The Attempted Coup in Niger
This week I want to write about the attempted coup in Niger. I don’t think I’m alone in not paying much attention to the goings-on in the landlocked countries of Central and West Africa. I wouldn’t be able to name them, and I certainly couldn’t easily find them on a map.
Despite the fact that TFG cavalierly referred to places like this as “shithole countries,” they deserve our attention if we want to understand what’s going on in the world. We recently heard about a military coup in Niger, but commentary on it waned after a couple of days. I wanted to understand more about what was going on in Niger.
The topic for today’s essay is Niger, the largest landlocked country in West Africa. Over 80% of its land lies in the Sahara, and it has about 25 million people (mostly Muslim). It is one of the poorest countries in the world, with an economy concentrated around subsistence agriculture, with an export sector dominated by uranium ore. By 1922 it was organized as a part of French West Africa, and its borders were fixed in by the 1930s. The autonomous Republic of Niger was declared in 1958, and the country acquired full independence in August of 1960.
Once again, a podcast provided me with good information on the events in Niger. Here’s the link to the August 9, 2023, episode of “Pod Save the World” if you’d like to listen.
Rather than try to summarize the main points for you, I made a transcript of the relevant 10 minutes or so. The transcript is a dialogue between two veterans of the Biden Administration – Tommy Vietor (Assistant White House Press Secretary and Special Assistant to the President) and Ben Rhodes (Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriter). I transcribed this as I was listening to it. I couldn’t always discern who was speaking, so this is a transcript of their discussion without identifying who was actually speaking at every moment.
The military in Niger staged a coup and deposed President Mohamed Bazoum, in fact I believe it was his own presidential guard who did this to him. He was about to can the guy who ran the presidential guard. But now the presidential guard and the military are holding him captive. Bazoom was the first elected leader in Niger to succeed another elected leader in Niger since the country came to independence in 1960. So this is a huge step back for the 25 million people in the country and for democracy in the region. Generally, there aren’t a whole lot of bright spots for democracy in the Sahel, so, in response, ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States], which is the union of 15 western African states, initially sent a delegation to try to mediate the resolve the crisis diplomatically. That didn’t work so they announced sanctions and a no-fly zone over Niger and issued an ultimatum to the coup leaders, saying you have one week to reinstate President Bazoom or else ECOWAS will “take all measures necessary to restore constitutional order in the republic of Niger. Such measures may include the use of force.” In response to that statement, the leader of other coups who now run Mali and Burkina Faso said they would view any ECOWAS intervention in Niger as a declaration of war against them as well. This quickly went from a coup in one country to potentially a regional conflict and one that would be another defacto proxy war between the US (and the EU) and the Russians and the Wagner Group who are backing the coup.
Meanwhile, the levels of food insecurity and child malnutrition are rising. It’s difficult to get assistance in because the Sahel region is plagued by a growing Islamic extremist threat and including Al Qaeda and ISIS offshoots. According to the World Terrorism Index, the Sahel is now the epicenter of Jihadist violence. In 2022 there were more deaths from terrorism in the Sahel than in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa combined. 15 years ago the region accounted for 1% of the deaths from terrorism. So these coups are part of the problem. They lead to instability and economic hardship and the conditions that lead to terrorism and also the coup leaders push out counterterrorism forces from places like France, they welcome in the Wagner Group. The Wagner Group doesn’t give a shit about terrorism. They care about protecting the person that they’re propping up who’s in charge, and their mineral interests, their gold mines etc they’re controlling. Niger had become one of the last places where the US, the French, the EU were allowed to have counterterrorism forces. Now that partnership is at risk.
Question: This idea of a regional fight between ECOWAS and the “couped” countries is very scary
Answer: It is. There’s a lot going on here. First, this is just another strike against democracy and the rule of law in this part of West Africa. We’ve seen this string of coups. Which, for people who may be somewhat flabbergasted by this, I remember talking to somebody in Mali who surprised me because they were kind of a small-d democrats, civil society kind of person, but they actually worked for a time for the coup leaders after the coup. This guy’s point to me was “hey look, you know, we’re sick of corruption. We’re sick of the French f**king us around” Generally, these coup leaders are young – not this guy, but some of these coupe leaders are younger, a lot of them in their 30s, the guy in Burkina Faso is 35. Just so people understand, there’s some broader rationale. This one is obviously different, this guy was about to get canned and just made his move. It does speak to the collapse of governance in this part of Africa.
