For the politics of the Sahel, the semi-arid region that runs through Africa from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east, it has been a tense and biting year. In late July, Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazum, was arrested by members of his presidential guard. General Abdourahamane Tchiani, head of the guard since 2011, declared himself chairman of the National Council for the Security of the Homeland two days later. It was Niger’s fifth coup since independence from France in 1960.
There have been 220 coups in Africa since 1950, of which almost half, 109, have been successful. But a pattern is starting to emerge that should pull us up the sleeve: the governments of Guinea, Mali and Sudan were toppled in 2021, and last year there was a coup in Burkina Faso in January, only for the interim president himself to be ousted in September. When President Ali Bongo was overthrown in Gabon in August, the Financial Times started one heading “Déjà coups”.
These coups have swept Françafrique, France’s sphere of influence among its former colonies in central and western Africa. To a much greater extent than other departing European powers, France has maintained political, economic and military ties to its former colonial possessions, mainly by presenting itself as a guarantor of stability. From 1960 to the mid-1990s, France intervened military to its customer community on average once a year.
Budget cold winds have caused the French armed forces to pull their horns. In 2012, tragicomic president Francois Hollande told an audience in Dakar that “the time of Françafrique it’s over’, a disengagement that reflects domestic public opinion. The recent rash of coups may well accelerate this. President Emmanuel Macron announced that it is withdrawing ambassador of France from Niger, while 1,500 French soldiers will leave by the end of the year. Macron withdrew 5,000 troops from Mali last summer and 400 special forces from Burkina Faso in February, where the French defense attaché was recently stationed asked to leave.
Just a belated dose of post-colonial reality, then — is France finally realizing that its former colonial possessions are equal members of the world community? Not exactly. France did not send its men and women to the Sahel just to live the empty imperial glories. From 2012 to 2014, 4,000 French troops undertook Operation Serval to drive Islamist militants out of northern Mali. Operation Barkhane, its successor, involved 3,000 troops based in Chad (with small forces from Estonia and Sweden and logistical support from the UK) against Islamists across the Sahel to establish stability and destroy extremists forces.
The 2021 coup in Mali initially prompted Macron to redeploy French forces to Niger, claiming it was simply a focus, but last November he announced the end of Operation Barkhane, in line with the changing priorities of his National Strategy Review, published at the same time .
But this is not just an issue for the French armed forces.
The United States Africa Command, based in Stuttgart but with a support center at Camp Lemonnier near Djibouti, is responsible for all of Africa except Egypt. Its commander, General Michael Langley, presented some facts of life to the Senate Armed Services Committee at the annual Posture statement on March.
Africa, Langley explained, “set the stage for the growth of violent extremist organizations and for America’s strategic competitors to bid for international allies.” He continued: “Africa is now the epicenter of international terrorism. Russia is expanding its operations in Africa, including through the Kremlin-backed private military company Wagner. Destabilization, democratic regression and human rights violations follow in their wake.”
French disengagement would leave a significant strategic vacuum. The growing attention to the threat from Russia does not mean that the US can simply ignore Islamic terrorism: violence continues to rise, and we have seen time and time again how “non-governmental spaces” give militants room to flourish, to improve and develop.
The situation is worse than that. As of 2017, Wagner Group, the private military contractor founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, has deployed around 5,000 troops to Africa. Directly funded by Russia since Prigozhin’s death this summer, this motley group of Russian ex-soldiers, convicts and foreign nationals operates in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan, providing security and paramilitary aid and disinformation services . Interestingly, they have often been rewarded resource allocations.
Connecting the dots is not difficult. If France withdraws from the Sahel, the United States does not currently have the boots on the ground to step into the void. Countries like Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger will inevitably seek new allies to keep jihadist forces at bay for the sake of their internal stability and order, and if that is the Wagner Group — flexible, unethical, ruthless, questionable proxy for Putin — it will expand Russian global reach and empower an irregular force that is unpredictable and ruthless.
When President Bush created AFRICOM in 2007, an observer compiled it is a “combatant command plus” — that is, it serves the same function as the other unified combatant commands, but with an additional implied task of diplomacy and soft power projection.
In fact it is almost a “minus”: these additional tasks are the core of General Langley’s work. It has a small direct footprint of 2,000, mainly in Stuttgart, but huge potential for training, development and assistance. Its components are widely scalable: the US Army component (TAF Southern Europe, Africa) can operate at the scale of a platoon to a two-star joint task force headquarters.
US policymakers and lawmakers know that the Sahel is important to the security of Africa and beyond. But the pace of events is accelerating and we are now in a position where failure to make a decision is by definition an option, as the geopolitical situation will not wait.
The White House must determine what its policy principles are Françafrique. Is it willing to see Russian influence expand significantly? If not, then what is she willing to do to prevent this outcome? By the New Year, I suspect the price to stay in the game will have gone up — so are you in or out?
Elliott Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs. He was a senior official in the UK House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including as a clerk on the Defense Committee and secretary of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
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