Two emails back to back in my inbox, received within two hours of each other a few days ago. The first, a press release from the Niger civil society organisation Alternative Espaces Citoyens, announced that its secretary general, Moussa Tchangari, had been abducted the day before from his home in Niamey by armed men in civilian clothes, and was being held in police custody for ‘apology for terrorism’. The second, the newsletter of a progressive think tank – the Tricontinental Institute – reports enthusiastically on the ‘Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel’ held in the same city of Niamey two weeks earlier, which aimed to show ‘pan-African’ support for the military powers of the Alliance of Sahel States (Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali). So, on the one hand, a junta arrests a historic progressive activist; on the other, progressive activists offer a platform to the same junta.
For Moussa Tchangari is not just anyone in Niger. A central figure in the major mobilisations that have punctuated the country’s political history over the past thirty years, he led student demonstrations for democratisation in the 1990s, mass mobilisations against the high cost of living in the following decade, and popular protests against the Issoufou government’s anti-democratic and anti-social tendencies in 2010. This commitment has led to several stints in prison, including four months in 2018. The radical nature of his stance against a government supported by Western countries made him unpalatable to European diplomats. All the more so as the issue of Niger’s sovereignty, particularly over its mining resources, was a major focus of his battles, many years before the inflammation of ‘anti-French sentiment’ in the region. Finally, Moussa Tchangari was one of the last critical voices left in the country after the coup d’état of 26 July 2023 and the installation of the ‘sovereignist’ regime of the Conseil national pour la sauvegarde de la patrie (CNSP, “National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland”).
The rarity of a voice like Tchangari’s can of course be explained by the fear that has gripped Niger’s civil society following the series of arrests of journalists who dared to deviate from official discourse, particularly on the reality of the successes in the fight against jihadist terrorists, the basis of the putschists’ legitimising discourse [1]. But this moderation can also be explained by the complacency of many of the leaders of Niger’s civil society towards the military government. As Azizou Abdoul Garba explained a few months ago, Niger offers the astonishing spectacle of ‘a civil society that unconditionally supports the military junta. Some of its actors, known for their commitment to democracy, have paradoxically decided to support it despite the dismantling of its institutions’ [2].
In August 2022, the most motivated of these formed the ‘M62’ movement, a group of around fifteen civil society organisations that organised demonstrations in the centre of Niamey to demand the withdrawal of the French military operation (Barkhane) against jihadists in the Sahel. The main leaders of M62 subsequently used their mobilising power to support the putschists in the context of the balance of power that had developed between the latter on the one hand and France and ECOWAS on the other, succeeding in bringing together thousands of Nigeriens in demonstrations of popular support for the new authorities’ decision to expel the French soldiers. The contribution of civil society leaders to the legitimisation of the new regime has not only taken such direct and explicit forms. It also happened in more subtle ways, through adoption of the language of the ongoing ‘rebuilding’ of Niger.
This more or less open assent to the new authoritarian course of events by ‘partners’ funded for years, if not decades, to promote democracy, good governance and human rights has baffled many European NGOs. The height of incomprehension was undoubtedly reached when faced with the attitude of the Niger representative of the international coalition ‘Turning the Page’, a network of African and European NGOs conducting actions and campaigns against African presidents’ attempts to stay in power by manipulating institutions. The same activist who in June 2022 coordinated a report on the ‘extinction of civic space’ in Niger during the Issoufou years (2011-2021), during which respect for public freedoms had indeed seriously regressed, is now one of the loudest eulogists of a regime in which ‘human rights are in free fall’ [3].
