The Coup d'Etat in Niger truly marks a break in the international pressure placed on Colonel TIANI and the National Council for the Protection of the Fatherland (CNSP). We must remember that on July 26, 2023, Mohamed Bazoum, then President of Niger, was overthrown by a Putsh and placed under house arrest within the presidential palace. The new military authorities, led by Colonel Abdourahamane Tiani, then decreed the cessation of uranium exploitation by the French group Orano. They nationalize at all costs and put Paris on notice to withdraw its troops from Niger. To general astonishment, the French Ambassador in Niamey was declared persona non grata and ordered to leave the territory.
Accustomed to salamalecs and other obsequiousness of all kinds from African heads of state, Paris was not accustomed to such impetuosity and guts from an African. The French are therefore surprised, even stunned, by so much assurance and determination, coming from the new Nigerien regime and its determination to deconstruct the myth of the tutelary power of the “Metropolis”. A nuclear power which was built under the banner of Nigerien uranium and which allowed this country to increase its aura among small nations. Faced with the fury and the limitless demands of the new Nigerien authorities for the consideration of their interests on the chessboard of international geopolitics, Paris is tense and brings out the heavy artillery of international sanctions, aided in this by an Economic Community of West African States, put to order. A succession of arbitrary, even inhumane measures are then set in motion.
The borders of neighboring countries are closed, banks, most of them French, no longer supply the country's economy. International donors, the World Bank and the European Union, in the lead, are breaking the ban with the new authorities. Everywhere, the clubs of sanctions are brandished, some bigger than others. Satisfied by this vast operation of dehumanization inflicted on the Nigerien people, the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, declared on August 16 in an interview with the newspaper Le Figaro that the Niger Coup d'Etat is doomed to failure. The ingenuity of cynicism, already established, then takes on grandiose proportions. Hospitals lack everything, down to paracetamol tablets, and electricity from neighboring Nigeria is cut off. The country lives in the Dark. Fuel and food prices are soaring. Populations who, in ordinary times, are already precarious, suddenly find themselves plunged into abject poverty.
The Western powers, under the banner of France, do not care. We must save soldier Bazoum at all costs, whatever it costs!!! Meanwhile, Niger is dying. It therefore appears very clearly that Mohamed Bazoum was only the Trojan horse of a creeping neocolonialism which, as the days go by, shows more and more its true face, that of an enormous hydra which has only and sole ambition, that of plunging Africa into abject poverty, through economic repression and the strangulation of all the outcomes which could have constituted a lifeline for starving peoples.
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