President Goodluck Jonathan yesterday said Nigeria will never recognise any government run by soldiers who executed a coup in Mali, urging them to immediately surrender power. "The coup plotters have only embarked on a fruitless mission of supplanting a constitutional government by other means which goes against the current global grain of constitutionalism. Nigerian Government would never recognize any unconstitutional regime," the president said in a statement by his spokesman Reuben Abati.
The overnight coup that ousted President Amadou Toumani Toure was led by low-ranking soldiers angry at the government's failure to stamp out a two-month-old separatist rebellion in the north of the west African nation.
Toure, 63, was preparing to cede power after elections later this month when the military struck.
President Jonathan urged all governments in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union (AU) and the United Nations to reject the coup in Bamako and demand an immediate reinstatement of Toure.
He said the coup was an "an apparent setback to the consolidation of democracy in Mali in particular and the African continent in general."
He warned the coup plotters not to truncate the presidential election slated for next month.
Jonathan also cautioned against shedding of blood and unnecessary destruction of property of the citizens and foreigners in Mali.
In a statement, the Foreign Affairs Ministry also said, "The Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria condemns unequivocally this unfortunate development in Mali as it constitutes a gross violation of the ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance to which all the States of the sub-region, including Mali, are parties."
The new military junta in Mali calls itself the National Committee for the Rectification of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDR), and is led by Captain Amadou Aya Sanogo.
Ousted president Toure, a former paratrooper, had himself seized power in 1991 in a coup against military ruler Moussa Traore after the latter's security forces killed more than 100 pro-democracy demonstrators.
But he quickly earned domestic and international acclaim by organizing polls the following year and a democratic handover to an elected civilian president in the Sahelian country, Africa's third largest gold miner and a major regional cotton grower.
Swapping his paratrooper's red beret and fatigues for flowing civilian robes and a Muslim bonnet, he returned to Mali's presidency through the ballot box in 2002 and was re-elected for his second and final five-year term in 2007.
Also yesterday, the ECOWAS and the AU condemned the coup that ousted Toure.
"By this unconstitutional act, the junta has automatically alienated and outlawed itself from the community," ECOWAS commission president Kadré Desiré Ouédraogo said in a statement.
"ECOWAS calls on it (the junta) to immediately relinquish power to the rightful government so that the country could return to constitutional normality."
He said he was in contact with the 16-nation regional bloc's chairman, Ivorien President Alassane Ouattara, "with a view to taking urgent action to ensure the rapid restoration of constitutional order in Mali."
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Daily Trust