In the early hours of Saturday 7 December 2025, a group of soldiers led by mid-ranking Beninese army officers attempted to seize power in Cotonou against the government of President Patrice Talon. They occupied parts of the national television and presidential infrastructure, broadcast a brief 'communiqué of the patriots' in the early morning, and were said to be holding two cabinet hostages. Within hours, after a direct request from the Talon government, Nigeria — under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu — dispatched Nigerian Air Force assets, including combat jets, and Nigerian Army Special Forces, in coordination with Ivorian forces, to assist the loyalist elements of the Forces Armées Béninoises.
By Sunday 8 December the coup had collapsed. The loyalist FAB, supported by Nigerian airstrikes against rebel positions, retook the broadcaster, freed the hostages, and arrested or scattered the plotters. Talon publicly thanked Tinubu and the Ivorian president Alassane Ouattara. The BBC reported on 12 December that about 200 West African soldiers — roughly half Nigerian, half Ivorian — remained in Benin for what was described as a 'clean-up' operation: hunting fugitive plotters and stabilising barracks.
The intervention is the most significant overt projection of Nigerian military power into a neighbouring state since ECOMOG's Liberia and Sierra Leone operations of the 1990s. It came against the backdrop of a sahelian region in which coups in Mali (2020, 2021), Burkina Faso (2022 ×2), Niger (2023) and Gabon (2023) had pushed ECOWAS — chaired at the time by Tinubu — to the margins. The Tinubu government framed the Benin operation as the active enforcement of the ECOWAS Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance (2001), and as a warning to coupists across the region.
Domestically, the operation was politically delicate. Tinubu had backed down from a threatened ECOWAS military intervention in Niger in August 2023 after sustained domestic opposition in the Nigerian Senate and public outcry. The Benin operation succeeded where the Niger threat had failed, in part because Benin's own legitimate government had explicitly invited the intervention. The episode is recorded in this archive both as a Tinubu-era foreign-policy moment and as the latest chapter in Nigeria's long history of subregional military intervention — cross-referenced in Diplomatic History: Benin Republic and the Armed Forces hub.