Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso: How a triumvirate of military leaders are redrawing West Africa’s map

In a crowded auditorium in Niger’s capital Niamey, the world’s youngest head of state rested his gauntleted hands on the desk in front of him and thanked God. Not just, he said, for bringing forth this day, Saturday July 6, but for all that he had done and would continue to do for the people of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – united now, Captain Ibrahim Traoré said, in the confederated Alliance of Sahel States (AES). 

Smiling and self-assured in his familiar khaki fatigues and red beret, Burkina Faso’s 36-year-old interim leader told his transported listeners that he was speaking to them not as neighbours, but as brothers and sisters.

“We have the same blood that runs in our veins,” he said. “In our veins runs the blood of those valiant warriors who fought and won for us this land that we call Mali, Burkina and Niger. In our veins runs the blood of those valiant warriors who helped the whole world rid itself of Nazism and many other scourges. In our veins runs the blood of those valiant warriors that were deported from Africa to Europe, America, Asia … and who helped to build those countries as slaves. In our veins runs the blood of worthy men, robust men, men who stood tall. And for this, we should be proud and grateful to be nationals of the AES.”

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His fellow triumvirs took up the refrain. Soft-spoken and avuncular behind a bushy black beard, Mali’s interim President Colonel Assimi Goïta said that by allowing “the free circulation of people and goods” within the three-country bloc, the confederation that they were putting in place would one day give way to a full-fledged federation, uniting 72 million people into one community.“We're moving beyond individual national identities,” he said. “Instead of citizens of Mali, Burkina Faso, or Niger, we'll refer to ourselves as people of the AES. In this alliance, a Burkinabe or Nigerien will feel at home in Mali, and vice versa, without encountering administrative barriers.”

The summit’s joint communiqué laid out the long-term aspirations of this imminent union: the three countries would pool their disparate resources to build wide-reaching transport and communications infrastructure; to facilitate trade and the free movement of goods and people to support an industrial transformation; and to invest in the three nations’ agriculture, mines and energy sectors.

This bold agenda, the document said, would be championed throughout the nascent AES by government-certified digital platforms nourished by “a narrative conforming to people’s aspirations” and speaking to them not in the French of their old imperial masters, but in their own mother tongues.

Friends in need

The road leading to this ever-less-distant federation has been a ragged one. The three countries have been drawing carefully closer to one another since 2020 following a series of coups that brought military governments to power in Mali, Burkina Faso and finally Niger in July last year.

The three leaders who emerged – Mali’s Goïta, Burkina Faso’s Traoré and Niger’s Abdourahamane Tiani – said they had been driven to act by the abject failure of what they described as corrupt and compromised civilian governments to protect their citizens from jihadist violence. This violence, they emphasised, took no notice of the black lines men had marked down on maps – much of the fiercest fighting was taking place in the Liptako-Gourma Region, the vast and porous borderlands where the three states meet.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), an economic grouping currently headed by regional heavyweight Nigeria, responded harshly to the putsches, imposing severe trade sanctions and even threatening military action against Niger – an idea that former colonial power France was quick to throw its support behind. The threat was met with outrage by the coup leaders, with Bamako and Ouagadougou pledging to come to Niger’s aid if it was set upon by the other West African nations.

Read moreWith ECOWAS exit, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger leave democratic transition in limbo

Since then, all attempts of reconciliation between the West African bloc and its renegade members have died in the cradle. Despite ECOWAS’s decision to lift its sanctions and border closures on Niger, the three wayward states announced in January 2024 that they were pulling out of the bloc.

In a statement accompanying the signing of the three states’ treaty of confederation on Saturday, Niger’s Tiani said the alliance had "irrevocably" broken with ECOWAS. Already, the three states appear to be deepening their cooperation – in April this year, Niger agreed to sell Mali 150 million litres of diesel at almost half the going rate, bringing much-needed support to a nation wracked by enduring energy shortages.

Virginie Baudais, senior researcher and director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Sahel and West Africa Programme, said that the three states’ decision was driven in part by more than a decade of failure by Western-backed regimes in the Sahel to hold back the tide of insurgent jihadist movements.

“It's a response to the loss of credibility of the European states and of ECOWAS in the region in the fight against terrorism,” she said. “The three leaders all claim that they are achieving good results in the fight against terrorism thanks to their established military cooperation. Clearly, each country cannot fight against these groups operating in the Liptako-Gourma Region, and the only option is cooperation.”

