Sahel Juntas Are Gambling With Hunger as the Rains Fail

The rains came late, came thin, and then left. In the second ten days of October, the Intertropical Front, the belt of moisture that decides whether a Sahelian village eats or empties its granaries, pulled southward across its full length. The rainy season is over. For farmers across the Sahel, it ended with a harvest too small to carry them to the next one.

Ask a mother in Chad, Niger, or Mali what a rainfall deficit means and she will not reach for a meteorological term. She will tell you about the millet that did not head, the sorghum that dried on the stalk, the goats that grew thinner by the week. Monitoring agencies recorded the most severe deficits in the Sahelian zones of Chad, Niger, and Mali, with moderate shortfalls elsewhere in the region, including Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Those numbers are not abstractions. They are hungry children, sold livestock, and families walking to towns in search of work that is not there.

Here is the question nobody in those capitals wants to answer. Drought is a natural event. Famine is a political one.

The Sahel has been dry before. It has always been dry in places, and its people have always been good at surviving that. What they cannot survive is a state that has stopped governing. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger are now ruled by military juntas that seized power in coups, promised to restore order, and have since delivered neither order nor development. Their leaders have suspended elections, muzzled independent media, and turned on civil society. The Alliance of Sahel States, the bloc these three governments formed, announced its withdrawal from ECOWAS in early 2025, cutting themselves off from a regional framework that had at least offered a mechanism for shared food reserves and coordinated early warning. Chad, for its part, has been governed for years by a dynasty that rose from the same militarized politics that now grips its neighbours.

Consider what a functioning government does when the rains fail. It opens grain reserves before prices spike. It runs cash transfers before people sell their last cow. It publishes clear, timely data so aid can move before the crisis becomes a catastrophe. It answers to citizens who can vote the rascals out when they fail. Now consider what these juntas have done. They have spent scarce public money on security theatre, on foreign military partnerships, and on the regime's own survival. They have treated the bad news as a national security problem to be managed rather than a hunger crisis to be solved.

The foreign players circling the region make the picture worse. Russia moved from Wagner to the state-controlled Africa Corps and kept its foothold in Mali and Burkina Faso, selling regime protection in exchange for access to gold and influence. Western governments that spent a decade building counterterrorism programmes in the Sahel have been pushed out or have stepped back, and few have asked why those billions did not produce either security or resilience. Turkey, the UAE, China, and others are all competing for minerals, ports, and political loyalty across the same terrain. Each of them speaks the language of partnership. Each of them is, at bottom, buying access to African resources and African governments. None of them, as far as we can see, has made the first priority of its engagement a farmer's ability to get through a dry season. This is the new scramble for Africa, with new flags and the same appetite. The loser is always the farmer in Gao, Diffa, or Ndjamena.

We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. In 1973 and again in the 1980s, the Sahel suffered catastrophic famines that killed hundreds of thousands and drove millions from their homes. Those disasters were worsened by corrupt governance, closed markets, and states more interested in controlling grain than feeding people. Half a century later, the climate is hotter and the populations are larger, yet too many of the same habits persist. The regimes have changed their uniforms. The logic has not.

So what must be done? Start with the basics that no ideology should be allowed to erase. Restore constitutional government and set election timetables that are binding, not decorative. Protect the independence of the press so that early warning reaches the public and the public can hold officials to account. Allow grain, fuel, and fertiliser to move freely across borders, because a famine in one country is a famine next door, and markets are faster than bureaucrats when they are not sabotaged by checkpoints and bribes.

Look at what works. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies on strong institutions, prudent management of its diamond wealth, and an independent judiciary that the political class could not capture. Mauritius, a small island with no natural resource bonanza, turned rule of law, open trade, and property rights into a high-income economy. Senegal has shown that peaceful alternation of power is possible, and that citizens who vote out a government are capable of transforming their country's direction. These are the building blocks: secure property rights for smallholders and pastoralists, rural credit that does not depend on political favour, water storage and small-scale irrigation, insurance schemes that pay out before the herd dies, and regional grain reserves held under transparent rules. None of this requires a strongman. All of it requires accountable institutions.

The private sector has a role too. Agribusiness, local banks, and mobile-money operators can move cash to rural households faster than any ministry, provided they are free to operate and their contracts are enforced. Civil society groups, from farmers' cooperatives to human rights organisations, must be allowed to document shortages and demand responses without being branded traitors. Regional bodies, including ECOWAS and the African Union, should stop treating coups as paperwork and start enforcing the commitments their members signed.

Our leaders must hear this from us. Citizens of Chad, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, demand that your governments publish their food stock levels, their emergency budgets, and their rainfall response plans, and that they do it now, not after the markets have collapsed. Demand a date for elections and a path back to civilian rule. Demand that the money for security be matched by money for wells, seed, and roads to market. Demand that foreign partners who claim to care about the Sahel make their aid conditional on governance and food security, not on who signs the next mining concession.

And to the rest of Africa, the African Union, and the wider world: you cannot claim to defend democracy while looking away as soldiers starve the civilians they swore to protect. Hunger does not respect borders, and neither should our solidarity. Open the grain corridors. Enforce the rules. Put pressure on juntas to set election timetables and on foreign suppliers to stop trading guns for gold.

The rains have ended. The lean season has begun. The question now is not whether the Sahel will suffer. It already is. The question is whether we will keep accepting governments that treat their own people as collateral damage, or whether we will finally demand that Africa's leaders govern for the families who are counting on them.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB