An intrepid traveller would now be hard-pressed to traverse the African continent at its widest point, passing from the Red Sea to near the Atlantic, while staying within a country that is not being torn apart by a civil war or recovering from one, has not suffered a military coup since 2021 or is not a failed state occupied by a toxic mix of rapacious politicians, militia and Russian mercenaries.
The traveller’s undoubtedly inadvisable route would take them from the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray, at war until last year, then across Sudan, where an internal power struggle within a repressive regime has metastasised into general violence, and into the Central African Republic, now seen by many analysts as the best example on the continent of the worst that can befall a nation.
After this comes a difficult choice. A northern route could go via Chad, ruled by a 39-year-old soldier who seized power in 2021 when his father was killed in battle after three decades in power, and Mali, racked by multiple insurgencies, Islamic extremists and more Russian mercenaries hired by the second military ruler to take power in recent years. Another itinerary could take in Cameroon, convulsed by a lengthy civil war, and Burkina Faso, which suffered two military coups in 2022 alone.
Either way, our traveller would need – along with some very expensive insurance and much luck – the means to cross the keystone state of Niger, which has become the latest country to fall prey to what now appears to be endemic instability.
Quite what triggered this recent upheaval in the Sahel remains unclear. Niger has been seen as the most stable state in the region. Only months ago, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, described it as a “model of democracy”. This conclusion was based on the success of its president, Mohamed Bazoum, a centrist and broadly pro-western moderniser who won more than 55% of the vote in elections in 2021 to become the country’s first leader to take power peacefully since independence from France in 1960.
Reports suggest that Bazoum was planning to reorganise the presidential guard, an elite force of soldiers commanded by Gen Abdourahmane Tchiani, who believed he was about to be sacked and preemptively took his revenge, placing Bazoum under house arrest.
What followed was straight from coup d’état central casting. Soldiers appeared on state TV to announce they had removed the president from power and suspended the constitution.
Tchiani then declared himself the leader of Niger in a televised address and explained that he had been forced to step in to protect the nation from grave security threats.
The crisis has reached a critical moment. Tchiani’s takeover prompted a threat of military intervention to restore Bazoum to power by 15 western African countries. Led by Nigeria, the group has given Tchiani until nightfall on Sunday to step down.
The French foreign minister on Saturday called these threats “credible”. Their target, however, has shown no sign of considering any compromise, merely calling on his countrymen to resist any invasion.
Across the continent there is deep consternation. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, has described the situation as “a serious setback”. This is an understatement. Niger’s stability is critical to the future of the Sahel and the latter’s future is critical to that of the continent. In a decade and a half, the region has gone from poor but relatively stable to a crucible of political chaos, human suffering, criminal trafficking and extremist violence.
Everywhere there is massive displacement, acute economic distress, intense demographic pressure and environmental degradation. Many of the Sahel’s most significant problems are exacerbated or caused by the climate crisis, and humanitarian officials have described the region as the “canary in a coalmine of our warming planet”.
The military regimes that have come to power across the Sahel have shown themselves incapable of meeting these challenges. Under Bazoum, levels of jihadist violence were falling in Niger. In neighbouring Mali, now under Col Assimi Goïta’s rule, they have risen by 25% since this time last year.
Wherever the mercenaries of the Kremlin-linked Wagner group deploy, civilians have paid the price. Inevitably, military regimes rely on force, not consensus, to manage the complex and troubled interplay of communities, ethnicities and sects in the countries they rule. The result is more instability rather than less.
The problems in the Sahel have a much wider impact too, affecting countries to the south and north such as Libya, Algeria and Egypt, among others. The new rulers of Niger have rejected all military cooperation with France, dealing a massive blow to counterinsurgency efforts there and in neighbouring countries.
The danger of extremist violence sourced in the Sahel but executed in Europe is real. So is the prospect of massive refugee flows, far greater than those experienced so far. The consequences for much of east and central Africa too could be devastating, setting the entire continent’s development back by decades or derailing it entirely.
At a geopolitical level, the coup in Niger appears set to add a new recruit to the developing coalition of global south states now ranged alongside Russia against the US and its western allies. Alignment in Africa now follows the fracture lines of the cold war.
