🔅 The Coup That Never Was
Plus, Trump’s Meeting with Five Presidents: Deportation Deals & Diplomatic Side-Eye
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
The Coup That Never Was
In mid-May, Ivorian timelines erupted with videos of soldiers, AI-voiced “news reports” and breathless posts claiming President Alassane Ouattara had been toppled. The rumours were fiction.
They started with a Burkinabé TikToker who praised Captain Ibrahim Traoré (Burkina Faso’s coup leader) and urged Ivorian troops to rise up. Pan-African-branded channels on YouTube, TikTok and X quickly recycled the clip, slapping on alarming headlines in French and English. Within 48 hours millions of viewers from Nigeria to Kenya had watched or shared the fake coup.
Why target Ivory Coast? With elections due in October and Ouattara seen as pro-Western, the country is a useful foil for influencers who denounce “imperialist puppets”. The content also pays: algorithms reward sensationalism, and some creators admit the topic spikes their ad revenue.
In this day and age, coup gossip travels faster than fact-checking, and unless the continent learns to swiftly blunt weaponised rumours, stability will remain only an algorithm away from collapse – ripe for whoever can game the feed to peddle influence and profit from the chaos.
Trump’s Meeting with Five African Presidents: Deportation Deals & Diplomatic Side-Eye
Washington called it a “business round-table.” African Twitter might have called it “Please Hold My Migrants.”
At a White House meeting last week, President Donald Trump asked the leaders of Liberia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Gabon to become temporary custodians for asylum-seekers the U.S. doesn’t want to (or can’t) send home. The hush-hush proposal: fly non-Africans to Monrovia, Bissau or Libreville, park them there until U.S. courts finish their paperwork, and promise not to boot them onward. Reuters sources say Liberia is already preparing to accommodate arrivals.
While presidential aides drafted talking points about “dignified, safe transfers,” Trump also pitched a grand re-brand: from aid to trade. USAID is gone, development budgets are axed, and now America wants deals, not donations.
The visiting presidents obliged with glowing sound bites (rumour: nominating the US leader for a Nobel was floated) yet Trump still managed a gaffe for the scrapbook. After Liberia’s Joseph Boakai spoke, in his country’s official language, the U.S. president marveled at the man’s “beautiful English” and asked where he learned it. Liberians, whose nation was founded by freed Black Americans in 1822, rolled collective eyes: colonial surprise, same old script.
Bottom line for Africa:
U.S. policy is pivoting… from grants to cargo planes full of third-country migrants.
Five small states must weigh Washington’s cash and kudos against the optics of acting as America’s waiting room.
And even in a charm offensive, the continent still has to explain why, yes, millions of Africans already speak “beautiful” English.
Former Nigerian Leader Buhari Has Died
Nigeria’s late ex-president Muhammadu Buhari has died, aged 82, in London.
Born in Daura in 1942, Buhari’s public life traced Nigeria’s post-colonial roller-coaster: 1983 coup saviour/strongman; 20 months of whip-brandishing “War Against Indiscipline”; 40 months in detention after Babangida’s counter-coup; and, after three ballot-box flops, the opposition icon who unseated Goodluck Jonathan in 2015.
Voters had banked on his frugal reputation to squash Boko Haram, break the oil-conduit kleptocracy and lower the jobless streets’ blood pressure. Instead, during his time, crude prices tanked leading to an economic crisis, rice prices exploded (which had his wife threatening to sit out his 2019 re-election bid), Boko Haram metastasised into IS-West Africa, herder–farmer feuds went thermonuclear, and a brutal crackdown on anti-police brutality protesters at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos in October 2020 made international headlines.
Yet Buhari’s personal ledger stayed oddly clean: no offshore mansions, no Panama leaks…
Africa’s verdict will thus debate two major snapshots: the incorruptible figure who finally made a peaceful opposition hand-over feel normal, and the fatigued commander whose inaction led many Nigerians to nickname him “Baba Go Slow.”
Either way, the last khaki president-turned-civilian has handed the baton to history, and you can read up more on his life here.
Food for Thought
“Nobody is born wise.”
— Kenya Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.