The coup in Niger condenses the vertigo of changes in global geopolitics. The retreat of France and the sadness of Europe, which looks down on an unstable region in the midst of demographic expansion where Russia wants to become stronger.
Humans spend half of their day on social networks, surfing the internet or looking at their mobile phones. But this virtual and ethereal world would not be possible without some material bases. The war in Ukraine was the trigger for this return to reality. We have discovered that we depend on energy, that wheat from the Russian and Ukrainian steppes feeds cattle and that without fertilizers there is no agriculture. A book by journalist Ed Conway, Material World , summarizes the materials that move the world into six: sand (cement), salt (for fertilizers), copper (for wiring), iron, petroleum and lithium.
China, Chile, Australia and Indonesia are material superpowers because in their soil there are the four elements necessary for the transition to the green economy (copper, nickel, lithium and cobalt). And it is this same material world that sometimes brings to the fore areas of the planet forgotten by the big media. Like Africa
In April, two factions of Sudan’s army began a war funded by the gold mines that have made the country the continent’s third-largest producer of the metal. The International Crisis Group dates the beginning of the gold rush to 2012, with the discovery of a giant vein that crosses the Sahara from east to west. Today, the economy of the military juntas of Guinea, Burkina Faso or Mali cannot be explained without this gold. Nor the activity of the jihadists who roam the Sahel.
On July 26, Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth, suffered a coup. A military junta overthrew the president emerging from the last election for apparently local reasons. Niger is the seventh largest producer of uranium in the world (10% of which feeds the nuclear power plants of France, the former metropolis). The country has deposits of gold and oil. But the population survives thanks to agriculture, which accounts for 40% of its economy, and international aid (Niamey was until yesterday an ally of the West).
Niger condenses the vertigo of changes in African geopolitics. There is a European power in retreat, France, which arouses the anger of a miserable population. Françafrique is the term used by the French media to describe this neo-colonial power in which the interests of Paris converge with local oligarchies. Macron promised to change this paternalistic and haughty model. He didn’t do it and he didn’t see a blow coming that seems to be the last piece of the domino to fall: the May 2021 coup in Mali and the October 2022 coup in Burkina Faso. In both cases, with Russian support.
They were the last pieces of the French military presence in the area, now reduced to 1,500 soldiers from Niger. Military and economic withdrawal. In 2000, France controlled 10% of trade on the continent. Today it has been reduced to 5%, in competition with China, Turkey and the United States. It’s over…
Niger’s military junta has already appointed a government and French impotence is so evident that the United States has taken the initiative in any eventual negotiations. The fear of the Americans (with a drone base in Niger with 1,100 men) is that Wagner’s mercenaries will eventually enter and become strong in the country.
The concern is reasonable. Russia has revived Cold War contacts to gain geopolitical influence and access to natural resources. It has Wagner, who with one hand makes war and with the other obtains licenses to exploit mining resources.
In 2017 Sudanese Omar al-Baixir, beset by popular anger, asked Vladimir Putin for help. In response, Wagner trained the Islamic despot’s soldiers and obtained gold mining concessions. The mercenaries fine-tuned the method to the Central African Republic. Support for the dictator in exchange for control of the timber, gold and diamond business. They went to the Sahel attracted by the gold. Do they also want to enter the uranium business?
Russia has given the coup plotters in the Sahel an anti-Western narrative of which Ibrahim Traoré, the young captain who rules Burkina Faso, is the rising star. His speech on August 1, full of anti-imperialist rhetoric and pan-African pride, has gone viral throughout Africa thanks to WhatsApp.
But nothing is what it seems in the Sahel. In the narrow strip of countries that cross Africa from west to east and that some know as the “coup belt” what there are above all are failed states in which the historic alliance between local elites and big powers irrigated with development aid and corruption no longer works. One can doubt the enthusiasm of the Nigerien population towards the military junta. But there is no loyalty to the deposed president, head of a democracy that has not delivered any of the promises he made.
The West has not been able to resolve the fragility of the Sahel, a region that is on the global agenda for its natural resources and for the terrors it causes in Europe: the fear of a geopolitical collapse; fear of the immigration bomb; the fear of jihadist terrorism that perpetuates chaos and upsets the population.
As Georgetown professor Ken Opalo explains in a long article this week, it is the obsession with security that explains so many coups in the Sahel: the armies are oversized and this gives the military a lot of prominence. The youth of the coup leaders – Ibrahim Traoré (35), Mamady Doumbouya (43), Assimi Goïta (43) – indicate that this is a job with a future. Maybe they’ll trade one vassalage for another. But it is not likely that they will change the fate of this suffering and unfortunate land.
