John O. Ifediora
Abstract
This paper advances the position that standing military forces in sub-Saharan and North African states have, on the whole, failed to serve the security interests of their populations, have functioned with alarming frequency as instruments of authoritarian consolidation, and constitute a chronic drain on public resources that are urgently needed for economic development. Drawing on historical evidence, comparative political analysis, and development economics, this paper argues that African states would be better served by disbanding or dramatically reducing conventional military establishments in favor of robust, well-trained, and well-resourced civilian police forces capable of addressing the actual security challenges that African citizens face daily. This is not a counsel of defenselessness, but a rational reallocation of scarce sovereign resources toward institutions that more faithfully serve the public good.
I. Introduction
The concept of the standing military as a pillar of the modern nation-state is one of the most durable inheritances of the Westphalian international order. African nations, emerging from colonial rule in the mid-twentieth century, largely adopted this model wholesale — inheriting in many cases the very military structures that colonial powers had used to subjugate them. For decades, the legitimacy of these institutions has gone largely unquestioned in mainstream policy discourse, treated as an axiomatic feature of sovereignty.
Yet a careful examination of the African experience compels a different conclusion. In country after country, the standing military has demonstrated not merely a failure to protect populations from external threats, but an active propensity to become the principal instrument of the population’s oppression. Simultaneously, military expenditure diverts funds from health, education, and infrastructure — the foundational investments upon which sustainable development depends. And the external threats these militaries purport to deter are, in practice, either nonexistent, beyond the military’s capacity to counter, or best addressed through multilateral diplomacy and regional frameworks rather than national armies.
This paper proceeds in four parts. Section II examines the ineffectiveness of African standing militaries against serious foreign aggression. Section III analyzes their well-documented role as tools of domestic repression. Section IV assesses the economic costs of military expenditure relative to alternative uses of those resources. Section V argues for a reorientation toward professional civilian police forces as the appropriate institutional response to the security challenges that most African citizens actually face.
II. The Military Ineffectiveness Thesis: Standing Armies and Foreign Threats
A. The Nature of Actual External Threats
The foundational justification for a standing military is the deterrence of, and defense against, foreign aggression. Evaluated against this standard, African militaries have an underwhelming record. This is not primarily a failure of courage or competence on the part of individual soldiers; it is a structural reality rooted in the nature of threats facing African states and the material limitations of their armed forces.
The external security threats most relevant to African states in the post-Cold War era do not take the form of conventional inter-state warfare. With limited exceptions — the Eritrea-Ethiopia War (1998–2000), the Ogaden conflict, and border skirmishes between states such as Sudan and South Sudan — African states have not faced the kind of massed, mechanized foreign aggression that a conventional standing army is designed to repel. The 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia War, notably one of the largest conventional conflicts in Africa’s post-independence history, resulted in catastrophic casualties on both sides, a stalemate, and a peace process brokered not by either military but by the Organisation of African Unity and international mediators. The war demonstrated that standing armies in the region were capable of producing mass death, but not of resolving the underlying political disputes that caused the conflict.
B. The Irrelevance of National Armies Against Great Power Intervention
When African states have faced truly serious foreign aggression from powerful external actors, their standing militaries have proven categorically incapable of providing meaningful resistance. France’s repeated military interventions in its former African colonies — a phenomenon so routine as to have acquired the shorthand Françafrique — have demonstrated consistently that a determined external power with modern equipment can overwhelm African military establishments with minimal effort. Operation Serval in Mali (2013), in which French forces rapidly dismantled jihadist territorial gains that the Malian army was powerless to reverse, is illustrative. The Malian military, despite decades of foreign investment and training, collapsed almost immediately when confronted with an organized non-state armed group. French intervention was decisive; the national army was not.
More recently, the deployment of the Wagner Group (now operating under successor structures) in the Central African Republic, Mali, and Burkina Faso illustrates the same dynamic in different form. These states, unable to address insecurity through their own military establishments, imported private military contractors — a de facto admission that the standing army model had failed entirely. The human rights consequences of this decision have been severe, but the relevant point for present purposes is the demonstrated inadequacy of national armed forces in providing security even against sub-state armed groups.
C. Regional and Multilateral Frameworks as Superior Alternatives
Where effective responses to external aggression and regional instability have been achieved, they have come not from national standing armies acting independently but from multilateral frameworks. The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) intervention in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province represent instances in which collective action produced outcomes that no single national army could have achieved alone.
