New Great Game in Africa: How Russia, West, and China have large stakes in Niger crisis

Editor’s note: This piece is part one of a two-part series on the Niger crisis. 

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On 26 July, a military coup ousted Mohamed Bazoum, the pro-West president of the west African country of Niger. The West reacted swiftly. The European Union, led by France, suspended security cooperation and financial aid to Niger. The US announced “unflagging support” for Bazoum, who is currently under house arrest.

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Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, veteran plotter of several US-backed coups across the world—including the 2014 one in Ukraine—flew to Niger but admitted that she had made little headway in her conversations with the new military regime.

In a sort of rerun of the first days of the war in Ukraine, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a political and economic union of 15 countries that has the West’s support, placed sanctions on Niger, suspending all commercial and financial transactions between Niger and ECOWAS countries and freezing Niger’s assets deposited in the central and commercial banks of ECOWAS.

The group has warned of military action unless Bazoum is restored to power and has asked its armies to stand by. The Niger junta has responded that in case ECOWAS carried out its threat, it will kill Bazoum.

Two of Niger’s neighbours, Burkina Faso and Mali, which have Russia-backed military regimes, have supported the coup and said that any military attack on Niger would be seen as an attack on them. A complex war could break out—a war that would be, just like in Ukraine, a proxy one between the West and Russia, while China, which has huge economic and geopolitical interest in the continent, watches closely and plots its own moves.

The New Great Game

Africa is the theatre where the 21st century version of the Great Game is being played. The Niger coup has only brought it out in the open. The players are the West, Russia and China. At stake are the continent’s agricultural wealth and massive natural resources.

It holds 65 per cent of the world’s arable land. Some 30 per cent of the world’s mineral reserves, 8 per cent of the world’s natural gas and 12 per cent of oil reserves lie in Africa. The continent has 40 per cent of the world’s gold and up to 90 per cent of its chromium and platinum. The largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum and uranium in the world are in Africa. Add to all this the geostrategic significance it has by just being where it is on the globe.

Yet, Africa remains the poorest continent on the planet and the mostly ruthlessly exploited one by the West even today. Niger, for example, is one of the world’s leading exporters of uranium, but ranks 189th out of 191 countries in the United Nations’ Human Development Index.

The French Connection

To understand the reasons behind the continent’s plight, one needs to realise that the colonial West never really left Africa.

Like France, which granted independence to most of its African colonies—like Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ivory Coast—in the early 1960s, but has continued to wield power over them. And the US, which never had a colony in Africa, but has been extremely active for the last 50 years on the continent, including straightforward military engagement with regimes it did not approve of.

France’s principal instrument of ongoing imperialism, little known outside France and Africa, has been monetary—the currency called “CFA franc”. No one really knows anymore what “CFA” stands for, because France has kept changing the term that the abbreviation represents—from a French phrase meaning “French colonies of Africa” to “French community of Africa” to “African financial community” to “Financial cooperation in central Africa”.

When France granted independence to its colonies, it managed to convince most of them to stick with the colonial currency. The printing of the CFA franc—and how much of it should be printed—is controlled by France. This is an immensely powerful lever to guard and expand its economic and political interests in the continent.

Obviously this undermines the sovereignty of these African nations but French governments have used every method imaginable—financial sanctions, military action, coups and even perhaps assassinations—to make sure that no one can step away from the CFA franc. Fourteen countries continue to use the CFA franc.

ECOWAS, which is threatening military action against the new Niger regime, issues the CFA franc.

Niger is a perfect example of French neo-colonialism. France relies on nuclear energy for 70 per cent of its power. Twenty per cent of the uranium it uses to generate this power comes from Niger. The majority (67 per cent) stakeholder in the company that operates the uranium mines is a French corporation.

Nearly 43 per cent of Nigeriens live in extreme poverty and only one in seven has access to electricity. In fact, of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest Human Development Index, five are part of the CFA franc zone, including Burkina Faso (184th out of 191) and Mali (186th), who are standing by Niger’s new regime.

Last Sunday, 95 French senators cutting across party lines wrote an angry letter to President Emmanuel Macron saying that under his leadership, France has lost its sphere of influence in Africa and been replaced by Russia and China.

