Niger is the graveyard of French policy in the Sahel

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As people streamed on to the streets of Niamey to show their support for the coup that ousted Niger’s civilian government last month, one sign, scrawled in pen on a scrappy piece of cardboard, stood out: “La France doit partir.” France must leave.

Unlike other colonial powers such as Britain, which abandoned its former dominions in Africa with almost unseemly haste, France stuck around. Either out of what you might call the “you broke it, you pay for it” school of postcolonialism, or an enduring ambition to control and profit from its previous possessions, France has hovered like a ghost.

For more than 60 years, Paris has meddled in politics and business on the continent in a cosy system that came to be known as “Françafrique”. French officials had hotlines to favoured presidents. French businesses gathered lucrative contracts.

Fourteen countries in west and central Africa, including Niger, spent a currency, the CFA franc, underwritten by Paris. That bestowed an exchange rate stability that former British colonies envied. But it also suited French investors repatriating profits and African elites with a taste for French luxuries purchased in hard currency.

France was ever-ready to intervene militarily. It dispatched soldiers to Ivory Coast when civil war erupted in 2002 and intervened again in 2011 when Laurent Gbagbo refused to cede power. It has sent troops to the Central African Republic seven times since independence. And in 2013, the French air force helped drive out Islamist militants in northern Mali who were threatening to march on Bamako.

Whatever France’s motives for this smothering presence — exploitation or prestige — it is not working. Across most of its 20 former African colonies, intellectuals and street protesters alike share a hatred of France, an easy scapegoat for all their problems. Senegalese activists burnt the CFA franc and attacked French-owned petrol stations and supermarkets. In Mali, people celebrated last year when its freshly minted military regime expelled French troops.

Nor have the efforts of French president Emmanuel Macron to reframe the relationship made a difference. Macron has opened up French history archives, returned looted art and hotfooted it around the continent. He has made important, if symbolic, changes to the CFA franc regime.

Anti-French sentiment has, if anything, escalated. Macron has been lambasted for paternalism (he brought up the delicate matter of birth rates) and for hypocrisy (he preached democracy but attended the funeral of France’s favourite soldier-president, Chad’s Idriss Déby.)

France’s loss has been Russia’s gain. When French soldiers failed to put down a simmering rebellion in CAR, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, the president, turned to Wagner mercenaries. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men in balaclavas now run everything from gold mines to Touadéra’s schedule. The generals in Mali also sought help from Wagner after expelling what its prime minister called the “French junta”.

If France’s slow-boil humiliation is good for Russia, groups linked with Isis and al-Qaeda may also be rubbing their hands (assuming they have not banned hand-rubbing along with music).

France has had limited success in fighting terrorist groups. Islamist ideology has traction in desperately poor countries with ethnic grievances, lousy governments and no tax revenue. But military regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, with or without Wagner’s help, have fared no better. As they lose control of swaths of territory, an Islamist caliphate in the Sahel draws closer.

With the fall of Niger’s civilian government, its “ally of last resort”, France’s rout in the Sahel is almost complete. The days of its base in Niamey — and 1,500 soldiers, drones and fighter jets — look numbered. Military governments, some with Russian leanings and all with an insurgency problem, now stretch 3,500 miles across the Sahel in a bayonet-straight line from coast to coast.

The end of French rule in 1960 left Niger in a terrible state. Once part of the mighty Songhai empire centred on Gao in the 15th and 16th centuries, at independence France’s cartographic creation was barely viable. Landlocked and surrounded by seven countries, 80 per cent of its vast territory sits in the encroaching Sahara.

Today, less than a fifth of its people live in cities. The rest scratch out a living — the average annual income is $533 — as best they can. Hardly surprising that Mohamed Bazoum, the mild-mannered civilian president with pro-French tendencies, struggled to bring a sense of progress. He is gone. And so soon may be France.

david.pilling@ft.com