The nation of Niger, located in west Africa, is under military rule. A coup d’état by a group of officers ousted the civilian president, Mohamed Bazoum, and installed General Abdourahmane Tchiani as leader of the country. The coup took place in late July this year. A former French colony, Niger gained independence in 1960, and currently has a population of 24 million people.

Let’s go into a bit of relevant background, so we can better understanding this coup in Niger. Why is Niger important to the Western nations? Why the focus on the Sahel?

France – former colonial power in the Sahel

Niger is located in the Sahel; the latter is not a country. A bio-geographic, eco-climatic region stretching in a band across Africa, it is the region below the Sahara where the desert conditions transition to savannah grassland. Niger, along with Mali and other west African nations, form a group of states economically and linguistically ties to France, the former colonial power.

For its part, France has maintained a web of intricate political and economic networks in the Sahel, intent on sustaining its predominant position in west Africa since decolonisation in the 1960s. Since the era of De Gaulle, the French ruling class has sought to aggrandise its international role, and kept west Africa as a network of clientele states – a policy of Francafrique.

Niger possesses extensive mineral resources, including uranium, diamonds, cobalt and platinum. Niger provides the uranium which powers the French nuclear and electricity industries.

French troops, since 2014, has been fighting Islamist and nationalist rebels in Niger, Mali, and other Sahel nations. Under the pretext of counterterrorism, Paris has deployed French troops and special forces in its former West African colonies. In 2020, no less a media outlet than the highly esteemed New York Times published an extensive article on the French military expedition in the Sahel.

The NY Times noted that the Sahel was becoming France’s forever war; a quagmire into which French imperialism has poured dollars and soldiers. In 2014, the French authorities promised that the deployment to the Sahel, and combat against Islamist extremism, would only last a few weeks. Seven years later, the French forces were still fighting. It is interesting to note how rival imperialist states are very effective at highlighting the crimes and misdeeds of their opponents.

The European Union (EU) nations have spent billions of dollars over the course of decades, outsourcing the policing and detention of migrants and refugees to sub-Saharan African countries. Niger, a mineral-resource rich nation in the Sahel, has served as a crucial lynchpin of this EU policy. Successive Nigerien governments have had formal partnerships with the EU to detain and corral would-be asylum seekers, preventing them from reaching Libya and Tunisia. The latter nations have served as embarkation points for refugees seeking asylum in Europe.

The US role

The United States, utilising its well worn rationale of a ‘war on terror’, constructed the largest, most expensive drone base in the world, in Niger. Located 5 kilometres south east of Agadez, Niger Air Base 201 cost millions of dollars to build, and requires millions each year for its upkeep. A hub of intelligence operations in the Sahel, the base is part of the expanding US military footprint in Africa. Since the recent coup, the base is unusable, and American military personnel are restricted to its premises.

American special forces have been active in Niger, with the permission of the previous Nigerien authorities. Elite units of American troops have been killed in engagements with Islamist militants, part of a covert war in the Sahel. The US deployment to Niger over the last twenty years has hardly been marginal or tangential to US interests. Not to be outdone, Germany has deployed contingents of troops Niger and Mali. The Bundeswehr, since 2018, has been training Nigerien troops in their fight against Islamist groups.

Not a Conradian ‘heart of darkness’

It is too simplistic, and woefully inaccurate, to dismiss the Nigerien coup as simply the work of power-hungry military officers. African politics is usually interpreted – if at all – by the corporate-controlled media as involving corrupt despots, power-mad generals and tribal warfare. This viewpoint reinforces our view of independent African nations unable or too incompetent to govern themselves.

The Nigerien military coup leaders did not decide to carry out their putsch on a whim. They did not seize power in a fit of semi-libidinous excitement for more authority. Niger is the fourth nation in west Africa to experience an anti-western coup by nationalist military officers. Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea have, since 2020, undergone coups by military officers who objected to the deployment of foreign troops (namely French and American) on their soil.

The leaders of Burkina Faso and Mali have explicitly stood by their fellow officers in Niger, denouncing suggestions by European governments to intervene militarily if ousted president Bazoum is not reinstated.

It is no wonder that numerous Western governments have watched the unfolding events in Niger with alarm. The role of Russia, if any, is still unclear at this time. The would-be putschist and mercenary Russian braggart Yezhgeny Prigozhin welcomed the Nigerien coup. Moscow’s attitude is more circumspect; however, given the recent high level Russia-Africa Summit, Moscow is making a strong push into African affairs.

Most of the corporate media are portraying the events in Niger as a worrying loss for the West in the fight against Islamist extremism. They are correct up to a point – however, the Nigerien generals are fully committed to combating religiously extremist groups. The ascent of nationalist officers to power in Niger – along with Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea – is, in a way, the revenge of Gaddafi. The latter was a Libyan patriotic officer who overthrew a weak, imperialist-backed proxy regime in that northern Arab-African nation in 1969.

Since the 2011 demise of the Gaddafi regime, Islamist organisations have spread throughout the Sahel, including in Niger. Rather than a Conradian ‘heart of darkness’ to which African nations are condemned by pro-imperialist writers, the darkness is not in the skin colour of the Africans, but in the imperialist project itself.