Pity poor Mamadou Tandja. Ever since being ousted by a military coup on Thursday February 18, 2010 the former President of Niger hasn’t been getting a whole lotta love. Aside from a few un-named "supporters" Tandja has been almost universally excoriated in the press. I guess that’s what you get when you screw around with the Constitution, silence the media and refuse to leave office. (Amazing how despots and tyrants never seem to learn that when you try to stifle the press it always comes back to bite you in the end.)
So universally unlikeable was Tandja that even those who have opposed the methods employed by the army to oust him are forced to admit that the former leader was getting a bit too big for his Presidential boots. But while the military take over is being painted as everything from a popular insurgency to a benevolent rescue mission, the questions remains, was the army acting on their own, out of patriotic love for their nation? Or is there something more sinister afoot?
More below the fold.
In looking for ulterior motives for the coup, there are no shortage candidates. Take the following "usual suspects."
France: As much as 75% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power plants. At least 25% of the uranium it uses every year comes from Niger. Thus they have an enormous stake in making sure their supply of the stuff continues uninterrupted. Last year the French firm AREVA signed an exclusive deal with the Niger government which would have doubled uranium production in that country by 2012. The deal would give France a more or less guaranteed source of uranium for the next 35 years. If anything were in the offing to squelch the deal, France would have a huge incentive to intervene to protect their investment.
China: China has also entered into contracts with Niger to mine uranium and extract oil. While their stake in the country isn’t as big as France’s, they nonetheless have an interest in seeing that minerals they need to fuel their economic growth remain accessible.
IMF: The International Monetary Fund is set to give approximately 35.3 million dollars to Niger over the next three years. While this may not sound like much, for a country like Niger where over half the population subsists on a dollar a day, aid from groups like the IMF as well as France, The United States and others is a huge portion of their yearly budget. All this largess is dependant upon mineral resources flowing to the developed world so again we come back to uranium.
World Bank: Like the IMF, the World Bank helps out developing nations... for a price. As Naomi Klein has documented in her book "The Shock Doctrine," that price is usually pressure on poor countries to privatize resources for the benefit of the developed world. Mamadou Tandja had some rather tenuous agreements with the World Bank. If he, or any other third world leader, gave any indication that he was thinking of changing those agreements,... well let’s just say he wouldn’t be the first leader to be overthrown who caused the wealthier members of the World bank to lose money.
The USA: America’s response to the coup is somewhat perplexing. Unlike the hue and cry over the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya last year, The United States reaction to Tandja’s removal was basically, "he brought it on himself." Up till he tried to make himself President for life, Mr. Tandja had maintained generally good relations with the USA who supplied Niger with weapons and military aid to help them battle Tuareg Nomad insurgents in the North and the Algerian-based al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). If one digs deeper, however their are other factors that may have led to a cooling off of US support. According to the BBC: "...Tandja's increasingly undemocratic rule put support from the EU and other Western donors at risk. This may explain his seeking closer relations with Libya and Venezuela, both of which he had visited in recent months. He was also rumored to be broaching a uranium contract with Iran." Any sentence putting the words, "uranium contract," and "Iran," in the same sentence would be enough to cause a neo-con paranoiac’s heart to beat like a djembe drum. Remember, we went to war in Iraq, in part, over a phony document related to uranium "yellowcake "from Niger.
Of course, given the economic stakes, (just the sale of uranium to France alone means a possible 420 million dollars at current uranium prices) and given the fact they have suspended the Constitution and dissolved all institutions of Government, the coup could well be a simple economic and/or power grab by the military. Regardless of whether the military coup was done out of noble motives or venal ones, however, I doubt the result will help the people of Niger much. The world may universally call for a "speedy return to democracy," but until such time as the illiteracy rate falls below its current 70% and until some of the wealth garnered by the sale of uranium and oil to the western world finds its way into the pockets of the poor, democracy in Niger is likely to remain as worthless as a cup of Saharan sand.
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