On the Long March to Sovereignty: Niger’s Revolution against French Neocolonialism Enters Third Year

AFRICA, 4 Aug 2025

Pavan Kulkarni | Peoples Dispatch - TRANSCEND Media Service

Rally in Niamey against foreign intervention and in support of the coup leaders.

Enduring a financial siege by France and terror attacks by its alleged proxies, the popular military government that replaced the puppet regime in Niger enters the third year of its rule, with concrete progress to show in agriculture, education, and power-generation.

31 Jul 2025 – Under siege by France’s monetary strangulation and a war against their state by armed groups, Nigeriens marked the second anniversary of the July 26 revolution against French neocolonialism.

The wave of mass protests against French military deployment in its former colonies had already washed away the regimes it had propped up in Mali and Burkina Faso when Niger’s then-president, Mohamad Bazoum, was also toppled in a coup on this date in 2023.

With the support of pan-Africanists, the left, and the mass movement protesting against French domination, the coup leader, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, established the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP) as a military government.

“Since July 26, 2023,” when Nigeriens made a “patriotic commitment to take our destiny into our own hands, the reactionary neocolonial system … has continued to unleash itself against our country and its people,” Tchiani said in an address on the anniversary on Saturday.

When his government ordered the French troops out soon after the CNSP was established, France mobilized 13 member states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), for a war against Niger.

The left and pan-Africanist forces in these countries counter-mobilized with demonstrations against the planned invasion of Niger. In the meantime, Mali and Burkina Faso, also former ECOWAS members whose popular military governments had already expelled the French troops, formed a defense pact with Niger, which evolved into the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). 

Tchiani’s government consolidated popular support domestically by successfully holding the fort against the threats from France and expelling its troops by the year-end. However, sanctions by ECOWAS strangled landlocked Niger’s underdeveloped economy.

France tightens the monetary noose around Niger’s economy

Even after these sanctions were lifted in February 2024, Niger remains in the clutches of a de facto embargo enacted by France through its control of Niger’s currency, the CFA Franc.

Established by France in 1945 and imposed on eight West African and six Central African colonies, this currency was originally pegged to the French Franc and then to the euro since its adoption in 2002. Printed in the Bank of France, it has no independent value outside the guarantee of conversion to the euro.

France is using this currency, which has survived the formal independence of its former colonies, as a noose to choke Niger’s ability to trade, said Aboubakar Alassane, a Nigerien member of the anti-imperialist West Africa People’s Organization (WAPO).

All foreign currency exchanges and transactions by the eight member countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) that use the CFA Franc are handled by the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) or its authorized intermediaries.

Created by the French state in the late 50s, BCEAO was required until 2020 to maintain 50% of all its foreign reserves in the Bank of France. France also had guaranteed representation in its governing bodies.

Some of these overt means of control were done away with in “symbolic” reforms by the turn of this decade to obscure its neocolonialism, against which mass movements were rising in the Sahel.

However, with CFA Franc still pegged to euro at an exchange rate guaranteed by France, BCEAO remains an arm of French neocolonialism.

“If we export, say petrol, the money we are paid goes into the BCEAO, even when we are trading with the BRICS countries. Since we have refused this subjugation to France, it has become almost impossible to export,” said Alassane.

“If we need to import something, we need to put our money in BCEAO” to have the CFA Franc converted to euro by the Bank of France. “Without euros or dollars, we are unable to import,” he explained.

The prolonged struggle for monetary sovereignty

“So to overcome CFA and establish our own currency is the next task of the revolution,” Alassane maintains. He is hopeful that the solid foundation for this transition will be laid with the establishment of the AES Confederal Bank for Investment and Development (BCID-AES) this year. A draft text for the establishment of this bank and a roadmap for its implementation were prepared by May 25, when the three AES member countries’ finance ministers met in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

A three-day meeting of finance experts in Niger’s capital Niamey last week was followed by a meeting of its ministers from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger on July 24 and 25.

Le Sahel reported that the draft’s “terms of reference relating to the preparation of the legal documents … procedure manuals and information system” were among the subjects discussed at this ministerial meeting ahead of the July 26 anniversary.

Expelling French troops and leaving ECOWAS was a matter of “political will”, Alassane explained. But to break free from France’s monetary chains is a “technical” problem that needs time to devise a solution, especially for one of the world’s poorest countries, emerging from over a century of French colonial exploitation, continuing post-independence.

Nevertheless, even under these economic constrictions, the CNSP has accomplishments to show.

“For the first time in Niger, we have not experienced a so-called lean period” 

“The Large-Scale Irrigation Program” rolled out last year is yielding “tangible results,” Tchiani said in his anniversary speech.