This suggests that, to whatever extent African states need military capacity at all, that capacity is more efficiently organized at the regional or continental level through pooled resources and shared command structures. The maintenance of expensive national standing armies to address threats that only multilateral force can realistically counter is, on this analysis, a profound misallocation of sovereign resources. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the vision of an African Standby Force gesture toward precisely such a regional model; the more radical but logically consistent extension of this vision would be the replacement of most national militaries with contributions to a permanent regional security architecture.
III. The Repression Thesis: Standing Militaries as Instruments of Authoritarian Control
A. Coups d’État and the Subversion of Democratic Governance
No analysis of African standing militaries can proceed honestly without confronting the extraordinary frequency with which they have seized power from civilian governments. Since the wave of African independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the continent has experienced more than two hundred successful coups d’état. This is not an incidental or peripheral feature of African military institutions; it is one of their defining characteristics.
The resources invested in a standing military — weapons, training, communication networks, logistical infrastructure, and the cultivation of organizational cohesion — create, by their very nature, an institution capable of overpowering civilian authority. When the professional and material interests of the officer corps diverge from those of the civilian government, the temptation to translate military capability into political power has repeatedly proven irresistible. The coups in Mali (2020 and 2021), Guinea (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), Niger (2023), and Gabon (2023) are merely the most recent expressions of a dynamic that has persisted since independence.
It is significant that these coups have in virtually every case been justified by the military in terms of national security — combating terrorism, corruption, or foreign exploitation. Yet the consequence of military rule has consistently been the suppression of civil liberties, the dissolution of elected institutions, and the entrenchment of military elites as new extractive classes. The military institutions ostensibly created to protect the nation become, in practice, the greatest threat to the nation’s political development.
B. The Weaponization of the Military Against Civilian Populations
Beyond the dramatic rupture of the coup, African standing militaries have been routinely employed by incumbent civilian and military governments as instruments of domestic repression. The use of military force against civilian populations — in Ethiopia’s Amhara and Tigray regions, in Sudan’s Darfur, in Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi massacres, in the Central African Republic, in the Democratic Republic of Congo — constitutes one of the most consistent and devastating patterns in post-independence African governance.
This dynamic is not accidental. The organizational culture of standing militaries is oriented toward the application of overwhelming force against organized adversaries. When deployed domestically — whether to suppress political opposition, quell ethnic unrest, or intimidate civilian populations in the vicinity of resource extraction — this culture produces predictable atrocities. Soldiers trained to regard lethal force as the primary instrument of problem-solving do not naturally pivot toward the measured, rights-respecting approach appropriate to domestic security contexts.
The literature on civil-military relations in Africa is replete with documentation of this phenomenon. The work of scholars such as Samuel Decalo, who painstakingly catalogued the praetorian character of African military establishments, and more recent scholarship on security sector governance by the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, consistently supports the finding that African standing armies have been as much a threat to their own citizens as to any external adversary.
C. Structural Incentives Toward Repression
The disposition of standing militaries toward domestic repression is not simply a matter of individual malice but of structural incentive. Military institutions depend on political patronage for their budgets, promotions, and institutional survival. Governments that feel threatened by political opposition or civil society find in the military a ready instrument of coercion — and militaries that serve this function are rewarded with increased resources and expanded mandates. This creates a mutually reinforcing relationship between authoritarian governance and military institutionalization that is deeply destructive to democratic development.
Furthermore, the cultivation of military loyalty through ethnic or regional favoritism — a pattern documented extensively across the continent, from Mobutu’s Zaire to Museveni’s Uganda — transforms the armed forces from a national institution into a factional weapon. The standing military becomes, in such contexts, an armed instrument of one communal group’s domination over others, a dynamic that has fueled civil conflict rather than preventing it.
IV. The Economic Cost Thesis: Military Expenditure as a Drag on Development
A. Opportunity Costs in Resource-Constrained Environments
African states collectively spend tens of billions of dollars annually on their military establishments. According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), African military expenditure has grown substantially in real terms over the past two decades, with some states allocating between three and six percent of gross domestic product to defense. In the context of economies characterized by severe deficits in public health infrastructure, educational attainment, road networks, electricity access, and clean water provision, these are not abstract figures. They represent hospitals not built, teachers not trained, roads not paved, and agricultural inputs not provided.
The opportunity cost of military expenditure is particularly acute in the least developed African economies, where marginal public spending on health and education has been demonstrated to yield extraordinary returns in human capital development and long-run economic growth. Research by economists such as William Easterly and Daron Acemoglu has established that institutional quality and public investment in human capital are among the strongest predictors of sustained economic development. Military expenditure that displaces investment in these domains is, from a development economics perspective, an exchange of long-run prosperity for short-run coercive capacity — a trade particularly harmful to the poorest citizens.
