and more coordinated and bring development of infrastructure when we don’t give in to this military takeover on pressures from the social media.”