Another point is that the French – French foreign policy is not exactly having a banner year in West Africa. These are mostly former French colonies where the French have a big military presence or a big development presence. There’s a kind of very clear through-line of f* you to the French on this stuff. Macron needs to be taking a look at what his Africa policy has been because some of his has built up over decades. So it’s not just on Macron, but that’s a notable piece of this.
But you homed in on the key point here, which is, I do not remember there being this kind of threat of interstate conflict in West Africa like this at all. To see the leader of Mali – I saw he went out and made a statement in which he repeated himself three times. “Any military intervention against Niger is tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali. So there’s this coup axis, like you mentioned. One, it’s clearly splitting ECOWAS, which used to be one of the better-functioning regional blocs. In fact, I remember ECOWAS, back in the Obama, was an essential part of preventing a coup in Cote d’Ivoire. Here, we have a real risk of conflict between states with an avowed agenda of undermining democracy by one of the member states of the group of countries involved.
When there are superpower conflicts, they can spread to all parts of the world because superpowers have interests in all parts of the world. That’s obviously what happened in previous world wars. Here, we’ve got already a Russia-West conflict in Ukraine but we also see that in forming a flash point in Iran and now, we very much see it in West Africa, because, the Russians aren’t behind this coup, but they’re opportunistic, and, when we were looking at the Wagner group as we were preparing a special episode before Prigozhin presented us with a special episode. I was calling around to Africa analysts, asking about how to think about what Wagner does in Africa, and their point was “well, they’re opportunistic.” So if there’s an opening in Mali, they’ll try to get a foothold there so they can then use that as a base to spread to a neighboring country like Niger. So we very much see that here, where Russia via Wagner is going to be coming in, trying to gain more influence. If the US, which has a bunch of troops in Niger, suspends its military assistance, Wagner will be right there saying “Hey, no strings attached with the Russian military assistance. We’re more than happy to help your coup.” And it doesn’t take billions and billions of dollars in military aid to be helpful to people like this. It can be guns, it can be disinformation campaigns, it can be special forces capability. Russia has less of that, because a lot of it’s in Ukraine, but a little bit can go a long way for somebody who’s running a coup in Niger.
There’s a big piece in the New Yorker this week about Prigozhin and the mutiny/insurrection or whatever you want to call it, and it’s really comprehensive in the way it details the rise of Wagner being through Africa. It’s got the Sudan in 2017, the Central African in 2018, the Wagner forces fought in Libya with Khalifa Haftar, this warlord, they fought in Mali, they fought in Syria. The sort of game plan here is “you get around the leader, you protect him, you train security forces, and then you take control of, say – in Syria they took control of oil and gas sites controlled by ISIS, you defeat ISIS, and then Wagner would take the revenue from the oil and gas.” So it was a win-win for Bashar al-Asad because ISIS was kicked out of some part of the country but also, a huge boon for Wagner economically. And they can generate their own revenue through corruption or through natural resources. Niger has huge stocks of uranium – 7% of global uranium.
Some people could rightly point out that the intervention in Libya that ended the rule of Gaddafi and the chaos that ensured in Libya, contributed to the rise of the flow of people across borders in advance of extremist jihadists. However, Libya was unraveling before the intervention, there was a civil war there, but what you see here is the lack of ay governance and the exploding youth populations in a place like this also attract extremism as well, so there are a lot of factors that have contributed to this persistent threat of violent extremist groups operating across the Sahel, but nonetheless, an opening for Wagner and a huge contagion around democracy going the wrong direction here.
Yes, and this becomes a really hard question for the Biden administration. It already is, about whether they will call what happened in Niger a coup or not. It obviously was, but once you say that, it forces the US government to cut off certain types of assistance, particularly military assistance, and the US opened a drone base in 2019. It cost $100 million, $30 million a year to maintain, and it’s become kind of the last beach-head for counter-extremist work in the region, and I’m not suggesting that the Biden Administration should not call it a coup, but there will be this balancing of interests that will result in these tortured press briefings like we saw during the Obama administration about whether to call the coup in Egypt a coup. I’m always in favor of calling things a coup if it is a coup. I mean, it is a coup. I don’t think we should be giving military assistance to armies that carry out coups. It sends kind of like the worst possible message. I’m not trying to diminish the competing interests of not just having a counter-terrorism interest but also the idea that if we pull out the Russians move in and all the rest of that, but at the end of the day you gotta stand for something, and a coup like this is not a close call. It couldn’t be more obvious what happened.
This gave me a lot to think about. I gave Wikipedia a real workout as I tried to figure things out.