Niger’s Coup Is West Africa’s Biggest Challenge Yet

Like every fraught relationship, Niger’s crumbling commitment to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is ending with an ultimatum: Either reinstate democratically elected Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum or face military intervention. Unsurprisingly, neither side is ready to concede power in this breakup.

Red flags broke out on July 26, when Gen. Abdourahamane “Omar” Tchiani and his junta-led forces ousted Bazoum and took control of the presidential palace. Less than 24 hours later, ECOWAS, a grouping of West African states, condemned the coup. The bloc imposed a strict economic sanctions campaign against Niger, suspending its transactions with neighboring countries and freezing Niger’s regional central bank assets. It also issued travel sanctions on Niger—an especially detrimental move given it could hinder the delivery of foreign aid, which makes up 40 percent of Niger’s national budget.

Most significantly, ECOWAS vowed to take “all measures necessary to restore constitutional order” in Niger, including the use of force. The deadline is Sunday. It’s a major step for the region, one that both embraces precedent while also defying expectations. And it could be the last hope (or straw) before cross-border conflict breaks out across West Africa.

Back up a minute. What even is ECOWAS?

Created in 1975, the 15-nation bloc was designed to “promote economic integration across the region.” Its principles center around establishing a single trading unit, similar to policies under the European Union, that promotes democratic governance and subregional cooperation. In this way, it is first and foremost an economic entity, not a military or political one.

But ECOWAS has fangs. It has two defense protocols that say any threat against a member state is deemed a threat against the greater community. And it has mustered troops to intervene in the past. So when instability rocked Niger, the seventh country in West and Central Africa to suffer a coup in recent years, ECOWAS saw intervention as part of its broader mission to support and protect West Africa, explained Cameron Hudson, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“There is a shared sentiment among a handful, not all, but certainly a number of countries that are fearful of a contagion effect of coups in the region,” Hudson said. For them, anxiety centers on “the secondary and tertiary effects of allowing a string of coups to go unchecked, and to see jihadist groups spread the threat of Russian intervention.”

But what can ECOWAS actually do?

Nowhere in ECOWAS’s mission does it say the bloc has the power to deploy troops or intervene in another country’s political processes. And for the first 15 years of its existence, it didn’t. But then Liberia happened. In 1990, civil war plagued the coastal nation after the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, led by Charles Taylor, ousted then-President Samuel Doe in a conflict that started in December 1989. Fearing heightened refugee flows and the loss of foreign investment in Africa, ECOWAS took the unprecedented step of sending peacekeeping forces into Liberia. Those troops helped establish an interim government, create conditions for new elections, free political prisoners, and push for a cease-fire. By doing so, it formed an ad hoc body that could deploy troops into another country’s territory, thereby redefining the African Union’s traditional definition of sovereignty.

Since then, ECOWAS has deployed peacekeeping troops in Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia (yes, a second time), Mali, and Gambia. Some of those missions established peace agreements; others failed to maintain lasting cease-fires, said Rama Yade, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “They have a long history of interventions, not always military. And they are backed by a very strong legal framework that forces the members to do something when their core principles are hit by undemocratic transitions or coups d’état.”

Nigeria and Senegal, at least, have already said they’d contribute troops to any intervention in Niger. But none of ECOWAS’s past intervention missions have faced a crisis as threatening to regional stability as the one in Niger. And that is because of Mali and Burkina Faso.

So not everyone is happy with ECOWAS’s actions?

Nope. Both Mali and Burkina Faso are members of ECOWAS. They are also recent winners of their own coup lotteries. They jointly announced on July 31 that any foreign intervention in Niger to depose Tchiani would be deemed a “declaration of war” against their own countries. That means if ECOWAS were to deploy troops, it might have to fight not just Nigerien junta rebels but also battle-hardened Malian and Burkinabe forces.

The three nations have a lot in common: They all harbor festering anti-French sentiment over their shared colonial past. All being in the Sahel, they face similar environmental and security risks, including from terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Boko Haram. And, most notably, they are all run by junta-led governments that came to power during coups in the last two years. And then there are the Russians.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, blamed the Kremlin for instigating Niger’s coup—specifically pointing fingers at Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group after one Nigerien junta general visited Wagner-allied Mali on Wednesday. Burkina Faso also hosts Wagner forces, and Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin celebrated the coup last week, saying his troops could assist in situations like the one unfolding in West Africa. But a senior U.S. intelligence official said there was no evidence of external interference in the coup.

Niger was one of the last states in the region that was seriously cooperating with the United States and other Western countries on counterterrorism operations. If Niger goes the same way as Russia-leaning governments in the Sahel, that would be bad news for Washington, Paris, and Brussels—not to mention the local residents who will have traded a tenuous democracy for a tremulous military dictatorship.

This is the first time ECOWAS has faced a division of this sort among its member states, and it poses a severe challenge to its regional authority. ECOWAS members are “really in over their head,” Hudson said. “The last time this threat was made was in 2017 in the Gambia, and that was a credible threat because the Gambia was the smallest country in West Africa with the smallest military in West Africa.”

But Niger is big and has a big army. “I have to believe this is a bluff,” Hudson continued, “because if it’s not a bluff and they were to attempt to go through with this [intervention], there is no clean way that this happens without massive civilian casualties and without the fear of a spreading regional conflict.”

Is anyone supporting ECOWAS’s threat of intervention?

Bazoum is (unsurprisingly) ECOWAS’s strongest advocate. The ousted president commended the bloc’s actions in a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, writing that “In Africa’s troubled Sahel region, Niger stands as the last bastion of respect for human rights amid the authoritarian movements that have overtaken some of our neighbors.”

But Bazoum isn’t alone in applauding ECOWAS’s harsh stance. The international community has overwhelmingly supported ousting Niger’s rebels. The United States, France, and other Western nations have all backed the subregional body’s decision and urged junta leaders to reinstate Bazoum. British Foreign Minister James Cleverly said on Wednesday that he’s spoken with the presidents of Ghana and Nigeria to demonstrate the United Kingdom’s support for ECOWAS. And even Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called the coup an “anti-constitutional act.”

Neither side appears willing to step down. So what might we see when the Sunday deadline expires?

All eyes turn to Nigeria to see if ECOWAS goes through with its threat. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu currently serves as the ECOWAS chair and appears enthusiastic to use military intervention to showcase his strength. Already, reports indicate that Nigerian troops under ECOWAS’s mandate are stationed near Niger’s borders. Senegal has also promised to supply soldiers if ECOWAS moves into Niger, acknowledging that “coups d’état must be stopped” even as the bloc maintains that military intervention is a last resort.

But the road to victory is tough—literally. Niger’s infrastructure is fraught with poorly constructed roadways. Add the possibility of military combat with Nigerien (and potentially Malian and Burkinabe) forces, and ECOWAS will have kick-started an interstate war. (There are also lots of jihadis, and perhaps a sprinkling of Russian mercenaries, to deal with.) And that’s all before ECOWAS troops make it to the capital, where they must retake the presidential palace without hurting the rebels’ No. 1 hostage inside: Bazoum.

ECOWAS and Nigeria are “going to lose a lot of credibility” if they don’t go through with their threat, something the bloc did not have a lot of to begin with, said Nathaniel Kinsey Powell, a West Africa analyst at Oxford Analytica.

“Even in ECOWAS’s best-case scenario, assuming they intervene, assuming they enter the country, they’re going to be faced with a political problem that’s almost irresolvable, that they’re propping up a president who will have no domestic legitimacy and will be forced to purge his own security forces.”