Showdown in Niamey

Africa caught in the midst of global competition

The Ukraine War and Western efforts to punish Russia have reignited global strategic competition between the West and the "Non-West" — meaning Russia and China and their allies. 

African states are caught in the middle.

They distrust the West — particularly France with its decades of neo-colonial rule —and they find the hectoring by the sanctimonious Americans and Europeans to be tiresome. 

They don't fully trust the Russians or Chinese either, they know those states will try to cheat and exploit them as well. 

Read more: US counter-terrorism efforts increasingly focusing on Africa

What African states do want is to be able to pick and choose goods, services, and alliances from whatever place best fits their needs.

The West often believes and certainly wants others to believe that it is the only game in town and that Washington and Paris, and the international organisations they dominate, know what is best for Africa.

This patronising attitude has been amplified by cheap but effective Russian-inspired propaganda on social media that seize upon the West's own contradictions and the injured nationalism of the local masses.

For years, the West derided the weakness of Russia. 

In 2014, the late Senator John McCain called it "a giant gas station pretending to be a real country." Other American politicians called it "a gas station with nukes."

String of Africa coups raise alarm bells in Western capitals

Now this string of military coups across the African Sahel conjures up the spectre of the Wagner private military company as some sort of Machiavellian mastermind and Praetorian Guard causing alarm bells to ring across Western capitals.

There is no evidence that Russia or Wagner were behind any of these military overthrows but there are states in Africa where the ruling regimes have favoured Russia while kicking out the French – Mali and the Central African Republic are the two biggest examples. Guinea, Burkina Faso and now Niger have not yet followed suit in embracing Wagner.

The irony is that Russia is indeed weak compared to the West in many ways but it doesn't need to be strong. What it can offer are foreign mercenaries — something African states have used before (Mike Hoare, Bob Denard, and Executive Outcomes were not Russian).

They can also offer support in a few, narrow but important, fields: competitively priced arms sales, grain and fertiliser imports, diplomatic cover, and corrupt deals with ruling elites. These are all things that the West provided for decades to those same ruling African elites. 

An alternative to Western hegemony

A weak but still "useful" Russia, coupled with an economically powerful and agile China, together do provide an enticing alternative for African regimes to a Western hegemony whose reins have become at times uncomfortable.

France pushes birth control for Africans while Americans prioritise gay rights on the continent. When asked if he was pro-West or pro-East, Uganda's ruler Yoweri Museveni recently answered in nationalistic terms, that he was "pro-myself. And I deal with other people according to how they relate with my own interest."

Tensions in the Sahel are already at a fever pitch not only because of the obsession with Wagner and the string of new military regimes but because of the shooting war raging in Sudan.

There, an Islamist-influenced Sudanese Army (SAF) faces off against a bandit army (RSF) which includes tribesmen and fighters not just from Sudan's Darfur region, but from across the Sahel, including Chad and Niger. Not surprisingly, both sides in the Sudan war are friendly with Russia although Wagner's ties are with the RSF.

Niger, in and of itself, is not a major international issue, in spite of the country's uranium mines and American drone base.

It becomes important this time because it is seen as part of a worrying larger regional trend of new military regimes in the Sahel that share certain characteristics: nationalistic, led by relatively young officers, potentially open to Russia and possibly anti-Western at a time of heightened international tensions involving the Ukraine War, great power competition worldwide, and fears about uncontrolled illegal migration and a scramble for valuable natural resources.

For the West, the challenge is to find a new, less arrogant and more effective, paradigm in dealing with African states.

This is difficult but not impossible.

An enlightening current example comes from Riyadh. Western relations with Saudi Arabia had seemed to deteriorate with the Kingdom in recent years with even candidate Joe Biden promising to make Saudi Arabia "a pariah." But the old threats and old mindset did not work and it was the West, not the Saudis, that had to substantively change its tone and approach in order to find more cooperative and respectful ways of engagement.

Niger alone doesn't have that clout but the entire African continent together does have considerable weight.

In a sense, the exaggerated Western fears about Wagner may have done the Europeans and Americans a favour by waking them up from a long dream of political complacency.

Whatever happens in Niger in the days ahead, the competition in Africa is wide open, with much to lose and even more to win.

-Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) in Washington, D.C.