A key lesson from the Niger crisis: Africans, not global powers, will plot the continent’s path

The assumption is that Moscow and Washington will dictate events. Regional leaders don't accept that, and therein lies hope

A coup belt" now extends across the African continent, running along the Sahel region that bisects north and sub-Saharan Africa. On 10 August, Niger, where the democratically elected president was deposed by a military junta, became the last link that completed the corridor of countries run by coupsters. It is the ninth coup or attempted power grab in west and central Africa since 2020. This might appear at first glance as a retrenchment, the thrusting of African countries back into military rule and weak democratic cultures, with a dash of Russian mischief to complete the picture of a fragile region at the whim of local strongmen and meddling. The reality is much more complicated, and perhaps even oddly hopeful.

Let's first address that which is not entirely true. Much has been made of Russian intervention in the region, primarily through the activities of the Wagner group. Wagner, in terms of troop deployment, is indeed present in Africa, but only concentrated in a few countries: Central African Republic, Mali and Libya. The rest of Wagner's active military presence is fluid and inconsistent in loyalty, as mercenary deployment often is: providing support, arms and training to governments and insurgencies alike. The organisation's main concern appears to be a sort of economic piracy, forging partnerships with local militias and governments to extract and skim off the yield of natural resources: gold in Sudan, oil in Libya, diamonds and uranium in Central African Republic.

To achieve these ends, Wagner deploys not just firepower and manpower, but nestles within the soft power of the Russian state. All Eyes on Wagner, a project that tracks the outfit's activities through open source information and witness accounts, told me that Wagner is assisted by the Russian non-profit organisation the Foundation for National Values Protection, which claims to monitor perceptions of government among the citizenry so as to better shape and get a feel" for what works in certain countries. The result is that Wagner is skilled in the sort of propaganda and targeted local outreach that portrays it as the representative of benign foreign powers, a contrast to the US and ex-colonial European forces. A gift from Yevgeny Prigozhin" is how food parcels of rice, sugar and lentils distributed to poor people are labelled. Two weeks ago, Putin proposed to liberate African countries from neocolonialism. In Niger, pro-coup demonstrators assembled waving Russian flags and chanting down with France". This is not to understate Wagner's and by extension Russia's influence, but these are enablers, rather than causes, of the spate of coups since 2020. And their presence galvanises US attention and diplomatic scrambling, further establishing the impression that these coups are somehow proxy skirmishes for power on the part of foreign regimes, obscuring the real dynamics on the ground.