2023-09-03 06:38:48
A group of protesters burns an image of French President Emmanuel Macron in Bamako, Mali (REUTERS/Paul Lorgerie)
The dominoes continue to fall in West Africa. This week it was Gabon, a small country very rich in oil. Just a month ago it had been Niger. There are already seven former French colonies where coups have taken place in the last three years. And all the military juntas that were imposed expressed their clear anti-French sentiments. Even in some of these nations, during the demonstrations in support of the coups, flags of Russia and China were seen waving, appearing as the “liberators.” Africans rise up definitively against the hindrances of European colonialism, particularly undermining the pride of France and politically weakening President Emmanuel Macron, while surrendering to the arms of the emerging powers in the region.
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This week Gabon’s top brass ousted President Ali Bongo, heir to a dynasty that has ruled the country since 1967, after disputed elections. The ouster of the Gabonese president, who is believed to be currently under house arrest, was led by his cousin, General Brice Oligui Nguema, who will assume power on Monday. Other leaders in the region, fearing they might be next, took precautions. In neighboring Cameroon, Paul Biya, who has held office for four decades and at 90 is the world’s oldest president, announced a sudden shakeup of his country’s military leadership. So did Rwanda, which has been ruled by Paul Kagame since 2000.
“With Gabon, my fear is confirmed that this will become a succession of imitators, soldiers who believe that they can govern their countries better than civilians and who appear with the stamp of being anti-French. Let’s hope this stops here,” Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is considered one of the few who respect the democratic system and who chairs ECOWAS, West Africa’s main regional body, said on Thursday.
Supporters of the coup celebrate with the police in the streets of Libreville, Gabon (AP/Betiness Mackosso)
There are many differences between the countries involved in the various coups – Mali, Chad, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon – but they share the common denominator of anti-French sentiment that drives the rejection of the political status quo whatever it may be. In all the countries in the region that have experienced these recent undemocratic takeovers, France has been the former colonial power. The juntas that toppled previous regimes are weaponizing resentment of Paris’s deep and complicated imperial legacy, much to the opportunistic glee of Russia and China, which offer rhetorical and, in some cases, substantive support to coup regimes.
It may interest you: Coup in Gabon: who is Ali Bongo, the ousted president whose family has been in power for 55 years
This was the case in Burkina Faso and Mali, where French peacekeepers were forced to withdraw after the juntas made it clear that their presence was unwanted. And in Niger, long the centerpiece of France’s counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel, the area south of the Sahara desert, anti-French rhetoric erupted. On Thursday, the junta that now rules in the Nigerian capital of Niamey ordered police to expel the French ambassador, a move that the Macron government, which only recognizes the authority of ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, does not view as legitimate.
All of this is especially painful for President Emmanuel Macron, who on his many visits to Africa during his tenure, delivered speech after speech proclaiming the advent of a new relationship with the continent that would “dispel the heavy baggage of the past.” In 2017, in the Burkina Faso capital, Macron called for renewed “partnerships” with the region, expressing his hope to invest in the education and aspirations of the continent’s youth. Six months ago, during a trip that included a stop in Gabon, Macron declared that “the days of the Françafrique are truly over,” an implicit reference to France’s long history of prioritizing its commercial interests and endorsing dictatorial regimes in its former colonies.
Thousands of people came out to express their support for the military in Niamey, Niger, armed with Russian flags (REUTERS / Mahamadou Hamidou)
On that same tour, Macron also marked a substantial change in security strategy. He ordered the French forces deployed in the region to operate in conjunction with local forces and not individually. “We have come to the end of a cycle in French history in which military issues took precedence in Africa,” he said in the Gabonese capital, Libreville, another expression of his desire to change the atmosphere in relations with African states.
It may interest you: The Niger coup junta announced measures to strengthen its power in the face of possible foreign military intervention
Speaking at a meeting with French diplomats on Monday, as tensions continued to mount over what to do with the Nigerian junta, Macron lamented the “epidemic” of coups rocking the region and said his government had to defend Nigeria’s fledgling democracy. Niger facing the coup plotters. Less than 48 hours later, the coup took place in Gabon. The military in that country justified their action as a response to a controversial election held a week earlier, in which Bongo claimed victory. An independent British pollster working on this election process said that while the election had been close, Bongo had won. But polls also showed growing anti-French sentiment across all age groups and with the exception of the country’s pro-Paris upper class. Ibrahima Kane, a Senegalese human rights lawyer at the Open Society Foundation, said in an interview with DW that the desire to break free from French influence is real. “The perception that the French have of us has never changed. We were always considered second class citizens. And West Africa, particularly French-speaking Africa, wants that situation to change,” he stated.
