Three days after Guinea-Bissau’s presidential election last month, chaos erupted. Incumbent President Umaro Embaló and top opposition Fernando Dias, claimed they had won. Before the electoral commission could make any official announcement, the senior military officers executed a successful coup. They immediately suspended the election, arrested the president, and closed the country’s borders.
President Embaló confirmed the takeover to France 24 in what he called a coup led by the head of the presidential military office. By November 27, General Horta Inta-A, one of the top military officers, had been sworn in as transitional president.
This is Guinea-Bissau’s ninth coup, including unsuccessful ones, since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974. For a nation of just 2.2 million people, this record mirrors a pattern of inevitable consequences of centralising power in weak institutions.
Embaló’s presidency exemplified the democratic theatre that passes for governance across much of Africa. Oppositions say his term should have ended in February, until the Supreme Court extended it to September. Embaló then delayed the election to November. Throughout his tenure, the former President dissolved parliament and ruled by decree after claiming to have survived three previous coup attempts, claims his critics dismissed as manufactured crises designed to justify his authoritarian measures.
“If Umaro Sissoco Embalo is re-elected, the agenda of democratic regression initiated in 2020 with his rise to power as President of the Republic will be consolidated,” political analyst Rui Jorge Semedo said.
The fundamental problem was not Embaló himself but the system he operated within. Guinea-Bissau’s presidency concentrates enormous power in a single office, creating a political prize so valuable that losing elections becomes existentially threatening to incumbents, while winning them offers the temptation of unchecked authority.
The military justified their seizure of power by citing the “discovery of an ongoing plan to destabilise the country, which was coordinated by some national politicians with the participation of a well-known drug lord and domestic and foreign nationals,” according to the military spokesperson Dinis N’Tchama.
Such an accusation is not new in Guinea-Bissau. The country has emerged as a hub for cocaine trafficking between Latin America and Europe. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime first warned in 2008 that Guinea-Bissau risked becoming a “narco state.” A 2025 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that the cocaine trade in the country could be “more profitable now than at any point in the country’s history.”
Vincent Foucher, senior research fellow at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, also noted that, “there is plenty of evidence that Guinea-Bissau is a drug hub, with a lot of Bissau-Guineans being arrested with cocaine in the subregion and abroad.”
One of such was how ex-naval chief Jose Bubo Na Tchuto was arrested off the country’s coast by US forces and sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison by a Manhattan court for conspiring to import drugs into the United States. But a military coup may not curtail the spread of drug business.
“The drug cartels’ influence is dependent on the lack of the legitimacy of the government. If, for example, we have a military coup, they will be more likely to create an environment through which they can grow their business,” explained Political analyst Aly Fary Ndiaye.
Guinea-Bissau’s instability doesn’t exist in isolation over the years West Africa has experienced a wave of military coups in Mali, Guinea, and Niger, which were often initially welcomed by populations frustrated with civilian governments. Yet these military interventions consistently fail to deliver on their promises of reform. More often than not, military rule worsened the central problem: too much power concentrated in the state.
The country’s chronic poverty compounds its instability. Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s poorest countries, with the World Bank estimating half its population living in poverty. Its coastline has many uninhabited islands, making it an ideal for drug traffickers
ECOWAS and AU denounced the “blatant attempt to disrupt the democratic process.” Mahmoud Ali Yousouf, the AU chairperson, reiterates in a statement the AU’s zero tolerance and unequivocal rejection of any unconstitutional change of government, and called for necessary steps to “restore constitutional order.”