These have been exploited with great cynicism and no little skill by Moscow. At a summit in St Petersburg for African leaders last month, though Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the coup in Niamey, the capital of Niger, President Vladimir Putin praised the resistance to “neo-colonialist” exploitation.
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Yet our traveller might also have glimpsed a reason for optimism during their largely depressing transcontinental journey. They might, for example, have stopped briefly in Nigeria. Endemic corruption, chaotic governance and a crippled economy make positive projections for the future of this vast country appear almost Panglossian. Even a recent dip in jihadist violence is attributable more to the success of the local Islamic State branch over a rival extremist group than to that of Nigeria’s armed forces.
But elections six months ago suggested an inflection point might soon be reached. Though 62-year-old Peter Obi, a businessman who offered a radical change of direction, was soundly beaten by Bola Tinubu, a veteran “political godfather”, the poll was nonetheless very different from the six others held since military rule ended in Nigeria in 1999.
Where the established parties relied on patronage networks, appeals to ethnic or religious solidarity and a massive party machine to mobilise support, Obi and the tiny Labour party reached out across Nigeria’s faultlines, promising efficient governance and innovation, not pork-barrel politics. The candidate’s frugal lifestyle and modest approach put the immense wealth of Tinubu in the spotlight.
Much of Obi’s support came from young people and urban voters. Many were affluent and educated, but not all, as the voting returns from polling stations in barracks in the capital Abuja demonstrated. Obi gained more than 6m votes – about 25% – and won in the capital, as well as in Lagos, long the fiefdom of Tinubu.
The new political map of Nigeria shows swaths painted in the bright red of the Labour party. A successful run for the presidency in 2027 is entirely possible, analysts say.
Such examples will encourage others across the continent. But democracy has been in retreat in many regions. Repressive regimes, parties that have clung to power for 40 years or more and “dinosaur” leaders have seen off a series of challenges from often younger politicians who know how to speak to a new generation of voters and to channel the immense impatience for change.
This is a disappointment, but if the rapid urbanisation, youth, increasing education and growing connectivity of much of Africa has yet to reach the critical level that would allow reformist opposition movements to win outright, this cannot be the case for ever. The coups in the Sahel may actually reinforce this argument.
A United Nations report published in July said that, though it might seem paradoxical, popular support for the recent military coups was “symptomatic of a new wave of democratic aspiration that is expanding across the continent”.
The survey of 8,000 people, 5,000 of whom lived through unconstitutional changes of government in west Africa or the Sahel, pointed to widespread impatience with existing politics as a significant factor in the record number of coups. Though many people said they believed the army should take over when a civilian government is incompetent, a massive majority of those surveyed preferred a democratic form of government.
In short, coups are welcomed only because there is no other option. Offer a democratic alternative, the logic then runs, and a deep well of longing for “free and fair elections, gender equality and the protection of civil rights” will be mobilised.
This means that the most important lesson learned by our traveller from their arduous journey may be that recent events in the Sahel, though deeply concerning and deserving of our full attention, do not necessarily signal a new dark age where men in uniform run amok across much of the continent, looting resources and striking deals with nefarious geopolitical actors to reinforce their power.
The momentum across the continent remains with the young – the average age of those surveyed by the UN was 35 – and the hopeful. Even jaded veterans appear to have decided it is time to draw a line in the sand, perhaps even if it is their political instincts, rather than their principles, that have told them where advantage lies.
Even before Sunday night’s deadline for military intervention, Tinubu had already made it clear he did not believe that the forced change of government in Niamey could be allowed to stand. “Without democracy, there is no governance, there is no freedom, there is no rule of law,” he said in early July. “We will not allow coup after coup in west Africa.”
Since the crisis in Niger broke, he has thrown Nigeria’s massive economic and political weight behind the international effort to restore Bazoum to power.
Last week, Niger’s President Bazoum, imprisoned in his home, made a desperate appeal. “Fighting for our shared values, including democratic pluralism and respect for the rule of law, is the only way to make sustainable progress against poverty and terrorism,” he wrote in the Washington Post.
Happily for him – and for us – hundreds of millions of ordinary people in Niger, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso and across the region agree.
• Footnote added 6 August 2023. In some earlier mobile versions of this article, an embedded map mistakenly marked Central African Republic as Nigeria. This has been corrected.
