Chad's Junta Watches Its Farmers Starve While Buying Guns

Outside Biltine, the regional capital of Wadi Fira, farmers are doing a grim arithmetic. They walk through fields that should be green and count what is gone. Seed they planted and never harvested. Animals that died at the water point. Children who went to bed hungry because there was nothing left in the granary.

This is not an act of God that no one could have seen coming. Drought in the Sahel is a known threat, measured and warned about for decades. What is unforgivable is a state that knows the rains are failing and still chooses where its money goes. Ask yourself who the Chadian state is really built to protect.

The eastern regions of Chad, Wadi Fira among them, sit on the edge of the Sahara. Rainfall is erratic, the soil is fragile, and most families depend entirely on rain-fed agriculture and livestock. When the rains fail, there is no insurance, no buffer, and no safety net. There is only the hope that someone in N'Djamena is paying attention.

Across the Sahel, the warning signs have been flashing for years. Food insecurity assessments conducted by the UN and regional partners have repeatedly placed millions of Chadians in conditions of acute hunger, and the lean season arrives earlier and lasts longer each cycle. The Lake Chad basin, which once fed tens of millions of people across four countries, has shrunk by roughly 90 percent since the 1960s according to widely cited satellite and hydrological studies. That is not a statistic. That is a lake that used to be a livelihood, now a memory with cracked mud where the water used to be.

Now look at the political economy surrounding that fragile land. Chad's current leadership came to power in April 2021, when Idriss Déby died on the battlefield and a Transitional Military Council installed his son, Mahamat Déby, in what was openly an unconstitutional succession. The constitution was suspended. The promised transition took years to deliver, and the election that followed in 2024 returned the same military man to the palace with a landslide that independent observers and opposition parties widely questioned. This is how the continent's old habits survive: a dynasty dressed in a uniform, calling itself a transition, asking citizens to trust it with their futures.

And what does that dynasty prioritize? Chad's defence budget has consistently consumed a disproportionate share of public resources, while rural development, irrigation, veterinary services and drought preparedness remain chronically underfunded. Oil revenues that were supposed to transform the country, under the agreements negotiated when the Doba pipeline was built, were largely swallowed by debt service, security spending and patronage. Meanwhile, the Chadian state has spent the last several years shopping its strategic position to the highest bidder. France's military presence was pushed out in 2024 and early 2025. Russian influence, channeled through the Africa Corps that replaced Wagner in the region, has expanded into the Sahel's security landscape. Turkey sells drones and armoured vehicles. The UAE and others court Chadian leaders with investment promises and arms deals. Every one of these partners arrives with a catalogue of weapons and a shortage of concern for a farmer in Biltine.

Let us be precise about the principle at stake. A government's first duty is to keep its people alive. A government that cannot feed its rural population, but can always find money for tanks, checkpoints and foreign security contractors, has inverted that duty. It has decided that its own survival matters more than the survival of the people it claims to govern. We have seen this pattern from Ouagadougou to Bamako to Niamey, where juntas promised sovereignty and delivered dependence. Chad is walking the same road, and the farmers of Wadi Fira are paying the toll.

Let us also be honest about the West and its partners. European and American governments lecture African states about democracy, elections and human rights, and then sign security pacts with the same officers who suspend constitutions when it suits them. China lends for roads and ports, and the debts come due in the form of collateral and political obedience. Russia sells regime protection and calls it partnership. Turkey, the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all pursue their own stakes in the Sahel: ports, mining rights, religious networks, arms markets. The scramble for Africa has new players, but the logic is the same. Outsiders want access, and African citizens are expected to pay with their land, their resources, and their dignity. A hungry farmer does not care whose flag is on the military truck. She cares that her children are not eating.

So what should be done? Start with what works. Botswana, which has faced recurrent droughts since independence, built a system of drought relief, national food reserves, and sustained investment in water infrastructure, all underpinned by a long record of predictable governance and an independent civil service. Its success is not accidental. It came from institutions that worked, budgets that were published, and leaders who could be voted out. Mauritius, which has no natural resource windfall to speak of, built its prosperity on property rights, open markets and transparent public administration. These are not foreign inventions. They are African success stories, and they prove that a state can protect its people from climate shocks when it chooses to.

For Chad, the blueprint is clear. Build a public, audited drought fund that releases money automatically when rainfall indices fall below set thresholds, so that aid does not wait for a photo opportunity. Invest in water harvesting, boreholes, drought-resistant seeds and veterinary services in the Wadi Fira region. Secure land tenure so that farmers have a reason to invest in their soil. Open the books on oil revenues and require parliament, not a presidential office, to approve security contracts and foreign military agreements. Allow independent media and civil society to monitor how relief is delivered. A free market in agricultural inputs, with clear property rights and competition, will do more for Chadian families than another armoured convoy.

The regional bodies must also act. The African Union has a Peace and Security Council that loves to issue communiqués about unconstitutional changes of government. It should now apply the same urgency to the humanitarian consequences of those changes. The Economic Community of Central African States and the Lake Chad Basin Commission must put drought and water security at the centre of their agenda, not in a footnote to security cooperation. The UN's Central Emergency Response Fund and humanitarian agencies must be funded in full and report publicly on what reaches the people who need it.

And the Chadian people have a role that no foreign power can play for them. Demand that your MPs publish the defence budget line by line. Demand that the drought relief plan for Wadi Fira has a timeline, a budget and a named official who answers for it. Demand a constitutional order that means something, with real elections, real courts and real accountability. Organise in your villages, your unions, your churches and mosques. Document the failures with photographs and records, because a government that cannot be shamed by hunger will be shamed by evidence.

We are Africans. This land belongs to the farmers standing in the dust outside Biltine, not to the men who sell it, lend against it, or arm the men who rule it. They have counted their losses. Now it is time to count ours, and to make those who failed them pay the price at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. Their harvest is gone. Their future must not be.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24