B. The Crowding Out of Productive Investment
Military expenditure crowds out productive public and private investment through multiple channels. At the most direct level, military budgets compete with civilian ministries for public funds. In countries where external debt service obligations already constrain fiscal space, the incremental defense budget represents a genuine displacement of spending on priority development programs. The opportunity cost is not hypothetical; it is measurable in the annual budget documents of any African finance ministry.
At a second level, large military establishments absorb significant quantities of educated and physically capable manpower that could otherwise be deployed in economically productive activities. The diversion of young men and women — among the most important assets of Africa’s demographically youthful societies — into military organizations that produce no economic output represents a substantial foregone contribution to national productivity.
At a third level, the governance deficits associated with large military establishments — corruption, rent-seeking, opacity in defense procurement, the militarization of resource extraction industries — impose systemic costs on the investment climate. Foreign and domestic investors are reasonably reluctant to commit capital in environments characterized by military impunity and the arbitrary exercise of coercive power.
C. Comparative Evidence from Demilitarized States
The experience of Costa Rica is instructive in this regard, though the geopolitical contexts differ significantly from those of African states. Costa Rica abolished its standing army in 1949 and redirected military expenditure toward education and public health. The country subsequently achieved levels of human development — life expectancy, literacy, access to healthcare — that dramatically outpaced neighbors with large military establishments and comparable or greater natural resource endowments. While direct transposition of this model to African contexts requires caution, the underlying principle — that demilitarization can fund transformative investment in human capital — is transferable.
Within Africa, Botswana’s relatively modest military establishment, its strong civilian institutional governance, and its sustained investment in education and public health have contributed to development outcomes that compare favorably with many African peer nations. The relationship is not monocausal, but the pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that reduced military expenditure, in the context of strong civil governance, is conducive to development.
V. The Alternative: Professional Civilian Police Forces as the Appropriate Security Institution
A. Aligning Security Institutions with Actual Security Challenges
The case against standing militaries is strengthened considerably by the recognition that it is not a case against security itself. The security challenges that most African citizens face daily are not invasion by foreign armies. They are crime, gender-based violence, road safety, communal conflict, and the predatory behavior of non-state armed groups operating in conditions of governance vacuum. These challenges are amenable to civilian policing responses — indeed, they are precisely the challenges that well-resourced, well-trained, and well-governed police forces are designed to address.
The fundamental misalignment between the security challenges faced by most African citizens and the security institutions maintained by their governments is a central pathology of the post-colonial African state. Resources invested in tanks, artillery, and fighter aircraft address virtually none of the threats that determine the daily safety and wellbeing of ordinary people. Resources invested in community policing, criminal investigation capacity, forensic science, domestic violence units, and traffic enforcement address almost all of them.
B. The Characteristics of an Effective Civilian Police Force
The argument advanced here is not for any police force, but for a specific vision of civilian policing that departs radically from the model currently prevalent across much of the continent. African police forces have their own well-documented history of corruption, brutality, and political manipulation — often because they too have been subordinated to authoritarian political control and denied the resources necessary to function effectively.
An effective civilian police force, capable of meeting the security needs of African populations, would possess several defining characteristics. It would be adequately funded from the savings generated by military demobilization, enabling competitive salaries, professional training, and modern equipment. It would be subject to robust civilian oversight through independent accountability mechanisms, including civilian review boards, judicial oversight of investigative powers, and transparent disciplinary processes. It would be educated not merely in the tactical applications of force but in law, constitutional rights, forensic methods, community relations, and conflict de-escalation. It would be demographically representative of the communities it serves, building the trust that effective policing requires. And it would be insulated from political direction in individual cases through professional norms and statutory independence.
C. Community Policing and Conflict Prevention
Research on effective policing in the developing world consistently emphasizes the value of community-based approaches that position police officers as partners of, rather than adversaries to, the communities they serve. Community policing models, adapted to African contexts, have shown promise in a number of settings as mechanisms for building social trust, gathering intelligence about criminal activity and communal tensions, and resolving disputes before they escalate into violence.
The prevention of communal violence — one of the most significant contributors to insecurity in many African states — is an area in which a professional civilian force is demonstrably better suited than a military. Military forces, by training and organizational culture, are capable of responding to violence once it has erupted; they are poorly designed for the patient, relationship-based work of identifying tensions early, facilitating dialogue, and building the inter-communal relationships that reduce the likelihood of violence occurring at all. Community police officers, embedded in neighborhoods and trained in conflict mediation, can perform this function in ways that soldiers cannot.
