Still as part of Chatham House’s #CHAFrica Programme Ministerial Roundtable series, Aperio attended a session led by Shegun Adjadi Bakari, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of #Benin.
Benin strongly condemned the coup which overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum of Niger in July 2023, including supporting Nigeria’s early calls for a military intervention to restore his government. Bakari opened by providing a historical explanation for Benin’s stance: between 1960 and 1972, it experienced at least one military coup every year, leading to a period of economic stagnation and, by some indicators, regression. In the 1990 Conference Nationale which set out the roadmap for Benin’s transition to civilian rule, the country therefore insisted on a clear separation between military and political power. Bakari noted that while former military officers have run for political office in Benin, they have had to give up their military positions before doing so.
A more sanguine view might be that the country saw a close alignment with Nigeria as an opportunity to further curry favour with what is often called Benin’s “big brother,” due the two countries’ close ties and Nigeria's much larger economy and population. As regional political analyst Claude BIAO mentioned in his recent Q&A with Aperio, the appointment of Bakari, an ethnic Yoruba (like Nigeria’s president Tinubu) who has significant ties in Nigeria, has been linked to efforts to preserve the Benin-Nigeria relationship. This is especially key in light of events in 2019, when Nigeria closed all of its land borders to trade in an attempt to curb smuggling, leading to disruption in Benin – Cotonou, the country’s economic capital, is about 20km away from the Nigerian border and only about two hours’ drive (traffic allowing) from Lagos.
Multiple questions in the session that followed Bakari’s remarks, as can perhaps be expected, focused on the democratic backsliding which has taken place under the presidency of Patrice Talon. While credited with liberalising Benin’s economy to attract foreign investment, Talon’s administration has also limited political freedoms, effectively banning all opposition parties in the 2019 parliamentary elections and imprisoning multiple leading opposition figures. While Bakari took these questions and answered them frankly, his justification for the moves – that having too many opposition parties makes holding elections prohibitively expensive and opens the door to “chancers” with no actual political base to use their status as candidates to curry financial and other favours – is unlikely to have satisfied many. The question is likely to be how Western investors weigh the backtracking of political pluralism in Benin, a country which has successfully held peaceful democratic elections since 1991, against a more inviting business climate engendered by Talon’s reforms.
You can read the full account of the roundtable on the FCD here:
https://lnkd.in/dtjXMq6q
