I wouldn't be too surprised. Peter Ajak [0] (the Belfer Center fellow indicted by the DoJ for attempting the coup) is a fairly slick and well spoken guy.
Westerners seem to underestimate how mercenary and brass knuckled politics in the developing world is (no, politics in insert_OECD_country_here is not to the same degree), and assume every bleeding heart activist will become the next Gandhi. Ironically this is how Orban's political career got started as well as an pro-Democracy campaigner in the 1980s and 1990s.
This isn't to undermine activists and NGOs working in these countries, but the default assumption in due dilligence should be that everyone is a crook and then validate.
That said, I definetly saw plenty of glazing of questionable developing country politicians during my time when I was much more HKS adjacent, but this is common for just about every pmajor policy program - it's the only way you can attract big names, and non-Westerners know how to take advantage of that Western naivete (I've definitely used it on occasion despite being raised in North America).
Sudan exports about one ton of gold per week to the UAE. That's how the conflict is funded.
Even the most modern country (South Africa) is an economic basket case. 42% unemployment. Stealing from the electric utility costs hundreds of millions per year. The most senior elected person in the legislature was charged with corruption and is pending trial.
He's been trying to participate in opposition politics in South Sudan and imprisoned for it, likely because he's a real threat to power. I think it's too much to label him a crook, he's just fighting corruption by actual crooks with tactics others will obviously disagree with. He's definitely a radical activist.
I'm not denying that South Sudan's leadership aren't crooks, but the only way you can climb up in these kinds of environments is to be a crook yourself - reformists do not survive in political environments where violence and criminalization is normalized. And this is part of that naïveté I mentioned earlier.
And if a coup were to happen, would stuff even get any better? Countries run on institutions, and a coup by default undermine institutions by normalizing violence as a short circuit to consensus building. This weak institution building due to the power of the gun is what lead both Argentina and Pakistan to stagnate despite being economic darlings in the early and mid 20th century respectively.
And more critically - we in the US do not want to normalize private citizens fundraising armed movements en masse in the 21st century. This is a bad precedent.
Finally, the Wikipedia article has clearly had some PR panache attached to it based on the edit history, and it's silence about Ajak's case despite having been going on for over a year now.
Westerners seem to underestimate how mercenary and brass knuckled politics in the developing world is (no, politics in insert_OECD_country_here is not to the same degree), and assume every bleeding heart activist will become the next Gandhi. Ironically this is how Orban's political career got started as well as an pro-Democracy campaigner in the 1980s and 1990s.
This isn't to undermine activists and NGOs working in these countries, but the default assumption in due dilligence should be that everyone is a crook and then validate.
That said, I definetly saw plenty of glazing of questionable developing country politicians during my time when I was much more HKS adjacent, but this is common for just about every pmajor policy program - it's the only way you can attract big names, and non-Westerners know how to take advantage of that Western naivete (I've definitely used it on occasion despite being raised in North America).
[0] - https://www.belfercenter.org/person/peter-ajak