BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — When soldiers seized power in this small West African nation on Wednesday, toppling President Umaro Sissoco Embaló just hours before election results were to be announced, the script followed a familiar pattern.
Military officers in fatigues declared they had saved the country from chaos.
The president claimed he had been deposed. Regional powers condemned yet another coup.
But according to a growing chorus of African leaders and opposition figures, the entire spectacle was theater—a carefully staged production with Embaló himself as both victim and director.
“This was not even a palace coup,” said Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s former president, who had been in Bissau observing the election for the West African Elders Forum.
“I was looking for the appropriate word to describe it. I could not get that, which is why I called it a ceremonial coup. It was a ceremony conducted by the head of state himself.”
The accusation is extraordinary: that a sitting president would fake his own overthrow to avoid facing voters at the ballot box.
Yet the evidence suggesting Embaló manufactured the crisis is mounting, raising troubling questions about democratic backsliding in a region already battered by military takeovers.
Unlike the coups that have recently convulsed Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, this one had peculiar features from the start.
It was Embaló who first announced his removal from power, calling the French television station France 24 to declare, “I have been deposed.” The military statement came later, almost as an afterthought.
No president had died. No fierce gun battles raged through the capital.
After roughly an hour of gunfire near the electoral commission headquarters on Wednesday evening, an eerie calm settled over Bissau.
By Thursday, Embaló was flying to Senegal on a chartered military flight, not as a captive fleeing violence but apparently by arrangement with the very forces that supposedly overthrew him.
“What happened in Guinea-Bissau was a sham,” Senegal’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko told lawmakers, his blunt assessment echoing the skepticism rippling through regional capitals.
The timing of the takeover provides the most damning circumstantial evidence.
Provisional results from Sunday’s presidential election were scheduled to be released Thursday.
While official tallies remain sealed by military order, multiple sources suggested Embaló faced a strong challenge from Fernando Dias, a 47-year-old political newcomer who had surged in the race.
Jonathan told reporters in Abuja on Saturday that the election had been completed and results were essentially known.
“The key thing is that the winner of that election must be announced,” he said, calling on West African leaders to pressure Guinea-Bissau’s new military rulers to release the outcome.
Instead, the High Military Command for the Restoration of Order suspended the electoral process entirely, claiming they had thwarted a plot by unnamed politicians backed by drug barons.
The convenient vagueness of the allegations, combined with the immediate detention of opposition leader and former Prime Minister Domingos Simões Pereira, suggested other motives.
Dias himself accused Embaló of staging “a false coup attempt” because he feared electoral defeat. Local civil society organizations made similar charges, describing it as a “simulated coup” designed to prevent results from emerging.
For Embaló, 53, orchestrating his own removal would fit an established pattern.
Throughout his presidency, which began in 2020, he has repeatedly invoked security threats to consolidate power. After claiming to survive an attempted coup in December 2023, he dissolved parliament.
Guinea-Bissau has functioned without a legislature ever since.
Critics have long accused him of fabricating crises to justify crackdowns on dissent, though he has never responded directly to such allegations.
This time, however, the international community appears less willing to accept the official narrative at face value.
The African Union suspended Guinea-Bissau’s membership Friday, citing the unconstitutional military takeover.
The Economic Community of West African States issued similar sanctions while demanding that soldiers return to their barracks.
Even the European Union called for restoration of constitutional order and completion of the vote count.
Yet the criticism has been carefully calibrated.
No government has explicitly accused Embaló of staging the coup, perhaps reluctant to level such a severe charge without conclusive proof.
Jonathan and Sonko spoke of their suspicions but offered no documentary evidence of coordination between the president and military commanders.
That ambiguity may work in Embaló’s favor.
The new transitional president, Major General Horta Inta-a, has promised elections within a year.
Whether Embaló will be allowed to run again remains unclear, but his safe passage to Senegal suggests he retains significant leverage.
He could return as a civilian candidate, positioning himself as the man who can restore stability to the chaos he may have created.
Guinea-Bissau has endured at least nine coups and attempted coups since winning independence from Portugal in 1974, earning a reputation as one of Africa’s most politically unstable nations.
It has also become a critical transit point for cocaine flowing from South America to Europe, with drug money deeply embedded in political campaigns.
Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo, who directs the Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa, noted that major traffickers financed electoral campaigns in the recent vote.
“There is no sign the impact of cocaine on politics and governance in Bissau will decrease,” she said.
Whether genuine or staged, the coup has plunged the country back into turmoil.
Pharmacies remained closed Thursday.
Residents stayed indoors even after the curfew lifted. A professor in Bissau named Julio Gonçalves captured the anxiety gripping the capital: “If somebody is sick, how can he buy medicine or go to the hospital?”
Others expressed weary acceptance of military rule, hoping at least for competent governance. “I am not against the military regime as long as they improve the living conditions in the country,” said Suncar Gassama, a Bissau resident.
For the people of Guinea-Bissau, the distinction between a real coup and a fake one may matter less than the result: another democratic process interrupted, another election result suppressed, another chapter in a long history of violence and instability.
But for Africa, the implications are profound.
If leaders discover they can manufacture coups against themselves to escape accountability, the continent’s already fragile democratic norms face a new and insidious threat.
The question is no longer just whether militaries will respect civilian rule, but whether civilians in power will respect it themselves.
As Jonathan put it in his briefing to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, regional leaders must insist on transparency. “Let us know the winner of the election,” he said. In Guinea-Bissau, even that basic democratic principle has become a revolutionary demand.
