The French Cordon Sanitaire has failed
North Africa believes it can rely on the Wagner Group and Russia, but Moscow has other plans for the region
The following is an update on many of the topics addressed in "The Pendulum Swings in Africa", dated 12 September 2021. The title of this deep dive into the world of western africa is a reference to a previous short analysis about the reply Paris gave initally to the destabilization of the Sahel region.
Before going any further, two sets of considerations must be made.
The first is that the following in-depth study has been written for illustrative purposes and does not aim to exhaustively describe the enormous complexity of life in the Sahel and West African regions.
To comprehensively analyse the reality of these places would probably require a book, knowledge of local languages and on-the-spot contacts.
Beyond historical observations and those concerning geo-economic balances, much of what is analysed could be subject to serious criticism. A very complicated and constantly changing aspect is the religious dimension of North Africa as a whole, with minorities and majorities of believers clashing with each other, undergoing forced migration or being culturally nomadic for historical reasons.
Many NON LOCAL information sources tend to make mistakes by taking the stability of a territory for granted when in fact an entire village/small town may have changed residence. Adding to this, the increasingly extreme atomisation has made the overall picture both political and religious confused with the exception of a few urban realities.
Hence, the in-depth study seeks to focus on the fixed points of the geo-economic reality of West Africa at the expense of a more serious description of the tensions between the various legal-religious adherences.
The second set of considerations summarises and outlines the correct and wrong predictions from the previous text.
The African targets of the soft power (and hard power) clash between the Western powers and the Russia-China duo have continued to be countries in the Gulf of Guinea/West Africa, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. The rapid destabilisation accompanied by a change of sides of countries such as Niger and the collapse into civil war as in the case of Sudan, however, took us strongly by surprise.We were equally taken aback by the speed with which many areas of Africa are devolving into general instability, making the establishment of a trade bridge between North Africa, West Africa and Europe increasingly complicated by forcibly introducing the need for ever greater use of force even if only to ensure the most basic security of sensitive infrastructure.
Human and drug trafficking, piracy, smuggling, clashes between multinationals in line with the foreign policy of different foreign powers and the manipulation of internecine wars even between the same Islamist organisations/insurgencies are gradually becoming the norm.All this makes life easier for mercenary organisations such as the Wagner Group, whose objectives are often achievable by even crude means and methods. However, the convergence of the interests of the countries entrusted to the Russian mercenary company with the true aims of the organisation run by Yevgeny Prigozhin is by no means a foregone conclusion.
Regardless, the nations in the centre of the Sahel and Western Sahara believe first and foremost in the Wagner Group's ability to solve the unresolved problem of local insurgencies and Jihad carried out by various groups.
As a whole, the idea of cooperation between European and African nations to boost trade between both has not failed, but any vague favour of a multilateral approach as opposed to a militarised bilateral one is becoming untenable.
The last truly sustainable example of such an approach is ECOWAS itself. It could therefore be argued that the 'Pendulum' in Africa has swung much more sporadically than we believed in favour of European nations, but much more commonly towards general chaos.
However, this is not a victory for anyone.
As we have already mentioned in various in-depth reports and through other media, the increase in terrorist attacks and lynch mobs against Chinese activities is indicative of how relations between the Dragon and many countries on the African continent are souring rather than mellowing. But this is not the result of sophisticated Western destabilisation operations.
Rather, it is caused by a disenchantment on the part of the young populations in the Horn of Africa.
Having said that, let us look at the events of recent months.
The following text focuses mainly on the situation in North and West Africa, without addressing the situation in the rest of the continent except through occasional references.
The supposed death of the Russian mercenary leader and oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and the weakening and gradual absorption of the PMC Wagner Group by the Russian state are not discussed in this in-depth study.
The kind of influence the Wagner Group could have had in a clash between ECOWAS and Niger would certainly have been important, but given the balance of forces on the field, it would not have been decisive.
For this reason, the disappearance of the Russian PMC will be dealt with in the third and final part of Domino.
The Exchequer
On 27 July 2023, Niger President Mohamed Bazoum was deposed in a military coup probably facilitated by the Wagner Group, the Russian state, the Algerian state and the espionage activities of the GRU and the Russian SVR.
It is the third general regime change in the heart of Francafrique, the fourth takeover of the local armed forces in politics in the region. It is the third pro-Kremlin departure of a local government executed in this manner, adding the country to an ever-lengthening list of nations aligned with the Russia-China bilateral alliance.
Instead, this is the sixth example of a successful destabilisation across the entire Sub-Saharan belt, with Beijing and Moscow aiming to use the countries involved in order to subject the European continent to increasingly intense migratory pressures and subsequently annex it to the macro continent of Eurasia. The Central and North African countries affected by the activities of the Wagner Group and Russia have so far been specifically Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Nigeria.
If one wished to extend the discourse beyond North Africa he would observe how nations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, even formally belonging to Francafrique, have gradually been absorbed into the Chinese sphere of influence without Paris having so far been able to effectively oppose them.
However, the reasons driving the evolution of events outside the Sahel are not the same as those within it. Guinea is an interesting starting point to better describe what is really happening on the ground.
The current head of Guinea's military junta, Mamady Doumbouya, is a representative of the Mandinka warrior ethnic group, with common origins with the dominant ethnic groups of Nigeria. The Mandinka and the other ethnic groups that emerged from an original strain from the Gulf of Guinea area, which dominate the western Sahel today, have had the most diverse religious beliefs. They also participated actively and independently in the slave trade run by the Arab, Berber and Mali empire between 800 AD and 1400/1500 AD, when the Portuguese gradually took control of this activity. For many historians, the slave trade was actually one of the methods by which they tried to manage the overpopulation following the Arab conquests between 600 and 750 AD.
Well Doumbouya, as a member of the Guinean special forces and a former soldier of the French Foreign Legion -one of the fiercest and best trained military forces in the world with centuries of experience in moving across West Africa- has actively participated in the repression of terrorist and insurrectionist organisations probably across the entire region.
He is not alone in having a history with the Western armed forces.Indeed, it is difficult to identify leaders belonging to these military juntas who have not been trained by the French or Americans.
Mamady Doumbouya, Assimi Goïta in Mali, Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso and Abdourahamane Tchiani in Niger have ALL been educated, trained and have fought alongside French or American armed forces, including through the last decade of insurgencies and wars involving ever larger slices of the Sahel.
How is this possible?