Shadow of European colonial history behind Niger coup

The sight of protesters attacking the French embassy in Niger while carrying the Russian flag illustrates the failure of the Paris-pushed foreign policy that shaped the European Union involvement in the Sahel region of Africa, in which Ireland has played a part.

President Mohamed Bazoum won the election in 2021 and took power in Niger’s first peaceful transition of power since it won independence from France in 1960. One of the West’s last allies in the region, he is now confined to the presidential palace, while the head of the presidential guard Abdourahmane Tchiani has declared himself leader.

The coup plotters gave their rationale as “the deteriorating security situation and bad governance”, making this just the latest case in a series in which military leaders in this part of Africa have overthrown civil governments while arguing they will do a better job of keeping insurgencies down.

For the last decade, Paris has been the driving force behind international and EU involvement in African former French colonies of the Sahel, aiming both to shore up fragile states and assert the status of France as an international power.

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Yet, after years of fighting, conflict has spread. Relations with local rulers have deteriorated, while the former colonial power has become the focus of blame among the local population for their continued troubles.

The arid and impoverished Sahel region runs through a strip of countries just below the major north African departure points for irregular boat crossings over the Mediterranean, and the EU’s involvement there has been justified by the idea that migration can be reduced by fixing root causes.

Irish soldiers in Mali

Ireland has had a small but active role in this strategy, providing eight staff to the European Union Training Mission (EUTM) in Mali. It aims to strengthen the ability of the Malian Armed Forces to control their national territory and grapple the armed groups whose fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and caused a dire humanitarian crisis. The Irish government approved a 12-month extension to the mission in March.

France and Germany decided to withdraw forces after Malian military leaders staged their own coup amid public frustration at the government’s inability to prevail over the insurgents. The United Nations is also ending its peacekeeping operation after being invited to leave Mali. Meanwhile, Wagner mercenaries have moved in.

[ Niger coup: United States, UK order evacuation of some embassy staff ]

Niger, the country next door with a friendly government in charge, was the country to which European efforts in the Sahel were supposed to be relocated.

“The focus of our future military engagement in the Sahel will be in Niger,” Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, said in April in a visit to the country, after the EU agreed to set up a new training mission there to help its military fight insurgent groups.

It didn’t last long. After the coup, the EU’s foreign service called for the immediate restoration of the constitutional order and suspended all security cooperation “with immediate effect”.

Much about the coup remains unclear, including the nature of Russian influence and to what extent the Wagner mercenary group continues to be an instrument of Russian state interests following boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted march on Moscow.

Locally, however, the coup evidently played out as a strike against France and in favour of Russia, with pro-coup protesters adopting the Russian flag as an anti-western symbol and reportedly chanting “Long live Russia”, “Long live Putin” and “Down with France” as they attacked the French embassy.

Officially, Russia has condemned the coup, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov describing it “a matter of serious concern” and calling for the restoration of the rule of law.

Mr Prigozhin, however, praised it as a blow against “the colonisers” and used it as an opportunity to pitch his services elsewhere in Africa, where his fighters have been working for hire to keep regimes in power in exchange for being allowed to log forests and mine natural resources.

It’s an echo of the old focus on resource extraction that remains a bitter legacy in European relations with Africa to this day.

Immediately after the coup, uranium prices spiked.

That’s because Niger is the world’s seventh-largest supplier of the radioactive metal, a fuel for nuclear energy plants. Half a century since France began mining uranium there in the 1970s, the majority French state-owned Orano company still runs Nigerien mines.

France has since become a nuclear-powered country: it produces 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear, plans to export its electricity including to Ireland, and aggressively advocates the technology within the EU as a solution to the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, Niger remains one of the poorest countries on earth.