One year after the coup, the Nigerien military junta is firmly in the saddle. In this Spotlight, Lisa Tschörner explains how the new rulers are mobilizing the population, staging a successful defence against threats, and expanding partnerships with authoritarian states in order to secure their power.
© picture alliance / REUTERS | Mahamadou Hamidou
Mid-July 2024 in Niger: Almost a year after the military coup, the new rulers present their future government programme that many had long awaited. It consists of a political vision by coup leader Abdourahamane Tiani and a “Resilience Programme to Save the Fatherland”, published by the Ministry of Economy and Finance.1 Both documents read like an ambitious development plan that Western donors could easily endorse: Ownership, good governance, the fight against corruption, and an independent judiciary as well as investments in education and job creation are key components of the documents. There is also talk of establishing a “genuine” democracy and organizing free elections.
With the “results-based management” approach, even the language and functional logic of international development cooperation has found its way into the programme. This is not surprising, given that the editorial responsibility lay with the Ministry of Planning, whose cadres were not replaced in the wake of the military coup. With UNDP and USAID, international donors were also involved in the development of the Resilience Programme.2 A comparison with policy documents from the previous democratically legitimized governments shows that parts of the new programme have been paraphrased or even copied and pasted from previous strategy papers.
The reality of the last 12 months, however, presents a different picture. Within one year, the self-proclaimed rulers dismantled the country’s most important democratic institutions by abolishing the constitution, removing elected representatives, and suspending political parties. Under the pretence of a transition aimed at renewing the political system, they established an authoritarian regime that has further worsened people’s living conditions and whose end does not appear to be in sight.
An important factor for the military junta’s consolidation of power was the successful mobilization of the population. This was achieved through an alliance of convenience between the new rulers and parts of Nigerien civil society. The latter had become a forum for political opposition due to the repressive behaviour of the previous governments.
The M62 movement, which was founded on 3 August 2022 (62 years after Niger’s independence) as an alliance of 15 civil society organizations, played a central role in this. Its members include prominent supporters of the opposition party Lumana. At the time of its founding, M62’s main objective was to protest against the redeployment of French troops from Mali to Niger. All but one of the movement’s planned demonstrations were banned under the then President Mohamed Bazoum. In April 2023, the Supreme Court sentenced M62 leader Abdoulaye Seydou to nine months in prison after he accused the Nigerien army of serious human rights violations. Only a few weeks after the coup, Seydou was released from prison after M62 organized demonstrations and night-time “patriotic vigils” in support of the coup plotters. The ongoing security crisis, an increasing presence of foreign troops, and several corruption scandals had also weakened the support of the deposed government within the population. Many now associated the military coup with the possibility for political change and therefore responded to calls from civil society to support the coup.
To mobilize the population, both the new rulers and their civil society allies used neo-sovereignist rhetoric, which gained popularity after the failure of international stabilization efforts in the region. Contrary to anti-colonial or pan-African aspirations, neo-sovereignist rhetoric distances itself from universalist ideas such as democracy and human rights, which are rejected as “Trojan horses” of the West. Instead, it propagates the existence of a national community that is constituted by setting itself apart from common enemies. A key element is thereby the distinction between patriots and traitors of the fatherland, not only ensuring the emotional attachment of the masses to the junta’s political project, but also preventing any form of questioning or criticism.
For example, by founding a “Solidarity Fund to Save the Fatherland” and naming all donors, the junta called on all patriots to close ranks. Together, all Nigeriens must contribute to the “true” sovereignty of the country and mitigate the effects of the sanctions imposed by the regional organization ECOWAS and Niger’s Western partners in response to the coup.
At the same time, however, the new rulers and their supporters successfully used the neo-sovereignist discourse to justify the numerous arbitrary arrests and the massive curtailment of freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
In order to demonstrate their ability to act despite rising inflation, exploding food prices, growing unemployment, and increasing attacks by jihadist groups, the new rulers repeatedly staged successful defences against external and internal threats over the course of the year. The junta repeatedly accused France of subversive attempts to destabilize the country in order to subsequently demonstrate strength against the former colonial power. Evidence for the accusations was either not presented or constructed through targeted disinformation.
