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Things are moving quickly in the Sahel, the semi-arid strip beneath the Sahara that has become a volatile coup belt. It does not seem long ago that President Emmanuel Macron was giving speeches about how France should tweak its relations with the region. Now it barely has any relations at all. In quick succession, French troops have been ejected from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, all three of which fell to military juntas in recent years. Men in khaki now rule and misrule countries in an unbroken 5,000-kilometre chain from Guinea on Africa’s west coast to war-ravaged Sudan on the east.
The lightning-quick developments have broader implications than France’s bruised ego. The Sahel accounted last year for almost half of all deaths from terrorist attacks globally, according to the Global Terrorism Index, with 1,900 terrorism-related deaths last year in Burkina Faso alone. Groups loosely affiliated with Isis and al-Qaeda, exploiting local grievances and joining forces with criminal gangs, are the main culprits.
France’s loss of influence has been Russia’s gain. Having ejected French troops, juntas in Mali and Niger have turned to mercenaries from Africa Corps, the paramilitary group formerly known as Wagner. The past week has brought credible reports of Africa Corps personnel arriving in Chad, which under its former leader Idriss Déby was a staunch ally of France. It has nudged towards Russia under Déby’s son, Mahamat, who met Vladimir Putin in Moscow in January and who will cement his position in a phoney presidential election next week.
The anti-French backlash is also affecting US security operations. American troops will temporarily leave Chad after a disagreement with N’Djamena. More seriously, Niger has ended a military accord that permitted Washington to station 1,000 troops in the country and operate a $100mn drone base. A high-level US delegation was rebuffed after it expressed concerns about Niger’s alleged talks to supply uranium to Iran.
Western policies have not been working. Sanctions and withdrawal of aid, understandable as an initial reaction to military coups, have only hastened the region’s rush to Russia’s embrace. Security has worsened since Russia’s arrival, with several massacres reported.
A new approach is needed. Lack of opportunity is driving Sahel’s swelling population of young people to emigrate in record numbers and to join terrorist groups promising status and a salary. There is no quick fix or return to the status quo ante, which in any case was inherently unstable. But a number of things could be tried to halt further deterioration.
First, Europe — and not France alone — should strengthen support for coastal states such as Benin, Ivory Coast and Senegal, as well as Nigeria and Ghana, which are a bulwark against the spread of militancy but vulnerable to contagion from the Sahel on their northern borders. The west must also do a better job at countering social media propaganda that Russian trolls have used effectively to influence public opinion.
Simply isolating the Sahel’s military regimes is not a tenable long-term option. That certainly does not mean backing juntas, which, in the long term, have little to offer their people. But it does mean engaging with populations through imaginative development projects. One obvious one is the African Development Bank’s “Desert to Power” initiative, which aims to bring 10,000MW of solar-powered electricity to 250mn people in 11 countries. Western governments should back this and similar projects aimed at improving people’s lives. Bringing light to the Sahel won’t solve all its problems. But in the dark, they will only get worse.