Total war

The three nations’ struggle against armed insurgents has no single cause and no simple answer. An armed campaign to build a Tuareg nation in Mali’s north, the chaos unleashed by the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s regime on the other side of the Sahara, the burning urgency that the worsening climate crisis has given to land conflicts between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralists, and above all the failure of these states to provide essential services to impoverished communities in the countries’ arid peripheries – all of these factors and more have entrenched a number of brutal jihadist movements across the Sahel.

For years, the fight against these movements has taken place alongside French and US troops as well as a United Nations peacekeeping force. Those days are over – all three nations have cut off their military agreements with Western powers. On Sunday, the last of the US’s almost thousand-strong contingent of troops left Niamey. In their place, the AES has sought allies elsewhere; Mali has seemingly invited the Russian mercenary Wagner Group to supplement its own state security forces. For his part, Traoré has declared a policy of total war against the militants, mobilising tens of thousands of armed volunteers to swell the ranks of citizen militias.

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“All three regimes use sovereignty as a political weapon and a means of legitimacy,” Baudais said. “They are determined to leave ECOWAS: European and American troops have been replaced by Russian allies. Diplomatically, they followed Moscow, and ECOWAS remained – for them – an instrument of the European powers, especially the colonial powers. Therefore, it is imperative to break away. They base their legitimacy on the independence of their countries, the choice of their partners and the respect for the interests of their populations.”

Just how successful the AES’s joint struggle against the disparate insurgents has been is hard to tell, she said. While the AES has lauded the retaking in November 2023 of the northern Malian town of Kidal from the hands of Tuareg separatists as a triumph for the military government, an almost total media blackout has made it difficult to judge exactly how much ground has been gained across the three nations.

“The situation varies from country to country,” Baudais said. “In terms of security, the situation in Burkina Faso is catastrophic. The strategy chosen is disastrous; the regime is hardening, and opponents are being arrested or disappearing. In Mali, the military regime continues to talk about its rise to power and its successes. Still, we see in our most recent research that more people realise that the situation on the ground is not improving.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Niger-based political analyst said he was doubtful that the military regimes were making the progress they’d hoped for on the battlefield.

“If I take the example of Niger, which I know best, the attacks haven’t stopped,” he said. “If anything, they’ve increased.”

A break from the past

But listening to the leaders’ speaking, it quickly becomes clear that the three regimes also see this new alliance as a means of breaking once and for all with the legacy of French colonialism and decades of “la Françafrique” – a shorthand for what critics of French foreign policy in Africa describe as the former imperial power’s enduring political, military and financial influence over its former colonies. In his speech in Niamey, Traoré – an ardent devotee of Burkinabe Pan-African revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara – was unsparing in his view of France’s continued presence in Africa.

“These imperialists have just one cliché in their heads – Africa as an empire of slaves,” Traoré said. “That’s how they see Africa. For them, Africa belongs to them. Our lands belong to them. Our subsoil belongs to them. They’ve never changed that framework, even today.”

Despite efforts by ECOWAS to mend the breach, including the appointment of newly elected Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye as a mediator with the departed states, Traoré has continued to describe ECOWAS’s leaders as “house slaves” more concerned with serving Western economic interests than their citizens.

“Sovereigntism is the response to the dependence on colonial history,” Baudais said. “This rejection must call into question our approach and encourage European leaders and policymakers to better understand the contexts. The failure of the United States in Afghanistan greatly impacted the Sahel, and so did the failure of counter-terrorism in the Sahel. The willingness to take control of security is an important variable.”

Baudais said that the French government had badly underestimated the degree of resentment its seemingly endless military intervention had sparked in its former colonies.

“It is, perhaps, a positive aspect of the crisis: the break from the history of colonial rule,” she said. “It could have gone smoothly, but the French authorities did not understand what was at stake in the Sahel. The breakup was, therefore, extremely violent.”

The Niger-based political analyst said that he found the AES’s break with ECOWAS to be an unfortunate step backward, adding that no country enjoyed full sovereignty in a globalised world.

“We’re in a context of globalisation, we can’t isolate ourselves,” he said. “Sovereignty begins first by production – we have a great many natural resources, but we don’t have the capacity to process them ourselves.”

“We don’t change things just by making speeches,” he added.

Baudais said that the three military leaders were facing heavy odds.

“Sovereignty cannot be eaten,” she said. “These regimes place significant expectations on themselves. Economic difficulties like the one Mali is experiencing today, with the lack of electricity, can and will weaken the regime if living conditions continue to deteriorate.”