Cameroon Ranked Among World’s Top 20 Countries at Brink of Coup D ’état

Cameroon Journal, Yaounde, Nov. 13 – Jay Ulfelder, an American political scientist, has stated that Cameroon is among the top twenty countries with a high probability of witnessing a coup d’etat. His statement comes after a three-year study that was prompted by the assertion that coup d’états are had to be predicted despite the negative effects they have on the rule of law, democracy and peace.

The study, as posted on wordpress.com, was guided by a mathematical model designed to enable prediction of probability of coups in countries around the world.

He used about 15 variables which include geographic region; last colonizer; indicators for former French, British, and Spanish colonies, country age; based on year of independence, post-cold war period; indicator marking country-years since 1991, when coup activity has generally slowed, infant mortality rate; relative to the annual global median, logged, and courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The latest version ended in 2012, political regime type; (in this case a four-way categorization based on the Polity scale into autocracies, “anocracies,” democracies, and transitional, collapsed, or occupied cases was used). Political stability; count of years since a significant change in the polity scale, political salience of elite ethnicity; violent civil conflict; election year; indicator for any national elections—executive, legislative, or constituent assembly, slow economic growth; domestic coup activity as well as regional and global coup activity with focus on a count of other countries in the same region with any coup attempts the previous year.

Jay Ulfelder’s findings show that almost all the forty countries sampled including Cameroon, have a possibility of witnessing a coup d’état this year. Among the top five countries Countries Guinea and Mali have probabilities below 50% (26,5 % and 22,7 % ) and Madagascar, which has a coup probability of 23,9 %.The analyst, however, states that this does not mean that the countries will be free of coups.

The red zones are mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa (9 countries), and West and Central Africa.