For example, the new rulers publicly accused France of liberating and militarily training terrorists or planning a military intervention, and then celebrated the forced withdrawal of the French ambassador and the French military mission in the streets of the capital, Niamey.
This was later followed by the fabrication of threat scenarios by unspecified but omnipresent “foreign powers” or “agents of France”, which included the states of the regional organization ECOWAS as well as the European Union (EU). In October 2023, for example, the junta proclaimed that it had foiled a spectacular escape attempt by deposed President Bazoum to Nigeria that had been orchestrated by a “foreign power”. A report on a raid at EUCAP Sahel broadcast on state television station Télé Sahel in early February 2024 accused the EU training mission of illegally stockpiling weapons in order to infiltrate the country in the name of France. However, the footage showing landmines was taken from a different context.
At the same time, the junta used the pretext of external and internal threat scenarios to indefinitely delay the start of the announced national dialogue process, which was supposed to decide on the duration of the transition phase, and instead secure unrestricted access to state resources. For example, a new regulation was issued in February 2024, according to which military spending is no longer subject to public procurement regulations, and thus independent control. This has not only paved the way for faster processing of arms purchases or the use of mercenaries, but also for the personal enrichment of the new rulers.
Another key element of the consolidation of power has been the expansion of cooperation with other authoritarian regimes. In addition to military partnerships, the focus has also been on establishing new economic relations.
With the founding of the Alliance of Sahel States, Niger formed a regional defence alliance with the coup governments of neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso in September 2023 in order to jointly counter a possible military intervention by ECOWAS. Four months later, the three countries jointly announced their withdrawal from the regional organization and decided to form a confederation at the beginning of July 2024 in order to work more closely together in all policy areas.
Under the slogan of “diversifying” partnerships, the new rulers have also successfully courted the favour of autocrats at the international level. In early January 2024, junta-appointed Prime Minister Ali Mahamane Lamine Zeine travelled to Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Iran, accompanied by various ministers.
Russia, which had already sent a delegation to Niamey in December 2023 to sign a new military agreement with the junta, sent an air defence system to defend against external attacks and 100 military advisors to train the Nigerien army on the new weapons system at the beginning of April. In July 2024, Turkey secured a lucrative contract to exploit natural resources after the junta withdrew concessions to extract uranium from French and Canadian mining companies.
Niger’s military coup on 26 July 2023 was the fifth unconstitutional seizure of power by parts of the Nigerien army since the country’s independence in 1960. The previous coup against President Mamadou Tandja in 2010 was described by many as a corrective or pro-democratic coup. After a one-year transition phase, the army ensured a return to democratic order. This does not appear to be the intention of the current rulers. Neither Tiani’s political vision nor the Resilience Programme include a timetable for organizing elections.
Nevertheless, one year after the coup, Western donors are hoping for a normalization of relations with the country, which they had not long ago described as an anchor of stability in the region. After all, even with the recent military coup and the subsequent suspension of development and military aid, the motives for the former engagement remain: In addition to the implementation of Agenda 2030, these include, above all, the fight against international terrorist networks, the prevention of migration movements, and the containment of Russia’s increasing geopolitical influence.
However, political decision-makers in Berlin, Brussels, Washington, and New York should keep in mind that any cooperation with the new rulers in Niamey runs the risk of further securing their authoritarian rule.
Lisa Tschörner is a researcher at Megatrends Afrika and part of the SWP's Africa and Middle East Division.
1 Programme de Résilience pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (PRSP).
2 An analysis commissioned by the author compared the new resilience programme (PRSP) with the Renaissance II and III Programmes adopted under Presidents Mahamadou Issoufou and Mohamed Bazoum and the Plan de Développement Economique et Social (PDES) 2022–2026. The analysis included the extraction and subdivision into individual sentences from the PDF documents (using spaCy, “fr_core_news_sm”), as well as the conversion of these into “word embeddings” using the “sentence-transformer” model “paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2”. The semantic proximity of the sentences from different texts was then calculated using cosine similarity; 12.7 per cent of the sentences from the PRSP corresponded to sentences from the PDES with a value of over 0.9. The author would like to thank Paul Bochtler (SWP) for preparing the analysis.
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