The junta — led by Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, the head of Niger’s presidential guard — unseated Bazoum on July 26, suspended Niger’s constitution and carried out the arrest of hundreds of potential political opponents. In response, ECOWAS levied stiff sanctions on Niger, closing borders, shutting off imports of electricity and blocking financial transactions. But even as those measures bite, the new regime appears undaunted. Its leaders met with delegations from neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso — two countries both controlled by recently installed, Kremlin-friendly juntas — and seemed to rebuff Western entreaties to relinquish control.
Victoria Nuland, the acting deputy secretary of state, visited Niamey on Monday and met some top officials from the junta. She told reporters that their “conversations were extremely frank and at times quite difficult” and didn’t seem to come out of her meetings with much optimism. “Their ideas do not comport with the constitution,” she said, indicating that considerable U.S. assistance provided to the country now hung in the balance. “And that will be difficult in terms of our relationship if that’s the path they take.”
In a Tuesday interview with the BBC, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the moment provided a worrying opening for Russia and its proxy mercenary organization Wagner, which has a footprint in Mali and growing influence in Burkina Faso. “I think what happened, and what continues to happen in Niger was not instigated by Russia or by Wagner, but … they tried to take advantage of it,” Blinken said. “Every single place that this Wagner Group has gone, death, destruction and exploitation have followed.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Niger, unlike Mali and Burkina Faso, was seen as a safer pro-Western bulwark in the restive Sahel — impoverished, insurgency-riven, but more aligned with Washington and Paris than its neighbors and an effective staging ground for regional counterterrorism operations. The United States flies drones out of a base in the country’s arid heartland. French peacekeepers, effectively chased out of Mali, withdrew to outposts in Niger last year. Now, their status and role in a country run by the junta’s transitional regime remains up in the air.
The coup in Niger is most immediately not about the interests or agendas of foreign powers, but political squabbles within a fragile democracy. But the ongoing crisis has invariably turned into a geopolitical conflagration. On Thursday, ECOWAS will convene another summit to plot the way forward. For some members of the bloc, Niger represents a line in the sand, a country whose coup can still be reversed after ECOWAS failed to thwart juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea.
Yet, especially on social media, backers of the coup have taken on a strikingly anti-Western line, casting both Bazoum’s government and its regional defenders as puppets of imperialist powers. They summon anger, in particular, over France’s fraught and deep legacy in the region, which saw the former colonial power remain as an occasional military intervener and a major economic player in West Africa, while also exercising fiscal dominance through the regional currency, the French-backed African franc.
“In many of these countries, the militaries are seen as leaders upholding their nations’ sovereignty and independence, as opposed to elected governments, which tend to be puppets of the West and have done nothing to challenge the neocolonial order throughout the years,” Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese economist, recently told UnHerd, a right-leaning British publication.
That was the narrative that followed the putsches in Mali and Burkina Faso, and the same story seems to be playing out in Niger. Mathieu Droin, a French diplomat who is currently a visiting fellow at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me that the anti-French sentiment on show in Niger is “a combination of pervasive resentment for the colonial era seen as the root cause of today’s travails, of grievances for the lasting presence of foreign troops without palpable impact on the security situation, and more crucially, of the exploitation of these feelings by wide-reaching disinformation campaigns.”
In an interview last week, Kiari Liman Tinguiri, Niger’s ambassador in Washington, scoffed at the “baseless rhetoric” spread online about France looting Niger’s uranium — in reality, Niger’s exports of the radioactive ore have dwindled in recent years and comprise only a small fraction of France’s imports for its huge civil nuclear industry. “We have had juntas before, and they said the same type of story,” he told me.
For France, adds Droin, Niger was supposed to mark a turning of the page in its complicated role in the region. “France invested in the Bazoum government to be a model of new types of partnerships with African countries, on a more equal footing,” he told me, pointing to how French troops fought alongside Nigerien counterparts in anti-militant operations. Now, Droin told me, “Niger going the same way as Mali and Burkina Faso would further consolidate a Sahelian arch of instability, under significant Russian influence.”
In a column for Le Monde, political scientist Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos concluded that the Nigerien coup represented some unwelcome chickens coming home to roost in Paris. The coup, like previous ones, raises questions about the past decade of France’s counterterrorism operations in the region and the relationships it forged with the region’s militaries. It also, Pérouse de Montclos concluded, ought to force French politicians into a more uncomfortable reckoning.
“It does not solely highlight the ineptitude of military cooperation that France’s parliamentarians, with a few exceptions, have never dared to seriously confront for fear of being immediately accused of leftism or laxity in the face of the threat of terrorism,” he wrote. “It also demonstrates the strategic limits of a middle power that has not finished purging its colonial past.”