Watching the coup politics of the Sahel, the broad band of territory that runs east to west beneath Africa’s Sahara Desert, it sometimes feels as if the region’s military-led governments have exhausted their imaginations with their acronyms and other naming conventions. In recent years, as civilian leaders have fallen to men in uniform in one state after another, national councils and national committees for the salvation or safeguarding of their countries have become the norm from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The latest, of course, is the newly minted military regime in Niger, which has dubbed itself the “National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland.”
For a number of reasons, as with events in Niger last week, Western governments have watched this trend with alarm. For France, the replacement of friendly democratic governments has demonstrated the futility of seven decades of post-independence strategy on the continent like nothing else has. Since the era of Charles de Gaulle, French governments of every persuasion have hoped that by maintaining a passel of onetime African colonies tightly within the fold as its economic and diplomatic clients, Paris would reap the dividends of aggrandizement on the world stage along with preferential trade.
For the United States, always more traditionally a standoff power in the region, the vast Sahel in recent years has been seen as a convenient, and maybe even irreplaceable, base for the conduct of its global war against Islamic extremism. This has been conducted out of public view, through covert means as well as the use of drone warfare and sophisticated surveillance.
For the European Union, meanwhile, the Sahel has become regarded as one of the final ramparts for holding back high-volume migration from sub-Saharan Africa into the rich continent to the north. Toward that end, the EU has spent increasingly large amounts of money to get Sahel governments to intercept and turn back desperate migrants from West Africa and even further afield on the continent before they can reach Europe’s gates.
Now, the almost domino-like fall of the Sahel’s governments has imperiled all of this. But what if we learned that the West’s way of looking at this part of Africa—and, to one extent or another, the continent as a whole—was actually a fundamental and even exacerbating part of the problem?
For many years now, Western policies have only paid lip service to seeing the Sahel in terms of its own immense problems instead of as a place to focus on the needs and priorities of the West itself. I first came to explore this part of the world and get to know it well at the outset of my career as a journalist in the 1980s. In 1996, hearing news of a coup, I raced overland and all night from eastern Burkina Faso to Niger to cover the event.
And as I look back, what is most remarkable are the continuities between then and now. There are few comparably sized parts of the world where the economic development challenges are so stark, and this has made political leadership unusually difficult. By almost every criterion, this is an unremittingly tough neighborhood to simply get by in, and I find it no accident that military rule, which has roots that stretch back decades there, has been so persistently recurrent.
Let us count the ways that the Sahel renders life tough on states. Starting with some vastly belated self-accountability would be helpful. For centuries, Europe helped drain this region of its people by fueling conflict to drum up volume in the slave trade, and the tendrils of unrest extended far beyond the continent’s coastal areas. In the late 19th century, Europe finally shifted its project in Africa from the trade in human beings to power plantation agriculture in the Americas to a focus on territorial control and colonization in Africa.
As it did so, it deliberately set about destroying the region’s own indigenous states and institutions, along with their traditions of self-governance and rule. Before colonization, the Sahel was peppered with states, including some with extraordinary historical pedigrees. Some people may feel inclined to regard this as ancient history, but they are wrong.
The best way to think about why this matters is to invoke the pithy remark of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. He spoke of what he called the Pottery Barn rule—that if an outsider comes into a shop and breaks its delicate goods while fiddling around, they will somehow be billed for it. The West is still being billed, in effect, for its disastrous legacies in Africa.
Let us come closer to the present, though. Having decided it wanted to dominate Africa via colonial rule, the West worked hard to superimpose its political institutions on the new territories that fell under its control. I am inevitably compressing many details here, but by the time the independence era loomed, in the late 1950s and 1960s, Europe hoped to see Western-style presidents, prime ministers, legislatures, and courts on the continent, all functioning according to Western-style constitutions.
What they had neglected to invest in was Western-style education, or indeed education at all. As I wrote in my last column, by the time many African states were joining the United Nations, sub-Saharan Africa only had roughly 8,000 high school graduates. Most colonies had nothing resembling a college-educated elite. And, most pertinent to the present dramas of the Sahel, such paltry education as had been provided under European tutelage was almost entirely concentrated in coastal colonies such as Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Benin.
