The nation of Niger in West Africa is under military rule after a coup d’état by a group of officers ousted the civilian president, Mohamed Bazoum, and installed General Abdourahmane Tchiani as the country’s leader.

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.

US and European imperialism in the Sahel

Niger is located in the Sahel; 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 with economic and linguistic ties to France – the former colonial power.

France has maintained a web of intricate political and economic networks in the Sahel, intent on sustaining its predominant position since decolonisation in the 1960s. Since the era of Charles 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.

French troops, since 2014, have been fighting Islamist and nationalist rebels in Niger, Mali, and other Sahel nations. Under the pretext of counterterrorism, Paris has deployed troops and special forces in its former West African colonies. In 2020, the New York Times noted that the Sahel was becoming France’s forever war; a quagmire into which French imperialism has poured dollars and soldiers.

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

European Union (EU) nations have spent billions of dollars outsourcing the policing and detention of migrants and refugees to Sub-Saharan African countries. 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 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 also deployed contingents of troops to Niger and Mali. The Bundeswehr, since 2018, has been training Nigerien troops in their fight against Islamist groups.

Not a Conradian ‘heart of darkness’

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 Yevgeny 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.

Pro-imperialist writers will continue to condemn African nations to a Conradian ‘heart of darkness’. What they fail to see is that the heart of this darkness lies precisely in the imperialist project itself.

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This is an edited version of an article first published 2 August 2023 as “Rebellious soldiers in Niger, forever war in the Sahel and the failures of foreign intervention” on the Antipodean Atheist blog.