Over the span of just three years, Mauritania, a Northern African country straddling the Great Sahara and the Atlantic, hit international headlines twice, albeit for apparently different reasons. Back in 2005, the country caught world attention following a much acclaimed military coup which toppled the dictatorial regime of Mouaya Ould Sidi Ahmed Ould Taya and promised to usher in a new era of democratic rule. They organized legislative and general polls and oversaw a two-year transition which lead to peaceful handover of power to a civilian government. Yet again, last week, the same military crop of generals stormed the palace, arrested the president and his prime minister and again took matters into their own hands. The question now running on the minds of many is what went wrong with Mauritania’s fledgling democratic exercise? What has gone amiss in the relationship between the president and the military that led to this dangerous development?
Mauritania has a long history of military coups, but the most remarkable of them all is the 2005 military coup which put an end to two decades of dictatorial rule by the former president Ould Taya and laid the groundwork for a successful democratic transition. Of all the six coups which have rocked the country, the military this time came as makers of democracy not usurpers of power and were able from the get-go to ditch long-standing public fear and mistrust of the men in uniform.
This shift in attitude is also spurred by the military being the only viable and functioning institution in the country which had what it takes to survive the calamitous policies of previous governments. Two-decades of dictatorship under the regime of Ould Taya left civil institutions, such as political parties and NGOs as well as state apparatus in complete disarray and people have no other anchor to look up to than the army.
The deposed president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi seemed to be out of touch with this new reality, and his decision to turn the heat on the army was costly for him and for the country's democracy. He miscalculated that his legitimacy as the democratically elected president will be enough to tip the scales in his favor in any face-off with them. He got it wrong because he failed to properly weigh the public standing of his opponents and when he set upon a rebranding mission as the strongman at the helm he was soon given a reality check.
To make matters worse, he was widely tipped to have been backed by the two generals he sought to get rid of and that he relied on their influence in the run up to his election to the office. In an interview with Aljazeera channel, few days before the coup, he tried to shrug off any embarrassment vis a vis this relationship, but he could not hide his intent to lay to rest the general perception that he was handpicked by the army, and too weak to be in charge on his own. Along the course of his attempted makeover, the deposed president not only misread the public support of the army but also made a host of other missteps which saw him limping on all the way long.
If history is any guide, presidents in unstable democracies stand no chance to run counter to the army if they don't enjoy strong public backing. And in the case of Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, this equation can not be more true. Judging by the record of his first year stint as president, he is by all accounts the most unpopular fist year president in the history of the country.
It's true that not much can be achieved in a year and few months in the office. But the president raised expectations sky high and promised to push through sweeping reforms, stem corruption and restore the credibility of public administration. During his campaign trail, he pledged to enact these reforms at once, insisting that only an immediate implementation of his reform policy will change the life of the people for the better. Yet three months from taking the office, he is nowhere to be seen.
The demons of economic crises, which ranged from soaring fuel and food prices, unemployment, etc. kept hitting hard on a population which already can not make ends meet. It took the capital city, Nouakchott, to be gripped by repeated blackouts and severe water shortages for the president to be jolted awake from his slumber.
The president's lack of action came to haunt him when violent protests broke out in the eastern part of the country, his electoral base, and spread nationwide. It was the first time that the country has seen such violent protests which left one person dead and many injured.
The president's handling of the crisis proved to many that the much desired change is still put on the backburner. With no end in sight to the growing public anger, it became clear the president's popularity has slumped and that his lame duck attitude is not helping to fix it. It was at the point that the cracks began to show in the power structure which supported him, i.e. the army, the ruling coalition and the MPs of the presidential majority. He sacked his own government of technocrats and formed a new political one without consultation with the ruling coalition and its MPs. Worse, the new government featured notorious figures from the former regime of Taya who are known for their corruption and mismanagement of public wealth.
The new team tried to sugarcoat the President's change of heart towards the figures from the former regime of Taya as indicative of his determination to be his own man. It hoped to refurbish the image of an isolated leader by misleadingly portraying the collapse of his power base as a calculated move to counterbalance the influence of the detractors form within his camp and outside it. And as the president rushes toward making enemies left and right, matters started to spin out of control with the massive walkouts from his ruling coalition and the emergence of what has been dubbed "the breakaway parliaments". It became clear that the president's fall from grace becomes a matter of time as his own supporters turned against him, spearheaded by the furious MPs' attempt to try, convict and impeach him. Both upper and lower houses of parliament were for some time sites of tireless efforts to bring the president to task, charging him and his spouse of corruption and mismanagement.
The brief tenure of the deposed president is certainly a successful story abroad. The international community, keen to see democracy alive and kicking in the unstable, war-torn sub-region, was quick to embrace Mauritania as a role model, hoping that the rest of Arab countries will learn from it and follow in its footsteps. But the trappings of democracy which the world saw were a far cry from the reality inside the country as the failure of the president to adroitly manipulate the levers of power sent the country into an economic, legislative and power crisis his departure was the only way to fix it. Thus, the army stepped in to put an end to a dictator in the making as it did in 2005 when it put an end to a full fledged dictator.
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