191 - How to Prevent Jihadists and Russians From Gaining Sway in the Sahel

The Coup in Niger

            The military ouster of one of West Africa’s most democratically inclined governments cuts one of the world’s poorest people’s from previously well-disposed donors and the international eleemosynary network. That’s a tragic result for the welfare of Niger’s 25 million people. But the coup also greatly assists the Islamist penetration of North and Middle Africa, giving more running room and conquest potential to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. Both jihadist militias will be anxious to add Niger to their growing fundamentalist annexations across the African Sahel.

            The Sahel is a belt of light, desiccated, soil and often sparse rainfall Immediately south of the Sahara Desert. From west to east, the Sahel encompasses Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, southern Ethiopia, northern Kenya, and Somalia.  Beginning in about 2011, after the ending of Muammar Qadaffi’s dictatorship in Libya, the availability of leftover Libyan arms and ambitious Arab, Berber, and Touareg mercenaries provided incentives for two of the globe’s most successful Islamist franchises to commandeer the jihadist space and at first raid, and later establish successful franchises in the Sahel.

            Mali, which stretches northward toward Algeria and Libya, was first afflicted, with a striking takeover of much of the far north of Mali and storied Timbuktu. In 2013, France, and later Germany, and Britain sent troops to restore Malian control to Timbuktu and the north, nearly 5,000 French troops remaining to keep order in Mali, and also in Burkina Faso, and Niger, until a succession of military coups in Mali and Burkina Faso  (following an earlier military takeover in Guinea, on the Atlantic Coast) led to the two new Sahelian governments turning against Francophone “colonialism “ and sending those powerful anti-insurgent forces packing.

            France reassigned a smaller contingent of 1500 soldiers to Niger, where they joined 1,100 Americans from the US African Command, plus a number of drone controllers, in continuing to battle the jihadist onslaught from bases in desolate Niger. A big drone surveillance base in located near Agadez in northwestern Niger, near Burkina Faso and Mali.  Now, after the region’s latest army purging of a democratic, civilian, government, the future of the French and American bases and anti-jihadist efforts is likely in serious jeopardy.

            Instead, the military leaders in Niger are likely to turn as their erstwhile counterparts in Mali and Burkina Faso have done (joined by the hapless autocrat running the Central African Republic) to the Russian Wagner Group for “technical” aid.  As explained at length in earlier issues of this newsletter, the Wagnerites have failed lamentably at halting the spread of Islamist fundamentalism; jihadists now control much more territory across the Sahel than they did when French troops protected Mali and Burkina Faso. Moreover, in Mali, the Wagnerites time and again have perpetrated atrocities against villagers and behaved as the worst kind of foreign marauders (just as they have in Central Africa, Sudan, and Libya).

            Furthermore, the Wagnerites and Yevgeny Prigozhin, their leader and likely stand in for Putin, are in Africa not to do peace enforcement but to loot.  They are taking gold from Mali, Central Africa, and Sudan, diamonds from Central Africa, timber from Mali and Central Africa, and searching for more resources to acquire. Africa’s gold (including some from Zimbabwe, as well) helps to support Putin’s war against Ukraine.  Exactly what payoffs the putschists in Mali and Burkina Faso receive from the Wagnerites is not exactly known, but soldiers create no mutinies without hope of being rewarded.

            That must be true for Niger, as well.   It is another major gold producer (worth $3.6 billion in 2022), and also exports onions, beans, oily seeds, petroleum, uranium, and radioactive chemical products. It has the globe’s seventh largest deposits of uranium, now supplying about 25 percent of Europe’s needs.  What is otherwise a desperately poor country, with an annual GDP per capita of only $578 and among the highest maternal mortality and lowest life expectancies anywhere, could still seem attractive to the mutineers, and the Wagnerites. 

Washington and Paris do not yet think that Prigozhin or Putin were instigators of Niger’s coup, but the leaders of the coup could not have been unaware of the benefits received from Russia by Mali and Burkina Faso’s new rulers.  Often coups are copycat events, driven “why not me” sentiments. Niger is only the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which he currently chairs, thought they could make the soldiers now in charge in Niger reverse the coup and free President Mohammed Bazoum by forming a West African standby army and threatening to invade Niger to overturn the coup.  Nigeria also cut the grid; Nigeria’s power plants supply 80 percent of Niger’s electricity. But yesterday Bazoum was arrested by the soldiers who formerly guarded him; he will be tried for treason, corruption, and abuse of office. The standby force will doubtless go nowhere, showing the futility of the Nigerian-led option.

Democracy is denied in Africa (and elsewhere) when soldiers scuttle constitutions and try their presidents on trumped up charges.  Outcomes for their citizens worsen. But even more destructively, coups in the Sahel unwittingly but dramatically transfer power and agency to the jihadists – the very enemy that the local Sahelian armies are ostensibly pledged to counter (hitherto with French and American support).  If Islamist legions now invade Niger, they will thereafter threaten the coastal states of Cote d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo, and even Ghana. Their success will also make it much more difficult for Nigeria, and Cameroon and Niger, to extirpate the ongoing home-grown Islamist insurgency (Boko Haram) that is still active and powerful south and west of Lake Chad.

Washington and Paris need to find a way to add muscle to ECOWAS’s determination to dampen coup tendencies in the Sahel and West Africa. Doing so would restore the possibility of democracy in the region and deny its opponents and antagonists.