Niger spoils Macron’s plan for an African reset

Six months ago, ahead of a four-country African tour, President Emmanuel Macron promised a “new era” for France’s ties with the continent, based on a “partnership” of equals. French military bases in Africa, he said, would henceforth be jointly run by local armed forces, with a “visible reduction” of French soldiers on the ground. It was to be a new phase in the Franco-African reset that Mr Macron first laid out in a speech in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, in 2017, vowing that he was “of a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do”.

Last week’s military coup against Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s elected president, leaves hopes of a fresh relationship severely frayed. On July 30th protesters in Niamey, Niger’s capital, declared “Down with France!” and waved Russian flags. A crowd attacked the French embassy, setting fire to the door and smashing windows. On August 1st, France began to evacuate its nationals and other European citizens from Niger.

For France, the putsch is particularly dismaying. After French troops left neighbouring Mali last year, they regrouped in Niger, then considered a point of relative stability in a volatile region. Under a bilateral defence agreement, France keeps a permanent base there, equipped with fighter jets, Reaper drones and, currently, 1,500 troops. The coup against Mr Bazoum does not seem to have been mounted for strategic anti-French reasons as much as for narrow personal ambition. Yet the fact that potent anti-French sentiment can be invoked so readily in support of it reveals how deep the problem has become.

Already France’s departure from Mali was a blow to its prestige. At one point the French had 2,500 soldiers in that country as part of Operation Barkhane, a regional counter-jihadist mission, which grew from a French operation first launched in 2013, at the request of the Malian government, that successfully pushed back a jihadist march on the capital, Bamako. When François Hollande, France’s president at the time, visited soon afterwards, he was mobbed by cheering crowds. But the overthrow of its government in 2020 followed by a second coup the following year, and the new junta’s decision to hire mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner group, changed the calculation. By August 2022 all French soldiers had quit Mali, taking with them some 4,000 containers of kit and 1,000 vehicles; Barkhane was shut down.

Two coups in Burkina Faso last year delivered further blows to France. The leaders of the second coup ordered all French troops to leave, which they did this year.

What has gone wrong for France? On broader links, Mr Macron has shifted France in the right direction. He has returned works of art from museums in Paris, long a source of resentment, to Benin and Senegal; promised to end the CFA franc, a France-backed regional currency; and asked for forgiveness for his country’s role in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Mr Macron has urged investors to look at tech and startups in Africa, not just contracts and concessions. Earlier this year he declared that the era of françafrique “is over”, referring to the insidious web of influence, military aid and business contracts that used to tie France to its former colonies.

Since quitting Mali, France has also been rethinking its operations on the continent. A review is due later this year. The plan is to ensure a lighter footprint and a more discreet presence. Indeed in Niger, France had already been acting more as a partner, less as the boss. “France had been trying to apply the lessons from Mali, to be sensitive to Niger’s concerns,” notes Michael Shurkin, a specialist on the Sahel at the Atlantic Council, a think-tank based in Washington, DC.

The trouble is that this rethink may, in essence, be too little too late. China, Russia and Turkey have been lending, investing or securing contracts in West Africa with scarcely a murmur; China has replaced France as the chief source of imports to the region. Other European countries train forces in the Sahel; America runs a big intelligence operation out of Niger.

Because of its colonial history, France is often singled out for policy inconsistencies that are sometimes overlooked in the case of other powers. Many democrats in the region were quick to criticise France when it (and the African Union) turned a blind eye in 2021 to the illegal seizure of power in Chad by Mahamat Idriss Déby on the death of his father, who had run the country for 30 years. Yet only a few grumbled when Mr Déby was welcomed to a summit of African leaders in Washington just months after his security forces had gunned down more than 50 protesters demanding an end to military rule.

This is partly because France is the ideal scapegoat. It is the only former colonial power to maintain big permanent military bases on the continent; Belgium, Britain and Portugal have none. France’s tight post-independence links to local elites, and its past willingness to act as a regional gendarme to prop up leaders, bound up its fortunes in theirs. The failures of unpopular rulers today, to reduce poverty or curb violence, are readily blamed on their proximity to France. In Mali, for instance, many were frustrated that security had been deteriorating for several years before the first coup, despite the presence of thousands of French troops and UN peacekeepers.

The French have not found a credible way to counter the post-colonial narrative of occupation and exploitation that is efficiently used against it, spread by Russian troll factories and disinformation units. It prevails today even against the evidence. In Mali in 2022, for example, the year that France closed down Barkhane, deaths due to political violence surged by a staggering 150%, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a research body. Wagner’s arrival, it notes, “is a key factor that contributed to the escalation of violence in 2022”. Yet this is not the way most Malians seem to see things. This year 80% of them told the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German think-tank, that the end of Barkhane had had no negative impact on their security—and 69% said that they had confidence Russia could provide it.

Moreover, though the French approach may be changing, the demands of a younger generation, intolerant of anything that smacks of paternalism, are changing faster. In 2020 Mr Macron was widely denounced on social media in the region for summoning leaders of the G5 Sahel—Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger—to a summit on the region’s security in Pau, in south-western France. “It was a mistake to work through a narrow regional organisation so weak that it was obvious that the country in charge was France,” says François Heisbourg, of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.

Above all, over the past decade, French counter-jihadist operations have scored tactical successes, yet the violence has still spread. This has reinforced conspiracy theories about France’s “real” motives—to train its army, to protect the uranium mine in Niger that helps supply its nuclear reactors—however far-fetched. France now faces some tough and painful choices. Its top brass says that a withdrawal from Niger is “not on the table”. But, if the junta remains in place, it may have to be. The main thing at stake in Niger is its democratic future and the stability of the Sahel. But for France it is also a test of its ability to recover influence and reshape its security approach to the continent. ■