D. Regional Security Cooperation as a Supplement
The transition away from standing national militaries need not leave African states entirely without recourse against the most severe external security threats. A regional security architecture — funded through contributions from member states calculated as a fraction of current national military budgets — could maintain a trained, equipped, and rapidly deployable force capable of responding to the scenarios in which organized military capacity is genuinely necessary: genocides, mass atrocity crimes, large-scale invasions. The African Union’s existing continental peace and security architecture provides a framework upon which such a permanent regional force could be constructed. This arrangement would preserve genuine collective security capacity while eliminating the domestic pathologies — coup risk, civilian repression, resource drain — associated with national standing armies. The resources freed from national military establishments would fund the robust civilian police forces described above, as well as the developmental investments — in health, education, and infrastructure — that constitute the most reliable long-run foundation of human security.
VI. Responding to Objections
A. The Sovereignty Objection
The most powerful objection to the proposals advanced here is the sovereignty objection: that the capacity for independent national defense is an essential attribute of sovereignty, and that African states that disband their militaries render themselves dependent on the goodwill of more powerful actors. This objection deserves respectful consideration, but it ultimately fails for two reasons.
First, as argued in Section II, the sovereignty that national standing armies ostensibly protect has proven largely illusory. When France intervenes in the Sahel, when the United States conducts counterterrorism operations, or when private military contractors operate on African soil, the nominal existence of a Malian or Central African standing army has done nothing to constrain these interventions. The sovereignty that African standing armies protect is, in many cases, the sovereignty of the ruling elite from domestic opposition — not the sovereignty of the nation from external interference.
Second, sovereignty in the contemporary international order is not secured primarily by military force but by institutional legitimacy, economic vitality, and the cultivation of relationships within international frameworks. A well-governed African state, investing in its citizens’ health and education, building a diversified economy, and participating constructively in regional and global institutions, commands greater real sovereignty than a poorly governed state with an underequipped army.
B. The Employment Objection
A second objection holds that military demobilization would create unemployment among former soldiers, with potentially destabilizing consequences. This concern is legitimate and its practical management requires careful planning. However, it does not constitute a permanent argument for maintaining militaries; it is an argument for adequately resourced demobilization and reintegration programs. Former soldiers with transferred training in discipline, logistics, and physical fitness can be transitioned into civilian police forces, border agencies, fire services, conservation authorities, and other public sector roles. Investment in vocational training for demobilized personnel is considerably less expensive than maintaining a standing military indefinitely.
VII. Conclusion
The case presented in this paper is a difficult one, cutting against institutional inertia, elite interests, and deeply held assumptions about the nature of sovereignty and security. It requires acknowledging that some of the most prestigious and resource-rich institutions in African states have, on balance, made the lives of ordinary citizens worse rather than better. It requires imagining an alternative institutional architecture that departs substantially from the models inherited from colonialism and the Cold War.
But the evidence, honestly examined, supports the argument made here. African standing militaries have not provided effective defense against serious external threats. They have provided, with disheartening regularity, the coercive infrastructure through which authoritarian leaders have suppressed their own populations. They consume resources that, invested instead in health, education, infrastructure, and professional civilian policing, would yield transformative improvements in human welfare.
The appropriate response to insecurity is not the perpetuation of an institution that has so consistently generated insecurity. It is the construction of civilian security institutions, grounded in the rule of law, accountable to the communities they serve, and funded by the resources that military demobilization would liberate. For African states seeking to build genuine security and sustainable prosperity, this reorientation is not merely a policy option. It is an imperative.
References and Suggested Further Reading
Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Publishers.
Collier, P. (2007). The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Oxford University Press.
Decalo, S. (1990). Coups and Army Rule in Africa: Motivations and Constraints. Yale University Press.
Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF). (2015). Security Sector Reform in Africa: Promises and Perils. DCAF.
Human Rights Watch. (Various years). World Report. Human Rights Watch
Ifediora, J (2025). Nigeria’s Quarrels with Economics and Good Governance. Barnes & Nobles Publishing Co.
Luckham, R. (2003). Democratic strategies for security in transition and conflict. In G. Cawthra & R. Luckham (Eds.), Governing Insecurity. Zed Books.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press.
Omitoogun, W., & Hutchful, E. (Eds.). (2006). Budgeting for the Military Sector in Africa. Oxford University Press / SIPRI.
Sklar, R. L. (1993). The African Frontier for Political Science. In R. H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, & J. O’Barr (Eds.), Africa and the Disciplines. University of Chicago Press.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). (Annual). SIPRI Military Expenditure Database.
Note: This paper presents a deliberately one-sided argument in the tradition of formal policy advocacy. Readers are encouraged to examine the substantial counter-arguments — particularly those concerning regional stability, the genuine threats posed by non-state armed groups, and the institutional preconditions for effective civilian policing — before forming their own assessments.