SIR: The streets erupt, not in anger, but in celebration. Ballot boxes, once symbols of hope, lie forgotten as citizens cheer the soldiers who have just shattered them. This is the haunting theatre of the people’s coup: a democracy mourned by no one, its funeral a festival.

At the heart of this paradox is a simple, devastating truth, articulated by Nigerian analyst, Oluyemi Fasipe. “Democracy loses legitimacy when it fails to deliver tangible outcomes,” he observes. “When citizens fear bandits more than the state and work harder yet grow poorer, they stop caring who is in power.”

Across West Africa, that contract has been torn up. Democracy became a phantom limb—a concept felt in theory but absent in the reality of empty markets, silent factories, and a justice system that only whispers for the elite. The state retreated, leaving a vacuum filled by fear and want. So when the tanks roll in, they aren’t seen as conquerors, but as unlikely liberators from a phantom that long ago ceased to serve.

Fasipe’s insight cuts to the core: people do not defend abstractions. They defend what feeds their children, what keeps them safe. The jubilation is not for the coup itself, but for the end of a democratic experiment that became a cruel joke. It is the desperate applause for any change when the present is untenable.

Yet the grim punchline, as Fasipe warns, is that “coups don’t solve problems. They suspend accountability.” The strongman’s promise is a mirage; the complex rot of poor governance merely festers in the shadows of martial law.
The path back, then, isn’t through lecturing citizens on democratic ideals. It is in the gruelling, unglamorous work of making those ideals real—proving that the state can be a guardian, not a predator.

Until then, the cheers for democracy’s end will only grow louder, a tragic ode to promises unmade and trust betrayed. The ballot will only beat the bullet when it first delivers bread, dignity, and justice.

Abiola Alaba Peters, a journalist, wrote from Lagos.