Niger is in a tough neighborhood.
To the west, Mali and Burkina Faso each experienced two coups in nine months. Chad, to the east, saw its most recent past president die in battle, only to be replaced by his son. And to Niger’s south is the very region of Nigeria where the government is fighting a long running counter-insurgency against Boko Haram.
Niger is also landlocked and one of the most climate-change vulnerable countries on the planet. On top of it all, a witches-brew of Islamist insurgencies, including Boko Haram and Islamic State splinter groups, are raging on the country’s peripheries and routinely target state security forces and civilians alike. For all these reasons and more, Niger ranks third-to-last on the UN’s Human Development Index — ahead of only Chad and South Sudan.
But against these odds, Niger was on a turnaround. It had achieved a degree of political stability in recent years. For the first time since 1960 one democratically elected president was replaced by a second democratically elected president when Mohamed Bazoum took office in 2021.
Alas, on Wednesday, that streak ended.
The elite Presidential Guard detained Bazoum in house arrest. By July 28, the head of that unit, Abdourahmane Tchiani, did the clichéd seize-state-television-in-military-fatigues to announce himself the head of a “transitional government.”
This is not good.
First and foremost, it interrupts Niger’s democratic consolidation. This is bad for both democratic ideals and Niger’s bottom line. Academic research routinely shows that when a military coup topples a government, the country suffers economically. A country’s GDP tends to sink in the years following a military coup — especially if that coup topples a democratically elected government, as was the case in Niger. Accordingly, we can probably expect Niger to fall further down in Human Development indices. Niger may be be rich in Uranium, but the prospect of that mineral wealth reaching the people is as remote as ever.
The coup in Niger also puts key western governments in a tough spot.
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