How does Mali's President Assimi Goïta Survive?
Five reasons an embattled leader is closing in on six years in power.
It has now been over a month since the devastating jihadist/rebel attacks that befell Mali on April 25, over five years since the May 2021 coup that erased all pretense of a civilian-led “transition” in Mali, and nearly six years since the ruling junta - headed by then-Colonial Assimi Goïta - took power in an August 2020 putsch.
Even if he were overthrown tomorrow, whether by his own troops or by the jihadists, Goïta would count as one of the most significant figures in Malian political history. And in Sahelian history - without Goïta, things might look quite different in military-ruled Burkina Faso and Niger, both of whose juntas drew clear impetus from Goïta’s successful violations, or perhaps recalibrations, of various regional and geopolitical norms. Goïta pioneered a political model that turned a military-led transition into an open-eded mode of governance, defying pressure from the Economic Community of West African States and from Western powers to step down; he also expelled French forces, undid a major peace accord negotiated under the auspices of Mali’s powerful neighbor Algeria, built a long-term partnership with Russia, and secured major capitulations from multinational mining firms. The influence of Goïta’s approach extends, I would argue, to Senegal, Guinea, and Chad, intersecting with longstanding domestic forces in those countries in different ways and contributing to a band of what might be called “neo-sovereigntism” in Africa. In a way, much of this is not new: Goïta has revived elements of the approach of Mali’s Moussa Traoré (in power 1968-1991) and has resembled elements of Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida (in power 1985-1993). But Goïta faces a different environment than those late Cold War autocrats did; he has managed to run an assertive, open-ended military regime in a post-Cold War context, a feat that is not unprecedented but that does contrast with some of the relatively short-lived military regimes that have come to power in West Africa since 1991.
Goïta has survived in power all while confronting a serious insurgency that clearly has his regime on the back foot, especially in 2025-2026. Being president of Mali is not easy under any circumstances - ask Amadou Toumani Touré, overthrown in a 2012 coup, or Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, overthrown by Goïta in 2020 - but it has been especially difficult since the northern rebellion-turned-jihadist takeover of 2012. Since 2013, Mali has not gone a day, to my knowledge, without both an active insurgency and foreign troops operating on its soil. That kind of pressure exerts a distorting effect on any country’s politics, elevating risks of mass protests, elite infighting, coups, coup attempts, and more - all the sorts of outcomes that Mali has experienced over the past fourteen years.
So how has Goïta lasted this long?
I can think of five main factors, or rather baskets of factors:
Political tailwinds: Goïta and his colleagues launched their coup after a summer of mass protests against then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. The protests voiced and symbolized deep structural issues in Malian (and Sahelian, and global) politics - the perceived corruption and fecklessness of the longstanding “political class,” frustrations with the lived experience of “democracy” as a saga of disappointments and manipulations, grinding insecurity juxtaposed with the triumphalist rhetoric of an overbearing and arrogant foreign power (France), etc. Goïta and company, almost by default, instantly symbolized an alternative to both septuagenarian politicians and neocolonial France. Meanwhile, Goïta and company benefited strongly from the aura of the War on Terror - two decades of American and French rhetoric and even cinema set the stage for a uniformed, bearded operator to promise, coming straight from the battlefield, that he could solve the country’s problems. The fact that there are still significant pockets of popular support for Goïta, even without the level of personality cult that surrounds Ibrahim Traoré next door in Burkina Faso, testifies to how advantageous of a start Goïta had, and how deeply he tapped into the zeitgeist.
State power: Even the weakest of states matter. Even with swaths of territory lost to government control, even with severely limited financial resources (and much economic sovereignty still outsourced to the International Monetary Fund, among others), even with a landlocked country facing several skeptical and sometimes outright hostile neighbors, running the state still matters. There are still administrative and military hierarchies, and the hand holding the lever can make some things move. The state is still the main vehicle for foreign relations, creating numerous opportunities for making deals, crafting alliances, and performing state power as well as Goïta’s personal power. The state also permits numerous opportunities for collecting and redistributing money, seemingly enough to maintain a critical mass of loyalty. Cracks within the state could bring Goïta down, of course, as was perhaps foreshadowed by a reported coup attempt in August 2025 - and an ensuing purge handed down by Goïta. But for the past nearly six years, Goïta has offered a lesson in the differences between “weak state” and “failed state.”
Weak civic opposition: See #1. Arriving to power in the context of discontent with the “political class,” Goïta and company were able to deploy high levels of authoritarian repression without meeting sustained and broad pushback. Arresting and intimidating career politicians, journalists, influencers, and civil society activists on an individual basis, then banning political parties, the junta dismantled (perhaps temporarily, but in a sweeping way) most of Mali’s democratic institutions. The junta also used a combination of intimidation and incentives and genuine support to create a favorable media bubble in Bamako, reinforcing the narratives of strength, self-assertion, and sovereignty.
An ambiguous insurgency: The question of what Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM) actually wants is much debated - but we can at least say that they have not yet made a serious push to capture and hold Bamako. Perhaps they can’t, perhaps they don’t want to, perhaps they can and want to but they’re not ready yet. Whatever the case may be, Goïta is not yet in the position of François Bozizé in the Central African Republic in 2012-2013, or Hissène Habré in Chad in 1990, or many other leaders who have watched a rebel movement grow and steadily bear down on the capital. JNIM’s itinerary is much more zig-zagging, leaving Goïta with the disadvantage of absorbing numerous defeats and humiliations, but also with the advantage of an interminable war that provides a justification of sorts for his own open-ended presidency.
Intra-elite balancing: Crushing the civil-democratic opposition has not meant there are no remaining aspirants to power. From the beginning, Goïta and his colleagues found ways to balance power among each other, namely by distributing top posts within the new political order to themselves; even to speak of Goïta as an individual may be a kind of shorthand or stand-in for power arrangements that are not completely transparent to outside observers, including me. The junta’s core members have also, from the beginning, opened doors to loyalists and allies from both the military and the civilian worlds to join them in power - witness the careers being made by General Abdoulaye Maïga, currently Prime Minister; and Abdoulaye Diop, who has been Foreign Minister since 2021. Not everyone who aligns with the junta has lasted at the top; the career politician Choguel Maïga rose and fell over a period of three years, for example. But the red lines are fairly clear for those who heed them. Each fresh crisis, moreover, offers opportunities to reshuffle the deck. Meanwhile, the junta - although rumors sometimes point to the contrary - has maintained its own cohesion, at least externally, and Goïta has maintained his status as the clique’s leader.
Concretely, then, Goïta can remain in power so long as (a) he maintains some significant degree of popular support, (b) he can prevent either complete bureaucratic dysfunction or a coup from within the ranks, (c) no pro-democracy protest wave coalesces into a popular revolution, (d) jihadists do not commit to toppling him, and (e) his inner circle(s) function. That sounds like a tough act to sustain - but Mali will soon have completed six years of it.