Dave Stockton, Workers Power 406, September 2023
On July 26, Niamey, capital of the West African state of Niger, saw the presidential guard arrest and depose President Mohamed Bazoum. The Guard, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani, after the briefest of brief hesitations, the rest of the army followed suit.
Demonstrators welcomed the coup, many organised by the M62 alliance of political and social movements which was formed during last year’s street protests against fuel price increases. They waved not only the flag of Niger but also of the Russian Federation and carried placards saying, “ France get out!”, speakers called for Wagner forces to come to Niger as they have done to Mali. It seems the trigger for the coup was President Bazoum’s plans to replace the heads of the presidential guards and the army.
There is a tradition of anti-colonial politics amongst the junior officers in the West African armed forces going back to figures like Thomas Sankara, who ruled Burkina Faso from 1983-1987 or Jerry Rawlings in Ghana, both motivated by pan-Africanist ideals, as well as the influence of the Cuban revolution.
It is unlikely, however, that today’s coup makers are motivated by any such radicalism. Indeed, the idea that turning to Wagner or Putin’s Russia will help the states of the region achieve independence or development is a total illusion. But so, too, is the idea that France or the EU/USA represent democracy. Their complaints are because Bazoum was their man.
No wonder his hope of restoration comes largely from abroad. France, the former colonial power, condemned the coup immediately and suspended all aid to Niger. (40 per cent of Niger’s budget comes from foreign aid). Emmanuel Macron threatened that “any attack against France and its interests will not be tolerated”. The condemnation was closely followed by that of the European Union and the United States.
The Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, imposed sanctions including a no-fly zone and border closures and its dominant state, Nigeria, which supplies 70 percent of Niger’s electricity, cut off the power supply, plunging the country into night time darkness
Ecowas defence ministers, meeting in the Nigerian capital Abuja, threatened a military intervention if Bazoum was not returned to power by August 6. The deadline has passed but thus far no signs of an attack are visible. But, in response to the threats, Niger’s neighbouring states, Mali, Chad and Burkina Faso, promised to come to Niger’s aid if it were invaded, thus threatening a full scale regional war.
Both France and the United States still have military bases in Niger. France, has 1,500 of its own troops as well as 1,100 US troops, ostensibly to train and arm the Nigerien armed force to fight Islamist rebels. Brigadier Tchiani has revoked all the military agreements with France
The underlying cause of the hostility to France lies not just in its brutal colonial past, nor even in the repeated military interventions in the former colonies to “preserve order” or rescue French civilians, but in the economic exploitation of the region and the failure to bring about any serious development of its productive forces or infrastructure.
France currently has around 30 companies or subsidiaries in Niger, including the Orano conglomerate, which operates the huge Tamgak uranium mine. Niger is the seventh-largest producer of uranium, in the world, and its product has long been vital to France’s nuclear industry, which produces 68% of the country’s power. There are also major lithium deposits, which are becoming ever more valuable due to the rapidly expanding electric vehicles industry.
Yet, despite (or rather because) of this immense natural wealth and who exploits it, Niger, still ranks 189th among 191 countries in the 2022 United Nations Human Development Index and 40% of its population live in extreme poverty.
The Niger takeover is thus a major blow not only to France but also to the US, UK and countries like Germany and Italy which have aided French forces in Africa in the name of the “war on terrorism”. And indeed, since the US-led interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, the centre of the Islamist guerrilla movements has moved to the regions around the Sahara.
These troops’ presence has re-ignited popular hostility to France and its allies, both because of the failure to bring the promised security and French companies’ continued exploitation of the regions where poverty has increased and the effects of climate change (desertification) have fomented frictions between farming and nomadic populations in the region.
It is these conditions that have favoured Russia’s penetration of the region, in the form of the Wagner group of Russian mercenaries, who are already operating in neighbouring Mali, as well as another French colony/semi-colony, the Central African Republic, where they are also exploiting the country’s gold mines. Wagner had an estimated 5,000 operatives in Africa before the Ukraine War. It was noteworthy, too, that the organisation’s maverick leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, immediately welcomed the Niger coup, though Putin, more cautiously, just warned against a military intervention by ECOWAS.
Niger is only the latest in a series of army coups; in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) in Sudan (October 2021), in Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), in Chad (April 2021) and in Guinea (September 2021) plus a failed coup in Guinea-Bissau.
Niger comes as a particularly hard blow because Macron, after being forced to abandon the “anti-terrorist” joint operations with the five nations of the Sahel and the humiliating expulsion of his troops from Mali, had designated the country as the centre for organising a scaled down operation, centred on West African military proxies with French “trainers”, to replace the discredited and hated Operation Barkhane (2014-2022) which, at its peak, involved 3,500 French troops. The strongly pro-French Bazoum, was to be the obedient agent of this policy.
The entire state system, that used to be called Françafrique, has fallen apart over the last few years, without, of course, dismantling the hold of France’s banks and extractive corporations over their economies. The West African states, despite repeated attempts to do so, have not been able to create a common monetary system independent of the French central bank. The CFA Franc is still the common currency of the 14 African countries and requires each to keep half their reserves in Paris.
What the coup in Niger and those in the surrounding states show is the semi-colonial system at its most naked and exploitative. But turning to Russian (or Chinese) imperialism is no solution to the region’s underdevelopment and poverty, which is driving hundreds of thousands to risk crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Nor will military regimes prove resistant to corruption or being suborned by Western or Russian imperialists.
The youth and the working classes of these countries need to unite across the artificial colonial borders, across the Francophone/Anglophone divisions, and fight to take control over the enormous resources of these lands and plan them to massively raise the living standards of their peoples. In short, a genuinely anti-imperialist revolution must become a socialist one, too, but one based on the democracy of the workers of the cities n the countryside, and the rank and file soldiers, not their officer corps.