The French ambiguity is palpable in the Gabonese situation. In many ways, Gabon has more in common with some Persian Gulf states than with its African neighbors. It has a small population of 2.3 million, enormous oil wealth, and a sparsely inhabited country; 88% of the territory is jungle. The Bongos were consolidated as a monarchical dynasty thanks to the increase in the price of oil. Omar Bongo seized power in 1967 and became a close ally of France, granting the concessions for the exploitation of crude oil wells to companies from that country. That left him with a free hand for the rest. It is estimated that he fathered at least 53 children with different women. After Omar’s death in 2009, power passed to Ali, one of his seven “official” sons, who “won” the presidential elections that year. While the super-rich life of everyone in the family continued with their Bentleys, the Parisian villas, the vacations on the Côte d’Azur while cruising around Libreville in different Rolls-Royce convertibles. In Paris they said that, although the Bongo stole, they did it discreetly and allowed a part of the wealth to reach the rest of the population, unlike other oil kleptocracies such as the one in Equatorial Guinea.
French forces together with their Chadian colleagues in the Sahel after the arrest of “one of the high-ranking members” of the jihadist group Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) Dadi Ould Chouaib (Min. Defense France)
“The coup in Gabon further weakened France’s position in its former African strongholds, even if the situation is different in this Central African country, ruled for more than five decades by the Bongo family,” Le Monde said in an editorial this week. . “Paris wants to believe that the military coup leaders do not share the anti-French rhetoric of their Nigerian counterparts.” The British The Economist supported the position of the traditional French newspaper: “France’s close ties with local elites after independence, and its willingness in the past to act as a regional gendarme to prop up the leaders, linked its fate to theirs ”. For that reason, she added, “the failures of today’s unpopular rulers to reduce poverty or curb violence are easily blamed on their proximity to France.” Michael Shurkin of the Atlantic Council summed it up this way: “Ties with France have become a kiss of death for African governments.”
The forced withdrawal of French and US troops from the region has strengthened insurgent Islamist groups such as ISIS affiliates and al Qaeda as well as Nigeria’s powerful Boko Haram. They dominate a good part of the desert areas of the Sahel and the routes of migrants who want to reach the Mediterranean coast through Libya to cross into Europe. The armed forces of Mali and Burkina Faso do not have control over vast areas of their territories and rely on regional self-defense paramilitary forces. The Chadian army, which although it is considered one of the strongest on the continent, is unable to stop attacks by Boko Haram and its affiliated group such as the West African Province of the Islamic State. The country’s then president, Idriss Déby, a retired general, was killed on the battlefield in 2021 when rebels tried to overthrow his government. In Burkina Faso, the coup came as a reaction to a massacre of 49 military policemen and four civilians in the north of the country, after they were unable to defend themselves against a rebel attack due to lack of equipment.
In Paris, they wonder if, given this complex situation, it is worth continuing with a policy so close to their former African colonies. It is no longer the dominant economic player in the region – in Gabon, for example, China has supplanted it as its largest trading partner – and it operates in a geopolitical field where the United States, Russia, China and Turkey, among other powers, also play. “Withdrawing from Africa would, to some extent, diminish France’s global stature, but the reality is that France – like Britain – has many strengths and, frankly, other priorities that better reflect its interests,” wrote Michael Shurkin of the Atlantic Council in a column it published in Politico.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is received by his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg. The Chinese presence is increasingly preponderant throughout the African continent (Yandisa Monakali/DIRCO/Handout via REUTERS)
A position that is shared by many in the corridors of power in Paris. A group of center-right lawmakers in the French parliament wrote a letter to Macron in August urging him to reconsider France’s role in Africa. “Today, the Françafrique of yesterday is replaced by the military Russafrique, by the economic Chinafrique or by the diplomatic Americafrique”, they said, lamenting how “Africa, a friendly continent, no longer seems to understand France, and increasingly contests its role and his presence.”
Perhaps the African military is inadvertently doing a job for its former colonial masters. And the coups d’état shielded by anti-French sentiment end up agreeing to the current interests of the European power even if it now shows a weakened Macron.
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