The Sahel was saddled in yet more terrible and lastingly exorbitant ways that few people understand or account for. As a result of the whims of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which apportioned nearly all of Africa’s territory to a variety of European colonists, most of the Sahel’s countries are landlocked and started out their national lives as sparsely inhabited lands with fragile and parched ecosystems.
For a nation, one can think of being landlocked as facing a permanent yet invisible tax on economic activity. Being parched means having a very limited upside in terms of agriculture, and agriculture is the most typical means that poor countries resort to in order to provide income for people and for national development.
On top of these harsh starting fundamentals, this region now faces twin perils that have only gradually wheeled into view—both existential. First, countries such as Niger, where the latest coup occurred, and Mali next door have some of the highest fertility rates in the world, meaning that their populations will balloon in the coming decades. Second, the entire Sahel region also faces an unusually high threat from climate change and global warming.
This should bring us back to the topic of Europe and the West’s engagement with this part of Africa. Is the biggest threat the Sahel faces really Islamic extremism? Can Europe realistically pretend to hold back the tides of people from this part of the world if they have no form of sustenance or economic advancement? To pretend that either thing is true strikes me as not only impractical but immoral.
The Sahel’s crises are tightly intertwined, and they run far deeper than the issues that preoccupy the West. There are no obvious solutions sitting ready on the shelf for dispensing, but starting out with the right diagnosis is an essential first step.
First of all, Western pressure that co-opts African governments to service the needs of Europe and the United States is a grave mistake. African populations have long put up with the overthrow of civilian governments—and often enough even applauded such actions—because they saw their elected leaders as essentially obsessed with currying favor with the West in exchange for aid or protection instead of focusing first on their countries’ own grave and nearly intractable problems.
If the West wishes to avoid the worst consequences of the threats it has prioritized in Africa— Islamic radicalism and migration—it will have to find much more effective ways of promoting African economic growth and development than it ever has before. And in doing so, it must avoid its reflexive tendency to think that it always knows best and then impose its political pressures and cultural dogmas on African states. As essential as it is, this kind of humility will not come easily to Washington, Paris, or Brussels. But now is the time.
Western leaders must learn to have real and extended conversations with African states on a broad range of issues about how to enhance the prospects of the Sahel’s weak and imperiled countries. It is only through this kind of engagement that African priorities can be placed at the top of the agenda, that trust and goodwill can be established, and that fundamental and lasting positive changes in the lives of the citizens of these fragile states can be achieved.
It is far from me to predetermine the details, but some things do seem obvious. Education in this region requires a huge boost, especially for girls. Africans need to be in charge of the details, but the West has a historic duty to help make this happen that it has shirked so far. Done right, education can foster more industry and services, dramatically lifting the region’s economic prospects.
One way or another, urbanization will continue to accelerate in this region as populations grow and life in the countryside becomes harsher. Niger’s capital, Niamey, is on track to be one of the world’s 20 most populous cities in this century, and Africa overall will account for 13 of the world’s 20 largest cities and 38 of the largest 100. Helping make cities livable and conducive to economic growth will be essential to making emigration less of a first option for many people. Figuring out how to supply affordable and reliable electricity will be key here, but all of these states have intense sunshine, opening the way for perhaps the greatest renewable energy resource of all.
Much more regional integration seems like the best tool to help overcome the penalty of being landlocked. This will require much better infrastructure, which the West has played little role in recently, mostly ceding that sector to China. There is plenty of room for both. This is not all about hard structures, though. Reinvigorating regional institutions and agreements is needed to get the most out of new roads, rails, ports, and cables. Here again, Africans must take the lead.
In terms of the West’s history with Africa, almost none of these things have precedents. Many of the Sahel’s problems don’t, either. They are new in scope and intensity. Therefore, it is time for the old playbooks to be thrown out and for much more imagination and, yes, resources. For both Africa and for the West, failing this will mean simply failing.
