As France pulls out of Africa, will Russia step in?

For the politics of the Sahel, the semi-arid region crossing Africa from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east, it has been a tense and nail-biting year. At the end of July, the president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, was seized by members of his presidential guard. General Abdourahamane Tchiani, head of the guard since 2011, declared himself president of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland two days later. It was Niger’s fifth coup d’état since becoming independent from France in 1960.

There have been 220 coups in Africa since 1950, of which almost exactly half, 109, have been successful. But a pattern is starting to emerge that should tug at our sleeve: the governments of Guinea, Mali and Sudan were toppled in 2021, and last year there was a coup in Burkina Faso in January, only for the interim president himself to be deposed in September. When President Ali Bongo was ousted in Gabon in August, the Financial Times began a headline “Déjà coup.”

These coups have swept through Françafrique, France’s sphere of influence among its former colonies in central and west Africa. To a much greater extent than other departing European powers, France has maintained political, economic and military ties with its former colonial possessions, not least in presenting itself as a guarantor of stability. From 1960 to the mid-1990s, France intervened militarily in its client community on average once a year.

Cold budgetary winds have caused the French armed forces to pull in their horns. In 2012, the tragicomic President François Hollande told an audience in Dakar that “the time of Françafrique is over,” a disengagement that mirrored domestic public opinion. The recent rash of coups may well accelerate this; President Emmanuel Macron has announced that he is withdrawing France’s ambassador from Niger, while 1,500 French military personnel will leave by the end of the year. Macron pulled 5,000 troops out of Mali last summer and 400 special forces from Burkina Faso this February, where the French defense attaché was recently asked to leave.

Just an overdue dose of post-colonial reality, then — France finally realizing that former colonial possessions are equal members of the global community? Not quite. France has not sent its men and women to the Sahel just to live out empty imperial glories. From 2012 to 2014, 4,000 French soldiers undertook Operation Serval to drive Islamic militants out of northern Mali. Operation Barkhane, its successor, involved 3,000 troops based in Chad (with small contingents from Estonia and Sweden and logistical support from the UK) taking on Islamists across the Sahel to establish stability and destroy extremist forces.

The 2021 coup in Mali initially prompted Macron to relocate French forces to Niger, claiming he was simply refocusing, but last November he announced the conclusion of Operation Barkhane, in line with the changing priorities of his National Strategic Review, published at the same time.

But this is not just an issue for the French armed forces.

United States Africa Command, headquartered in Stuttgart but with a supporting hub at Camp Lemonnier near Djibouti, is responsible for all of Africa, save Egypt. Its commander, Gen. Michael Langley, presented some facts of life to the Senate Armed Services Committee in his annual Posture Statement in March.

Africa, Langley explained, “set the stage for violent extremist organizations to grow, and for America’s strategic competitors to bid for international allies.” He continued: “Africa is now the epicenter of international terrorism. Russia is expanding its African operations, including via the Kremlin-supported private military company Wagner; destabilization, democratic backsliding, and human rights abuses follow in their wake.”

French disengagement would leave a significant strategic gap. Increasing attention on the threat from Russia does not mean that the U.S. can simply ignore Islamic terrorism: violence continues to rise, and we have seen again and again the way in which “ungoverned spaces” give space for militants to grow, improve and develop.

The situation is worse than that. Since 2017, the Wagner Group, the private military contractor founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, has deployed around 5,000 troops in Africa. This motley group of Russian ex-soldiers, convicts and foreign nationals, funded directly by Russia since Prigozhin’s death this summer, has been active in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan, providing security and paramilitary assistance and disinformation services; interestingly, they have often been rewarded with resource concessions.

Connecting the dots isn’t hard. If France steps back from the Sahel, the United States does not currently have the boots on the ground to step into the void. Countries like Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger will inevitably look for new allies to keep jihadi forces at bay for the sake of their own internal stability and order, and if that is the Wagner Group — flexible, devoid of ethics, ruthless, a deniable proxy for Putin — it will expand Russian global reach and empower an irregular force that is unpredictable and unscrupulous.

When President Bush created AFRICOM in 2007, one observer dubbed it a “combatant command plus” — that is, serving the same function as the other unified combatant commands, but with an additional implied task of diplomacy and projection of soft power.

In fact it is almost “minus”: those additional tasks are the core of Gen. Langley’s work. It has a small direct footprint of 2,000, mostly in Stuttgart, but huge potential for training, development and assistance. Its components are widely scalable: its U.S. Army component (Southern European Task Force, Africa) can operate at the scale of a platoon up to a two-star joint task force headquarters.

U.S. policymakers and legislators know the Sahel is important for the security of Africa and beyond. But the pace of events is accelerating, and we are now in a position where failing to make a decision is by default a choice, as the geopolitical situation will not wait.

The White House needs to determine what the principles are of its policy towards Françafrique. Is it prepared to see Russian influence expand considerably? If not, then what is it willing to do to obstruct that outcome? By the New Year, I suspect that the price for staying in the game will have risen — so are you in or are you out?

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs. He was senior official in the UK House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.