While the positioning of civil society in Niger stems from its specific characteristics – its ‘structural weakness’, to paraphrase Abdoul Garba – it is part of a regional ideological context in which the democratic model of governing society is being devalued. The survey conducted by Tournons la page and Science Po-CERI of around 500 association and trade union activists in six French-speaking African countries reveals that less than half of activists believe that democracy is preferable to any other form of government, while 61% consider that effective government is preferable to democratic government. This ‘democracy fatigue’ is also reflected, albeit to a lesser extent, in the major surveys covering the English-speaking countries of the continent. The reasons for this disenchantment are manifold and vary from country to country, but are largely based on the concrete experience of a ‘democracy’ systematically misused by a corrupt political oligarchy, to the detriment of national sovereignty, development and security. [4]
France and Western countries in general appear as compromised in these democratic failures. On the one hand, because the institutional models implanted on the continent since the 1990s are increasingly seen as products imported from the West, often through conditionalities, which malfunction because they are exogenous and incompatible with local socio-political realities. On the other hand, Western governments have too often validated facade democracies, as long as these favoured their access to natural resources, public contracts or military bases, giving the impression of a continuation of the colonial presence by other means, particularly in the former French colonies. In both these respects, Vladimir Putin appears as an alternative, a counterpoint devoid of neo-colonial compromise, in resistance to Western hegemony, more reliable in terms of security and respectful of African sovereignty, projecting the image of a ‘muscular conception of power and political virility’ in vogue among large sections of African youth. [5]
There is therefore a trend towards the geopoliticisation of African civil society, based on this interweaving of unresolved (neo)colonial liabilities, feelings of political alienation and elective affinities with alternative powers. At the same time, it is fuelled by a process of framing (i.e. constructing and disseminating narratives) that demonises the role of the West in Africa, by local or external contractors of influence in the service of the foreign policies of Russia and China. Not that the existence of neo-colonial mechanisms is an illusion, of course [6], but these agents of influence are at pains to caricature or even invent them, often with the help of conspiracy theories [7], while soft-pedalling the internal political factors of dependence and idealising competing imperialisms.
The Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel mentioned at the beginning of this article is just one example of this propaganda. The fact that the ‘International Peoples’ Assembly’ is one of the promoters of the event also makes it part of a much wider process of geopoliticising civil societies. This organisation is effectively a branch of an international enterprise to mobilise popular organisations in the global South in favour of the interests and vision of Chinese foreign policy. [8] Contrary to what the title of this conference suggests, and following the example of other ‘campist’ anti-imperialist initiatives [9], it is precisely not the ‘peoples’ who are important to the organisers of the event – in this case the reduction of jihadist insecurity and poverty in the Sahel or the promotion of social and political rights – but the survival of the regimes that have joined the camp of the anti-Western empires.
Notes
[1] Amnesty International, « Niger : La liberté de la presse en péril avec l’intimidation et l’arrestation de journalistes travaillant sur le conflit », 3 mai 2024.
[2] Azizou Garba, « Niger : la société civile contre la démocratie ? ».
[3] Human Rights Watch, « Niger : Les droits humains en chute libre un an après le coup d’État », communiqué de presse, 25 juillet 2024.
[4] Afrobarometer, Aperçus africains 2024. La démocratie en danger – le point de vue du peuple, 2024 ; Ichamily Foundation, African Youth Survey, 2024.
[5] Jean-François Bayart, L’Afrique au diapason de Vladimir Poutine ?, 21 septembre 2022, https://aoc.media/analyse/2022/09/20/lafrique-au-diapason-de-vladimir-poutine/.
[6] CETRI, Anticolonialismes, Paris, Syllepse, Collection « Alternatives Sud ».
[7] Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, « Le rejet de la France au Sahel : mille et une raisons ? », L’enchevêtrement des crises au Sahel, Paris, Kartala, 2021.
[8] See the well-documented article by Alexander Reid Ross and Courtney Dobson in New Lines magazine (18 January 2022) on the nebula of organisations funded by a pro-Chinese US billionaire to (among other things) disseminate a narrative casting doubt on the reality of the persecution suffered by the Uyghurs. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-big-business-of-uyghur-genocide-denial/.
[9] Campism, the most blatant manifestation of which is the benevolence shown towards the ‘Arab Pinochets’, such as the former Bashar al-Assad, whenever they use anti-Western rhetoric.
François Polet is a sociologist, a research fellow at the Centre tricontinental – Cetri and the author or coordinator of several studies and publications on sub-Saharan Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This article was first published on the Cetri website. It was translated from the French by Daniel Mang.