West Africa, where coups d’état in Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali in the recent past, coming as they did against the backdrop of continuous conflict in the Sahel region where violence has displaced more than 2.5 million people and spread to Benin and Togo, seems headed into a new period of instability. If not arrested, the trend of violence in Africa’s coastal states could wipe out its economic development gains. But obviously nobody is listening. The latest to join the list of African nations where the armed forces or political figures backed by them have ousted a civilian government is Niger, where a coup was effected on 26 July. It was West Africa’s seventh in three years.

What has the West worried is that while China is well-established on the continent in major countries’ economic and security domains and seems immune to internal upheavals there, the fast-paced developments in the aftermath of the Niger coup mirror those in Mali and Burkina Faso ~ in that they underline the near-impossibility of sustaining the US-led West’s hard security and geostrategic interests and its slightly less enthusiastic commitment to democracy in various parts of Africa. Washington’s much-vaunted twintrack policy approach to counter China in Africa is premised on pushing a narrative denigrating Beijing’s mercantilist approach and Moscow’s so-called dark ops to achieving their strategic aims while simultaneously working towards a new, more flexible regional policy premised on ‘four pillars’. These have been defined by the USA as fostering open societies; delivering democratic and security dividends; advancing pandemic recovery and economic opportunities; and supporting conservation, climate adaptation, and an equitable energy transition process. The developments in Niger are likely to have put paid to all that, at least for the foreseeable future.

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One of the leading experts on global conflict and security, Vanda FelbabBrown, points out that tensions had been simmering between Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, and Mr Abdourahamane “Omar” Tchiani, the head of the presidential guard that conducted the putsch with the backing of the country’s military elite. More interestingly, in keeping with the script of West Africa’s recent junta takeovers, the putschists justified their move as necessary because of Mr Bazoum’s inadequate security policies; in fact, asserts Felbab-Brown, the ousted president’s counterterrorism approach and his strong cooperation with the West were “improving the security picture”. While Western analysts rule out a direct Russian role in the Niger coup, nearly all of them flag the ‘disinformation campaign’ Moscow has been running in West Africa agitating against France and the USA, accusing both powers of neo-colonialism and polarisation. But the fact is that the so-called propaganda, whether Russian or Chinese, has fallen on receptive ears. Over the past decade and more, Niger’s ruling establishment has used brutal and violent tactics against protesters and opponents, to which the West closed its eyes in order to maintain military bases, uranium access, and cooperation to stem the tide of migrants heading to Europe. Going ahead, western powers will likely have to pinch their collective nose too, much as they did in large parts of West Asia, South Asia, and Latin America during the Cold War