“Since the CNSP came to power, the area under irrigation has been expanding”, especially in main agrarian regions like Dosso and Tillabéri, Salia Zirkifil, a 53-year-old rice farmer from Tillabéri’s Kandadji locality, told Peoples Dispatch. “This has increased the food grains availability and made the prices more affordable.”

The ECOWAS sanctions in mid-2023, followed by unprecedented floods last monsoon, had sent food prices skyrocketing. “A 25 bag of rice was costing between 16 and 20 thousand CFA. It is now available for 11 to 12 thousand,” he said.

“For the first time in Niger,” Tchiani added in his speech, “we have not experienced the so-called lean period.”

It is common for farming families to cope with grain shortages during these periods by eating the seeds from the previous harvest. This leaves them with a shortage for the upcoming planting season.

“Since there was no lean period this time, farmers were able to save all their seeds for sowing,” Zirkifil said, hopeful that the next harvest will be even larger.

Cement structures replace Niamey’s straw classrooms

Education is another key area where the CNSP has made progress. “The Executive Committee of the Union of Nigerien Students (CD-USN) particularly commends the large-scale classroom construction program both in Niamey and across the country,” said its secretary general, Effred Al-Hassan. These classrooms are solid structures built of cement.

Most classrooms in Niger, like most of its dwellings, are walled and roofed with either mud or straw. It is not unusual for these structures to collapse during the monsoon downpours. However, the scale of their destruction during the Sahel-wide floods between June and October last year was devastating.

The government slashed the price of cement by half to aid reconstruction. In November that year, 50-year-old Boubakar Isaka was laying out all the small hollow blocks he had hand-pressed from the cement he’d bought to dry under the Sahelian sun.

Catching his breath, he pointed to the rubble amid three huts still standing on his small plot of family land in the rural southern outskirts of Niamey. Once rebuilt, his family – for the first time – will have a solid cement dwelling, he explained, speaking over the mooing and bleating of the cattle his elderly father was herding back in.

A public school teacher by profession, Isaka harbored a simple hope for the future of education. “I wish one day all classrooms in Niger will be made of cement,” he told Peoples Dispatch.

“The government has since built 3,000 cement classrooms in Niamey. We still have classrooms built of mud, but all the classrooms made of straw have been replaced with cement structures in Niamey,” Alassane said.

“When a student studies in a clean, well-ventilated, well-equipped classroom that is protected from the elements, it boosts concentration, strengthens commitment, and significantly improves academic performance. The physical setting directly affects students’ mindset, behavior, and attendance—positively influencing the entire educational process,” explained student leader Al-Hassan.

“Finally,” he added, the CNSP’s “payment of scholarships, stipends, and allowances” – long overdue since the previous regime – has played an important role in “alleviating some of the social hardships of students. These payments reflect a willingness to listen to and address students.”

However, understaffed schools with a lack of qualified teachers “remains a critical issue,” he added. About 80% of the teachers are on contract. The persistence of this problem even under the CNSP is a major factor holding back the quality of Niger’s education system, maintains Soumaila Koba, president of the Independent Teachers Union.

Often paid late – and paid only a fraction of the wage received by their permanently employed colleagues in public schools – contractual teachers are forced to constantly seek alternative or additional work, inhibiting their ability to dedicate all their working time and effort to teaching.

“We must fight terrorism for schools to function”

Regularizing their employment and wages, and increasing recruitment, requires a considerable budgetary allocation. The government has so far been unable to allocate such resources amid the financial siege, especially since the more urgent demands of security are consuming a vast portion of the state’s coffers, Koba explained.

“The entire western zone is threatened” by terrorist attacks that have left scores of schools shuttered, as the villagers, including the teachers and students, flee to safety. “We must fight terrorism for these schools to function,” he told Peoples Dispatch.

Both Koba and Al-Hassan opine that the successful completion of the academic year with all exams conducted without fraud or other violations is in itself a commendable achievement amid the current security challenges.

“The Sahel region has been in the grip of a serious security crisis for more than a decade”, threatening the very “existence of its states,” Nigerien foreign minister Bakary Sangaré said in his address to the 79th UN General Assembly last September.

After spawning terror groups across the Sahel by destroying Libya in 2011 as a major participant in the US-led NATO war, France set up military bases in the region, ostensibly to fight these groups. However, the area under their control and the number of violent attacks they launched only increased under French militarization.

France aiding terror groups?     

After the expulsion of its troops, France “informs, trains, finances, and arms terrorist groups in the Sahel” as a part of “its new strategy of recolonization,” Sangaré added in his address to the General Assembly.

