Military Government in Africa

No military government in Africa has ever surrendered power voluntarily. In fact, no government has ever changed hands peacefully through the electoral process in the 20 years since colonial Africa started breaking up into independent nations.

The data suggest that the frequency of military coups increased throughout the 1960s, and then diminished somewhat during the 1970s. The calculations of Kende show that the number of wars and the length of these wars in the Third World have been increasing: from twenty-five years' duration of all wars put together in the period 1945-1949, to thirty-three years' duration in 1950-1954, forty-eight years in 1955-1959, fifty-seven years in 1960-1964, and eighty-nine years in 1965-1969. Kende's graph shows a tendency to longer durations since 1964. The number of wars in any given year was, on the average, six in 1945-1954, ten in 19551964, and eighteen in 1965-1969. The number and length of military conflicts in the Third World therefore seems to have been increasing, particularly since the mid-1960s. This tendency toward more military conflict in the Third World seems to be, at least in part, generated by the world economic and political crisis. The persistence -- and probable aggravation -- of this crisis is likely to generate still more military conflict in the foreseeable future.

According to popular conceptions, the wider distribution of armaments causes wars and other military conflicts. Indeed, Kende does find positive correlations between military expenditures and arms imports on the one hand, and war on the other. But this correlation does not mean that armaments cause war or conflict -- though, of course, the prossession of arms constitutes a credible threat. In his discussion of the "causes of the increasing tendency" of war and other military conflicts in the Third World, Kende notes the shift by the United States from a strategy of "massive retaliation" during the cold war era to one of "flexible response" through "limited war" after the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity; the development of national liberation movements and their repression; the simple statistical increase in the number of states in or among which military conflicts could take place; and the increase of tension within many of these states. We will examine these and related causes of increased military conflict in greater detail.