By Louis Achi
Leaders of the Sunday, November 26 coup attempt in Sierra Leone have been arrested, the Anglophone country’s authorities have said.
The swift put-down of the attempted military coup in Sierra Leone by the authorities reinforces Anglophone Africa’s relative political stability contrasting with its Francophone block despite its warts, pimples and all.
Some troops had attacked a major armoury early Sunday with the obvious intent to capture arms with which to prosecute what would have been a military coup.
But according to the New York Times and Reuters, President Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone has declared that leaders of the attacks have been arrested and calm restored.
Bio spoke on a nation-wide state-owned television channel in which he admitted that several security spaces in Freetown, particularly the armoury at the Wilberforce military barracks and the Pademba Road Prison came under attack.
An unidentified spokesperson of the coupists was quoted by global media platforms as saying, “We’ll clean this society. We know what we are up to. We are not after any ordinary civilians who should go about their normal business”. .
Had the coup succeeded, it would have meant Africa’s coup syndrome ravaging Francophone Africa crossing into British-West Africa.
ECOWAS and the United States are the earliest geopolitical actors to condemn the development in Sierra Leone but with most global media platforms, particularly The New York Times and Reuters saying that the political situation in the country has been tense in the aftermath of Maada Bio’s re-election earlier this year.
The 59-year-old president himself, said The New York Times, took part in two coups during Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s.
The two media houses added that the results of the election which brought him to power was rejected by his main opponent and questioned by some observers “who cited a lack of transparency”.
