LONDON - Niger’s coup in July was followed a month later by a putsch in Gabon. Those flashpoints, which followed military takeovers in recent years across the subregion, created a “coup belt” across the Sahel, with officers consolidating power in Chad, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. The deeper impact was that the validity of democracy was called into question across West and Central Africa.

In Niger, where many citizens had been battered by an Islamist insurgency or forced to pay higher food prices due to supply chain shocks caused by the war in Ukraine and the COVID pandemic, there was no clamor for the elected president when he was overthrown by the military.

Democratic principles were further undermined when Ali Bongo won a widely disputed presidential election in Gabon to retain power. The coup that removed him days later was welcomed in much of the country. That reflected findings by polling company Afrobarometer which show high levels of trust in the military in many countries — including a groundswell of support for those who remove leaders that abuse power — and a declining belief in the effectiveness of democracy.

The inability of West Africa’s regional body Ecowas to reverse the Nigerien coup through the threat of military intervention and economic sanctions have shown the subregion’s potential coup plotters that little would happen if they staged a putsch. And so there has been contagion with attempted coups in Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau in recent months.

The democratic crisis has exposed the fragility of some leaders, such as those in Central Africa’s Congo Basin, where long-standing leaders and soldiers have watched coups unfold in neighboring countries. But, as Nigeria-based risk consultancy SBM Intelligence noted recently, seizing power is not the biggest challenge: “The regimes still have the onerous task of farming for their legitimacy by other means, which chiefly has to do with improving the lives of their people.”