What’s behind the Sahel’s wave of coups?
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does the wave of coups in the Sahel mean for its people? Since 2020, Central and West Africa have faced more than 10 coup attempts. Meanwhile, global powers are shifting, as Russia eclipses France and the United States in the region’s geopolitics. In a region where people are demanding security and dignity, what could lie ahead for the rest of the decade?
In this episode:
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Nicolas Haque (@nicolashaque), Al Jazeera Correspondent
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Marcos Bartolomé and Shraddha Joshi with Hisham Abu Salah, Duha Mossad, Hagir Saleh, and our host Kevin Hirten, in for Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Our lead of audience development and engagement is Aya Elmileik. Munera Al Dosari and Adam Abou-Gad are our engagement producers.
The Take production team is Amy Walters, Ashish Malhotra, Catherine Nouhan, Chloe K. Li, Cole van Miltenburg, Duha Mosaad, Hagir Saleh, Hisham Abu Salah, Khaled Soltan, Marcos Bartolomé, Phillip Lanos, Sarí el-Khalili, Sonia Bhagat, Shraddha Joshi, and Tamara Khandaker.
Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, life inside the so-called coup belt. |
| 0:15.0 | Molly, Rikina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Nishire, and Gabon are all now being run by military leaders after the army kicked out the civilian government. |
| 0:26.3 | Why have the 2020s been so unstable in the Sahel and what could lie ahead for the rest of the decade? |
| 0:35.0 | I'm Kevin Horton, and this is The Take. |
| 0:45.0 | Of course, you could call it a wave of coup, but you could also see it in terms of a wave of discontent in the way democracy was operating in this region. |
| 1:02.3 | The Sahel is a strip of land stretching eastward from the Atlantic Ocean across the south edge of the Sahara Desert. |
| 1:10.1 | It's been mired in political turmoil. |
| 1:12.8 | More than 10 coup attempts have rocked Central and West Africa since 2020. |
| 1:18.5 | Nicholas Hock has covered them all. |
| 1:21.7 | I'm a correspondent for Al Jazeera English, |
| 1:23.7 | and I live in Dakar, Senegal, covering the region. |
| 1:30.1 | So, Nicholas, I think it's fair to say that the Sahel is one of the most consequential and least understood regions on Earth. |
| 1:39.7 | You've been a roving news correspondent in the Sahel for a long time now. |
| 1:43.8 | You know it intimately, but it is such a big and complicated place for people who don't |
| 1:49.4 | know much about it. |
| 1:51.2 | What does the Sahel mean to you? |
| 1:54.3 | The Sahel is for thousands of years the place in which people, it's kind of the highways through the deserts. |
| 2:07.7 | People use the Sahel, the Sahara Deserts to trade. |
| 2:11.9 | And so when you think of the Sahel, you think of deserts. |
| 2:15.4 | But in fact, it's a multi-faceted landscape where people usually |
| 2:24.8 | don't necessarily live, but where people are constantly on the move, adapting to the |
... |
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