Analysis: Africa and rising threat of proxy wars

Over the past three years, a quartet of successful coup d’états have taken place in West Africa, a region historically acknowledged for its predilection towards military uprisings. Mutinous soldiers have overthrown the presidents of Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Guinea (September 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022) and Niger (July 2023).

The coup in Niger is the latest in a series of military takeovers in West Africa.

In 2021, there were six coup attempts in Africa, with four of them successful. The backgrounds of this upsurge can be found in the regional instability that has spread across the Sahel, as well as poor governance by elected leaders, and the legitimacy question associated with many of the elected leaders whose electoral ascension to power have been robustly questioned and repudiated by many in their countries.

Security crises, Malian sociologist Aly Tounkara noted, are “fertile ground” for coups, as does the “lack of integrity of leaders”.

The security crises across the Sahelian West Africa for long led to the securitisation of development – the subordination of growth and development objectives to security priorities. This has failed to deliver security and has only ever undermined development, thus engendering social and economic unrest in the sub-region.

Internal conflicts in Africa have naturally unlocked the door to outside meddling.

France’s historical role as a guarantor of security across Francophone West Africa is now being openly challenged in a number of countries. Paris has had a longstanding habit of meddling in the political, economic, and military affairs of its former colonies on the continent, including foisting the use of the CFA franc, a West African currency that critics see as a vestige of colonialism.

France’s argument that it maintains a presence solely to help countries in West Africa is increasingly being repudiated.

In recent months, several countries in the sub-region have moved to end their military ties with France, demanding French troops leave the region.

Niger has seen rising anti-French sentiment since its military deposed the president and took power on Wednesday. There have been a series of anti-French and pro-coup protests in Niger’s capital Niamey, with demonstrators waving Russian flags and chanting ‘Long live Russia’, ‘Long live Putin’, and ‘Down with France’.

French troops withdrew from Mali in 2022 and Burkina Faso in 2023 following military coups.

Niger’s junta last week revoked a portfolio of military cooperation agreements with France. France has between 1,000 and 1,500 troops in Niger, helping to fight an insurgency by groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State that has destabilised West Africa’s Sahel region.

Onyekachi Wambu, a journalist, said: “Where in the past a consensus existed in the region for ECOMOG to intervene in Sierra Leone and Liberia as part of a home-grown collective security initiative, now the region looks to once more be inviting in different external players to resolve its issues.”

Hippolyte Fofack, chief economist and director of research at the African Export-Import Bank, noted that 13 foreign countries in 2019 were carrying out military operations on African soil, more than in any other region, and most have several bases across the continent. Africa is home to at least 47 foreign outposts, with the United States controlling the largest number, followed by France. Both China and Japan established their first overseas military bases since World War II in Djibouti, which is the only country in the world to host both American and Chinese outposts.

Through AFRICOM, the US has a large military footprint in West African states, advancing US national security interests through the training of special operations forces of many African nations’ military, as well as undertaking intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in the continent.

France has a well-established military presence in Niger.

At the same time, Russia’s footprints are expanding across the Sahel and Africa. Moscow is one of the actors filling the void left by French troops in Mali. The withdrawal of French forces from Mali leaves an open window that is being covered by the Russian mercenary group, Wagner PMC.

Immediately after the Niger coup, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s chief, touted his paramilitary group as the solution to that country’s security crisis. “A thousand Wagner fighters are able to restore order and destroy terrorists,” Prigozhin said on Telegram on July 27, “preventing them from harming the civilian population”.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a conflict-monitoring group that tracks political violence worldwide, Wagner is entrenched across Central and West Africa, where it is training local militias and propping up fragile governments allied with Russia in exchange for lucrative mineral rights.

A Brookings Institution report in July found that the Wagner Group had sent mercenary deployments to Syria, Libya, Mozambique, Mali, the Central African Republic, and Sudan.

Moscow has demonstrated its capacity to take advantage of governance shortfalls, instability, and security vacuums in Africa.

A report in February by the US-based Carnegie Endowment, said: “After brokering an exemption to the UN Security Council’s embargo on supplying arms to the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2017, Moscow quickly sent weapons and military trainers from the Wagner Group to that country.

“Prior to the Russians’ arrival, CAR had been under France’s strong political and military influence for decades, although that relationship failed to help Bangui make significant progress in terms of stability, security, and economic development. Moscow exploited Paris’s decision to withdraw its forces from CAR in 2017 at a time when armed groups remained active and held large parts of territory.

“However, Wagner support since France’s pull-out has helped consolidate the current CAR government and prevented rebel groups from extending their control. Wagner’s entry into CAR was clearly an opportunistic move by Russia to exploit France’s failures and the favourable context for a new security interlocutor.

“Today, Wagner is the Kremlin’s most important proxy in CAR; it provides security for the government, facilitates Russian political and diplomatic influence, and has gained access to lucrative mining assets.”

Moscow, according to the report, is now taking advantage of a similar alignment of opportunities in the Sahel.

It said: “It has embraced the military regimes in both Mali and Burkina Faso, providing them with security assistance, diplomatic backing, and information operations support.

“Russian military advisors arrived in Mali in late 2021 after the country’s second military coup. Primarily through the Wagner Group, Moscow has provided the country with a 400-strong contingent of mercenaries to combat jihadist groups. In mid-2022, it delivered arms shipments. However, Mali’s security situation continues to deteriorate, and the insurgency is spreading.”

But it is not just Russia that is challenging the global west for dominance in Africa. There is an ongoing trade war between the US and China in West Africa competing for rare earth minerals. The Asian power has been using debt obligations as a tool of soft power on West African nations.

West Africa has become a focus for mineral exploration and exploitation with large resources of gold, iron ore, diamonds, bauxite, phosphate, and uranium. China has secured critical mineral import from Guinea, which accounts for 27 percent of the world’s total supply of bauxite.

Proxy warfare – when a major power instigates or plays a major role in supporting and directing a party to a conflict but does only a small portion of the actual fighting itself – has helped major powers achieve some of their objectives, but the proxies themselves only sometimes achieve their goals.

In the 1950s, US President Dwight Eisenhower called proxy wars “the cheapest insurance in the world,” reflecting their limited political risks and human costs for sponsors. But these conflicts are tremendously costly for the countries in which they occur.

During the cold war, central, eastern and southern Africa proved to be fertile grounds for proxy war as the US and the Soviet Union found it critical to expand their spheres of influence, largely by promoting leadership in the ‘Third World’ that would be sympathetic to their causes.

Angola, Chad, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Namibia, Somalia, and Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) were all epicentres of cold war powers’ proxy war.

By using both diplomatic and military power, the US and the Soviet Union attempted to carve out areas that could be utilised as staging grounds against one another.

Because of these conflicts, numerous nations in central, eastern and southern Africa were destabilised economically, politically, and socially. Pervasive issues stemming from these conflicts remain to this day and show the painful legacy of the cold war.

The coup in Niger is bringing the possibility of proxy war in Africa to prominence. Nigeria is under pressure from western powers to act bellicosely in Niger.

Proxy wars, Fofack further postulates, are prolonging insecurity and locking countries into a downward spiral of intergenerational poverty. “Moreover,” he said, “they drain African countries’ already limited foreign-exchange reserves and shrink their equally narrow fiscal space while reversing democratic gains, reflected in the recent resurgence of military coups.”

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According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), military spending in Africa exceeded $43 billion in 2020, up from $15 billion in the 1990s. Defence outlays accounted for an average of 8.2 percent of government spending across Africa in 2020, compared to an unweighted global average of 6.5 percent. The share is considerably higher in conflict-affected countries like Mali (18 percent) and Burkina Faso (12 percent).

According to SIPRI, three of the five African countries where military spending is rising most sharply – Mali, up 339 percent over the past decade; Niger (288 percent); and Burkina Faso (238 percent) – are battling terrorist networks in the Sahel, a desperately poor region stretching across the continent from Senegal to Sudan and Eritrea.

As West Africa slides towards the possibility of proxy warfare, the sub-region needs stronger collective security to avoid sliding into another painful era of fighting great power wars.