The American Way

The US has been intervening in Africa for decades. The Cold War was fought as hard in the continent between the erstwhile Soviet Union and the US as it was anywhere else. The Soviets had supported liberation movements against colonial and white supremacist rule across Africa with advice, cash, arms and pressure on the international community. Current leaders of many African countries retain those memories and also of the brutal days of the Western empire.

A recent study by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy found that people in much of Africa view Russia much more positively than they do the US. In fact, Russia’s popularity has grown since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Leaders of several African nations have publicly blamed the US-led eastward push of NATO to the borders of Russia for the war, not Vladimir Putin.

This is not for lack of trying from the US side. It has financed politicians, covertly and overtly backed coup attempts—some of which succeeded—and tried to intimidate governments with direct military threats. By the late 1990s, it had discovered that its messages of bringing democracy to the continent did not cut much ice with Africans, given the West’s colonial history in Africa.

In 2008, it created a single command for the continent, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). Since then, the number of American troops, military bases and drone strikes in Africa has gone up considerably. Between 2008 and 2019, the number of US soldiers stationed there soared 170 per cent, from 2,600 to 7,000. The number of military operations, programmes and exercises jumped more than 20 times, from 172 to 3,500.

AFRICOM’s stated mission is “to disrupt and neutralize transnational threats” to “promote regional security, stability and prosperity”. But even the Pentagon’s own data indicates that security and stability have fallen sharply since AFRICOM was set up. In a July 2019 report, the Pentagon admitted that “militant Islamist group activity in Africa has doubled (between 2012 and 2018). Over the past 10 years, there has been a ten-fold increase in violent events (from 288 in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018)”.

In fact, the new regime in Niger has said that it carried out the coup because the West’s efforts to curb jihadi terrorism in the region had been a dismal failure.

In 2011, in a campaign to get rid of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, the US and NATO bombed the country for six months. Qaddafi was finally ousted and slaughtered by a mob in a public square in Tripoli, but since then the country has been reduced to a state of anarchy and is currently the world’s leader in international slave trade.

By the end of 2017, US special forces had planned and coordinated commando raids in at least eight countries—Libya, Somalia, Kenya, Tunisia, Cameroon, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, where four American soldiers were killed in a failed operation in October 2017. Officially, the US only has one permanent base in Africa—Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in east Africa, but media reports based on leaked Pentagon documents have shown that it has at least 29 bases in 15 different countries.

The Biden administration seems to have woken up to the fact that its military-centric strategy has not been working too well. Over the last one year, high-ranking people like Vice-President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have visited the continent in what has been termed a “charm offensive” by American media. Joe Biden has not been there yet, but in February, his wife Jill visited several countries.

This is the result of a sudden concern over long-term trends in the continent in the light of the war in Ukraine. Not a single African nation has joined Western sanctions against Russia, choosing to either remain neutral or openly siding with Russia. This has dismayed the West. In fact, it is clear that Russia’s influence in Africa has actually grown since the war began.

It is also why Russia has actually strengthened its military, security and economies ties in the region since the outbreak of the war. In March, delegations from 40 African countries and 14 leaders assembled in Moscow for an international parliamentary conference “Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World”, where, in his keynote speech, Vladimir Putin assured the guests that Russia “has always and will always consider cooperation with African states a priority”. Since the war began, Russia has been supplying free food grains.

The Niger coup is proof that the Ukraine conflict has speeded up history in Africa. Putin would certainly want to open up new fronts against the West and Moscow already has considerable clout in Africa. A new front may not lead to widespread physical combat, but Russia already has thousands of troops on the ground in Africa, in the form of its mercenary army The Wagner Group.

In its official statements, Russia has called for a return to constitutional order in Niger, but Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has offered support to the military junta in case of war. Wagner has strong bases in both Burkina Faso and Mali. Even if Moscow has not been directly involved in the coup, it will certainly use the situation to its benefit. News reports and videos suggest that there is strong support for Russia in the crowds that came out onto the streets of Niger to support the coup.

As Russia and the West face off in Africa and several countries brace for war, China will be busy making its own calculations. It has much to lose if matters get out of hand.

The second part will follow. 

The writer is a former editor of Financial Express, and founder-editor of Open and Swarajya magazines. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.  

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