Earlier in August 2022, Mali’s foreign minister, Abdoulaye Diop, sought an emergency meeting in a letter to the UN Security Council, accusing France of violating Malian airspace “to collect information for the benefit of terrorist groups … and to airdrop them weapons and munitions.”

Last year, Burkina Faso’s president, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, accused France of using two bases in Benin, which borders both Burkina Faso and Niger, to “train terrorists”. He claimed to have “audio recordings of French agents in Benin, who play at the terrorists’ centers of operations”.

The accusation of France’s use of Beninese territory as a launchpad for terror attacks has also been echoed within the country, including by trade unions, the Communist Party, and several civil society organizations.

Read more: The people of Benin intensify anti-French protests in the wake of a terror attack 

While France denies supporting terror groups, its ally Ukraine, to which it has provided billions of euros in military support, has been less than shy. Spokesperson of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Andriy Yusov, said in an interview last year that it provided “information, and not only information,” to armed groups fighting the state in Mali. Le Monde further reported that Ukrainian authorities are also training an armed group to use drones.

“By insidiously combining high-profile terrorist operations” with “subversive economic action”, France and its neocolonial regimes in ECOWAS “sometimes make us lose sight of what we have achieved together” in “reappropriating our country” and “its immense resources,” Tchiani said in his address.

Uranium mining nationalized

Among Niger’s most strategic resources are the large deposits of the highest-grade uranium in Africa. This resource was for long a monopoly of France.

Niger’s state-owned Sopamin was a minority stakeholder in the Somaïr uranium venture mining these deposits. A 63% stake was held by the French state-owned Orano, which allegedly extracted a disproportionately higher 86% of its uranium production since 1971. When the CNSP stopped the export of uranium to France, Orano disrupted the mining, practically bringing production to a halt.

“But production has resumed” after the CNSP nationalized Somaïr, taking control from Orano last month, said Alassane. “We are accumulating stockpiles.” Although unable to export for now due to the “financial embargo by France”, he is confident that once the AES has wrestled out of the CFA and established a sovereign currency with its own central bank, uranium mining will yield the much-needed funds to finance development in Niger.

Using uranium to generate nuclear electricity domestically can only be a distant goal for Niger, whose economy, shaped to extract resources for France, is extremely underindustrialized outside the mining sector.

While the extracted uranium powered French nuclear reactors, lighting a third of all the bulbs in the European country, over 85% of Nigeriens lacked connection to the national electricity grid.

About 70% of the electricity consumed in Niger is imported from neighboring Nigeria. Its president, Bola Tinubu, had led the charge to mobilize ECOWAS, which he was chairing at the time, for a war against Niger at the behest of France, when its puppet regime was ousted in July 2023.

He was unable to mobilize his own parliament for the war. Nevertheless, he plunged much of Niger into darkness by cutting off its electricity supply when ECOWAS sanctions took effect in August 2023.

Even after the sanctions were lifted last February, Nigeria’s resumed electricity supply was only 46 megawatts per day, 42% less than the pre-sanctions level of 80 megawatts. Severe shortages thus continued, causing prolonged power outages that sometimes lasted for days in Niamey.

“But now,” Alassane said, “we have a steady power supply in the city because of the two new power plants” – a 30 megawatt solar plant, the largest of its kind in the country, commissioned by the CNSP in late 2023, and another 20 megawatt thermal plant inaugurated last December.

Dependence on Nigeria for electricity has reduced significantly in Niamey, but persists outside the capital.

“Mastering electrification means mastering the source of industrialization, enabling the processing of agricultural products, and thus laying the foundations for autonomous development,” maintains Mamane Adamou, leader of Niger’s Institute for Evaluation Strategy and Forecasting (ISEP).

Much distance remains to be covered on the rocky road to this autonomous development. However, confidence remains high among the popular movements that the CNSP is leading the country on that road, with sincerity.

“A difficult but victorious fight that we will have to wage over time”

“No major political project on a national scale has been carried out in haste and in a short time; this is particularly true in the case of Niger, taking into account … the issues related to the exploitation of our natural resources, and the unprecedented adversity we face today,” said Tchiani.

It is a “difficult but victorious fight that we will have to wage over time”, and on “a path full of pitfalls,” he added in his anniversary speech, making no claims of false or premature victory. “We have made this choice to take the difficult path … together and in unity, with full responsibility and with a clear awareness of the issues and challenges that await us.”

Nonetheless, he went on to reassure Nigeriens that “despite the difficult situation we are going through and the fierce adversity we face, our country is indeed on the right path: that of dignity, sovereignty, and the fight for a better future for all.”

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