Sahel coups and the mini-Great Game

Gwynne Dyer

Opinion

If you are a democratically elected leader in one of Africa’s Sahel countries and you suspect the army is plotting to overthrow you, what’s the best counter-measure? Should you:

A) appoint the army’s senior officers as ambassadors to distant countries (with lavish salaries), and replace them with more loyal junior officers?

B) raise and arm your own party militia to protect you from the army?

C) hire the Wagner Group (property of Yevgeny Prigozhin) to keep your army in line?

Alas, there is no good answer. Shuffling the army’s officers around might buy you a year or so, but the new set of senior officers will soon develop the same ambitions to replace you.

Setting up your own party militia will be seen by the army (quite rightly) as an attempt to replace them, and will probably end in a civil war.

Bringing in the Russians may be the best short-term solution, as the Wagner Group are much tougher than your own soldiers and can usually be paid in mineral rights. However, all Western aid will be cut off, and you can expect to have the French and US intelligence services intriguing to overthrow you instead.

Soon-to-be-ex-President Mohamed Bazoum of Niger didn’t do any of these things, so he is now a prisoner in his own palace, overthrown by head of the Presidential Guard General Abdourahamane Tchiani. (The latter now calls himself president, but most democratic countries in Africa still see Bazoum as Niger’s legitimate president.)

From the number of Russian flags that have appeared in the streets of Niamey, Niger’s capital, it is likely that General Tchiani got in touch with the Wagner Group instead. It’s the Great Game again, this time with the Russians on one side and the Americans and the French on the other.

Most of Africa is not like this, and the African Union is pushing back hard against this coup. It has given the coup plotters 15 days to “return to their barracks and restore constitutional authority”. If they refuse, the AU will take “necessary action, including punitive measures”.

What those might be remains to be seen, but why is it always the Sahel, the band of semi-desert land south of the Sahara running across Africa at its widest? In the first decades after independence in the 1960s there were occasional military coups elsewhere in the continent, but in the past quarter-century they have been concentrated in the Sahel region.

It’s getting even more extreme. Of the 14 military coups and attempted coups in Africa in the past three years, 12 have been in the “greater Sahel”: Niger two, Mali three, Gambia one, Guinea one, Burkina Faso two, and Sudan three.

These countries have a lot in common. They are all Muslim and, except Sudan and Gambia, all former French colonies. They are very poor even by African standards. And all except Gambia and Guinea are mostly desert, with the great bulk of the population living along one big river.

Being very poor means the state is weak and most of the population is economically desperate. Revolt in the hope of something better is tempting, and there is therefore some support for radical Islamist movements. Terrorist attacks militarise the societies and put more power in the hands of the military.

The great powers are attracted by conflict in regions like this because a small investment of aid, arms or foreign troops seems to promise a large strategic or financial return.

The original “Great Game” was the 19th-century rivalry between the Russian and the British empires in the region of weak states and tribal territories between British-controlled India and Russian-ruled Central Asia. It was a complete waste of time and nobody won. In fact there was nothing there worth fighting for.

The same applies to the mini-Great Game now under way in West Africa, and especially in the Sahel. At the moment it looks like the Russians are drawing ahead — but once again, it really doesn’t matter.

Go home, and let the African Union take care of it. If they can.