ABSTRACT
Most of the Western scholarship about army coups in Africa, especially Francophone Africa, gives too little insight into the personal motives of ambitious officers. Maintaining, as many scholars do, that military takeovers in Africa are the result of government inefficiency, corruption, ethnic cleavages, and intraelite strife, as Samuel Decalo has pointed out, is virtually tautological. In fact the Central African army is, like many African armies, "a coterie of distinct armed camps owing primary clientelist allegiance to a handful of mutually competitive officers of different ranks seething with a variety of corporate, ethnic, and personal grievances". Bureaucratization as a vehicle for state building has not succeeded in the Central African Republic; instead, there has been continual deterioration in the reliability and capabilities of state organizations. The likelihood of a Central African bourgeoisie that sees the state as more than an instrument for its own accumulation of wealth achieving power and actually beginning to develop a self-reliant national economy is remote.
