The Niger coup’s lessons for the US and France

The writer is editorial director and a columnist at Le Monde

Don’t call it a coup or a putsch: it is an “extra-constitutional attempt to seize power”. And the military officers who deposed and sequestered the democratically elected president are not putschists nor a junta, but a “group asserting power”.

The extraordinary lengths to which the US state department has gone to avoid correctly naming what happened on July 26 in Niger reflects the degree of embarrassment that this new turmoil in sub-Saharan Africa has caused western strategists.

It also points to the differences in how the two main western security actors in the region, the French and the Americans, have approached the issue. President Emmanuel Macron, telling it like it is, spoke of “a perfectly illegitimate coup d'état” — and then went into a rare silence, while Washington and some African states tried to engage into negotiations with “the group asserting power” in Niamey.

Still unresolved after almost a month, the situation in Niger is a terrible blow to western efforts to stabilise this part of Africa. It is also a wake-up call regarding the evolving geopolitical reality of a continent which has now attracted a multiplicity of players. 

Not only has the activity of jihadist groups dramatically increased, but Niger is the fourth West African country, after Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso, whose leader has been overthrown by a military coup in the past three years. Paradoxically, Niger was one of the few states where the jihadist offensive was actually losing strength over the past year. Not even this success story has prevented the political instability from spreading.

Who lost Niger? The coup is probably the last nail in the coffin of French policy in west Africa. Wary of its colonial burden, Macron has indeed offered a new, more balanced vision for the region, but France’s permanent military presence proved a powerful counterargument. Kicked out of Mali last year, French forces thought they had found a safe haven in neighbouring Niger, led by a friendly president, Mohamed Bazoum. Now, its new rulers have asked Paris to withdraw its 1,500 troops.

For the Americans, who maintain two important military bases and 1,100 men in Niger, the lesson is almost as bitter. As acting deputy secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, found out on August 7 in Niamey, trying to negotiate a return to constitutional order with a brigadier general and three colonels is not an enviable task. Particularly when the general, Moussa Salaou Barmou, who graduated with a masters in strategic security studies from National Defense University in Washington, was seen by the Pentagon as its best partner in the fight against Islamist extremism. The conversation, Nuland said, was “extremely frank and at times quite difficult”. 

The Biden administration now finds itself in a quandary: either it sticks to its professed democratic values, which makes it difficult to maintain military bases in co-operation with an illegitimate junta, or it decides that the deteriorating security situation, threatening even coastal states of west Africa such as Ivory Coast, is paramount and worth some pragmatic concessions.

So far, Washington has been hoping for a diplomatic solution that would allow its forces to stay in landlocked Niger in exchange for a pledge to some sort of democratic transition. This explains the luxury of precautions taken by not calling a coup a coup, to avoid having to cancel US security assistance.

Another argument plays in favour of the pragmatic approach: the Russian factor. Macron has learnt the hard way how Vladimir Putin, while pretending to know nothing about the role played by Wagner mercenaries in Africa, has used this tool, as well as disinformation campaigns, to spread Moscow’s influence. 

The extent to which Russia, burdened by its war in Ukraine, can redirect resources to a new operation in Africa may be doubtful, as is the real ability of Wagner’s fabled leader Yevgeny Prigozhin to redeploy forces on the continent. The reduced number of African heads of state who chose to attend the second Russia-Africa summit last month in Saint Petersburg — 17, compared with 43 for the first summit in Sochi in 2019 — is also a sign of Putin’s declining stardom.

But African states, courted by China, Turkey and others, want their claim to sovereignty to be recognised. Their current heft on the global scene cannot be ignored.

Nor can hard questions be avoided on the disastrous record of democratic governance in sub-Saharan nations. Niger, one of the poorest countries in Africa, twice the size of Texas, may be partly covered by desert. It still provides fertile ground for great power competition.