The coup in Niger condenses the vertigo of the changes in global geopolitics. Regression of France and concern of Europe, which looks sideways at a region in full demographic expansion in which Russia wants to become strong.
Humans spend half the day on social networks, surfing the internet or looking at their mobile phones. But that virtual and ethereal world would not be possible without some material bases. The war in Ukraine has been 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 in six: sand (cement), salt (for fertilizers), copper (for wiring), iron, oil and lithium.
China, Chile, Australia and Indonesia are material superpowers because the four elements necessary for the transition to a green economy are found on their soil (copper, nickel, lithium and cobalt). And it is that same material world that sometimes makes areas of the planet that are forgotten by the mainstream media emerge. Like Africa.
In April, two factions of the Sudanese military launched a war financed by the gold mines that have made the country the third largest extractor of the metal on the continent. 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 that gold. Neither is the activity of the jihadists who swarm in the Sahel.
On July 26, Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth, suffered a coup. A military junta overthrew the president who emerged from the last elections for apparently local reasons. Niger is the seventh world producer of uranium (of which 10% feeds the nuclear power plants of France, the former metropolis). The country has gold and oil deposits. But the population subsists thanks to agriculture, 40% of its economy, and international aid (Niamey was until yesterday an ally of the West).
Niger condenses the vertigo of the changes in African geopolitics. There is a receding European power, France, which arouses the ire of a miserable population. Françafrique is the term used by the French media to describe that neocolonialism in which the interests of Paris converge with the local oligarchies. Macron promised to change that paternalistic and haughty model. He did not do it and he did not see a coup coming that seems like the last piece of dominoes to fall: a coup in May 2021 in Mali and in October 2022 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 Nigerien soldiers. 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. C'est fini...
Niger's military junta has already appointed a government and French impotence is so notorious that the United States has taken the initiative in eventual negotiations. The fear of the Americans (with a drone base in Niger with 1,100 men) is that Wagner's mercenaries sneak into 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 wages war with one hand and with the other obtains licenses to exploit mining resources.
In 2017 the Sudanese Omar al Bashir, plagued by popular anger, asked Vladimir Putin for help. In response, Wagner trained the Islamic despot's soldiers and obtained gold mining concessions. The mercenaries refined the method in the Central African Republic. He supported the dictator in exchange for control of the timber, gold and diamond business. They have gone to the Sahel attracted by gold. Do they also want to enter the uranium business?
Russia has gifted the coup leaders in the Sahel with an anti-Western narrative of which Ibrahim Traoré, the young captain who rules Burkina Faso, is the rising star. His speech on August 1, replete with anti-imperialist rhetoric and pan-African pride, has gone viral across Africa thanks to whatsapp.
But nothing is as it seems in the Sahel. In the narrow strip that crosses Africa from west to east and that some know as the "coup belt", what there is above all are failed states in which the historic alliance between local elites and great powers is watered with aid to development 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 ousted president, holder of a democracy that has not delivered on 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 due to its natural resources and the terrors it provokes in Europe: the fear of geopolitical overturning; the fear of the population bomb; the fear of jihadist terrorism that perpetuates chaos and unsettles the population.
As Ken Opalo, a Georgetown professor, explains this week in a long article, it is the obsession with security that explains so many coups in the Sahel: the armies are oversized and that gives the military a lot of prominence. The youth of the coup leaders -Ibrahim Traoré (35 years old), Mamady Doumbouya (43), Assimi Goïta (43)- indicates that this is a job with a future. Perhaps they will exchange one vassalage for another. But they are not likely to change the fate of this long-suffering and wretched land.
