An ECOWAS deadline for the junta in Niger to relinquish power and restore ousted President Mohamed Bazoum expired yesterday. Now, West Africa waits. The threat of war still looms and neither side has indicated it will back down.
Over the weekend, Niger and ECOWAS both took important steps to prepare for war. Niger closed its airspace Sunday and readied its armed forces in the event of an ECOWAS invasion. The junta sent a delegation to Mali last week, reportedly asking the country to spare Wagner mercenaries in the event of a Western-backed military intervention, according to France 24’s Wassim Nasr.
ECOWAS leaders in Abuja worked on war plans over the weekend and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu asked the Nigerian senate Friday for authorization to deploy the country’s military in the event of a possible ECOWAS intervention. Nigeria has also cut off power to Niger, plunging most of the country into darkness.
An intervention is not a certainty. Nigeria’s senate wants Tinubu to exhaust all diplomatic options first before authorizing a deployment. Niger’s junta has also consolidated its support, with thousands rallying in support of the coup in Niamey, the country’s capital, this weekend. The junta also sent troop reinforcements to Niamey, suggesting that any conflict to restore Bazoum would drag out for some time.
“I fear that the junta will remain in place for the foreseeable future,” Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Global Insider.
The outcome of an ECOWAS intervention would almost assuredly be chaos, as your host and his colleagues Alex Ward and Matt Berg explained in NatSec Daily last week. If Nigeria and ECOWAS do invade Niger, it would spark the first multistate conflict on the continent in decades and test the military might of Nigeria, as well as the Wagner-affiliated Sahel states of Burkina Faso and Mali, who have pledged to defend Niger.
ECOWAS would not be able to go it alone, and the crisis has created some unlikely allies for the bloc. France, which has long seen Nigeria and ECOWAS as threats to its influence in West Africa, announced its support for an ECOWAS-led military intervention Saturday (French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna did not confirm whether her country would participate in the intervention). The U.S. has signaled some support for ECOWAS’ actions, though also hasn’t committed to supporting an intervention.
Aid groups are worried that conflict could exacerbate an already fragile situation in Niger. Whitney Elmer, deputy director of Mercy Corps’ West and Central Africa operations, told Global Insider that 3 million people in Niger are projected to face severe food insecurity before the end of the summer “lean season” in September. Some 500,000 people are also already displaced within the country.
“If there’s active conflict happening, we project that those numbers could go up,” Elmer said.
