2023-08-03 18:26:46
Supporters wave Niger flags during a rally in support of the Niger junta, in front of the National Assembly, in Niamey, July 30, 2023. – / AFP
It has already been nine days since Mohamed Bazoum’s life shrunk to the walls of the Nigerian presidential residence. In this one-story white villa, a pretty but modest house for an official building, the living conditions of the president who has been sequestered since Wednesday July 26, with his wife and their 22-year-old son, by the men of the presidential guard become every day more difficult days.
While Nigeria began to apply the economic and financial sanctions decided on Sunday by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), cutting off its electricity supply, which represents 70% of what Niger consumes, the putschists “unplugged” the line supplying the presidential residence, according to an adviser to Mohamed Bazoum. No more food is being delivered to the president, and “chains were placed on the doors of the residence”.
This great animal lover – he is the sponsor of the Noé association, fighting to save endangered species and owns many species himself – can no longer take to the air in the garden to take care of his gazelles and the famous tortoise. It is said that she has lived in the residence for sixty years: the specimen had already experienced four coups d’etat.
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Arrests of executives of the Bazoum regime
In this residence located on the banks of the Niger River, in the heart of Niamey, Mohamed Bazoum can almost hear the slogans incensing the putschists of General Abdourahamane Tiani, self-proclaimed head of the junta, and Russia, chanted by the demonstrators on Thursday August 3. Only five minutes by car from there, several thousand people gathered once again on Thursday at Place de la Concertation to support the junta and shout down the old regime and its main ally in the fight against terrorism, France. Unlike Sunday, when the enclosure of the French Embassy had been damaged by protesters, arousing the anger of Paris – from which more than 650 nationals have just been evacuated – the demonstration took place in calm. The surroundings of the diplomatic representations were secured by Nigerien police officers, the only sign of appeasement in recent days.
In an attempt to consolidate its power, the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Fatherland (CNSP) has multiplied the signs of firmness. Thursday, he cut the signals of the French public media, RFI and France 24, and multiplied the arrests of executives of the Mohamed Bazoum regime. As of Monday July 31, Foumakoye Gado, the president of the Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism (PNDS), the president’s party and senior adviser to the latter, was arrested, like the ministers of mines, Ousseini Hadizatou Yacouba, and of oil and energy, Mahamane Sani Mahamadou, who is also the son of former president Mahamadou Issoufou. This last “is in fact under house arrest”, reports one of his relatives. An important security device was deployed around his house, located near the presidency, where the ministers arrested by the junta were transferred.
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