A coup too far: Why Benin’s rebel soldiers failed where others in the region succeeded

Had last week’s coup attempt in Benin been successful, it would have become the ninth to take hold in the region in the last five years alone.Just a few days after soldiers took power in Guinea-Bissau while a presidential election vote count was still under way, leaders of the West African grouping Ecowas rapidly concluded that Sunday’s attempted overthrow of Benin’s President Patrice Talon was one destabilising step too far.In support of his government, Nigerian warplanes bombarded mutinous soldiers at the national TV and radio station and a military base near the airport in Cotonou, the largest city.Ecowas also announced the deployment of ground troops from Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone to reinforce the defence of constitutional order.This is a region that has been shaken by repeated coups since 2020, and which little more than 10 months ago saw the putschist regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger completely withdraw their countries from Ecowas – the Economic Community of West African States – of which they had all been founding participants 50 years ago.So, faced with the prospect that yet another civilian government might be overturned by discontented soldiers, the presidents of the remaining Ecowas member states rapidly reached the conclusion that the attempted coup in Cotonou could not be allowed to succeed.