Niger's Junta Spies on Exiles in Paris While Preaching Sovereignty

Here is a question every Nigerien should be asking tonight. If your government really believes it is defending your dignity, why are its spies in Paris hunting the people who ask for your vote?

Last month, France declared two Nigerien intelligence officers persona non grata at Niger's embassy in Paris. They were given no choice but to leave French soil. According to Le Monde, one of them was suspected of tracking Nigerien opposition figures living in France. Think about what that means. Men paid by a military government were watching fellow citizens who had fled, not because they committed crimes, but because they dared to speak. This is what the junta's "liberation" looks like when you strip away the parade uniforms and the anti-Western slogans.

Start with the facts, because the facts are damning enough. On 26 July 2023, General Abdourahamane Tiani and other officers overthrew Mohamed Bazoum, Niger's democratically elected president. Bazoum was not a foreign puppet. He won a peaceful transfer of power from Mahamadou Issoufou in 2021, one of the rare moments in the Sahel when a ballot box actually changed hands. Tiani's men took that democratic achievement and locked it away. Reports indicate Bazoum has remained detained since the coup, and no credible timeline for his release has been offered. A coup against an elected leader is not a sovereign act. It is theft of a nation's future, committed by men with guns.

France refused to recognise the junta and kept calling Bazoum the legitimate head of state. We will say this plainly: that position was right. Democracy does not become negotiable because the man who breaks it has a flag and a microphone. But France is not a clean hand in this story, and Africans have every reason to remember why. Paris spent decades propping up leaders who rigged elections, jailed journalists and treated Françafrique as a private estate. The same French establishment that now lectures Niamey about democracy once shook hands with the autocrats who made Niger's people distrust democracy in the first place. Hypocrisy from the West does not excuse tyranny from the Sahel. Both must be named.

The sequence since 2023 is a case study in how juntas operate. In late August 2023, the military authorities ordered French ambassador Sylvain Itté out of the country. Paris initially refused, insisting only the recognised government could expel him, and a tense siege developed around the French embassy in Niamey before Itté was withdrawn the following month. The junta then tore up its military cooperation agreements with France and demanded the departure of roughly 1,500 French troops. The last of them left in December 2023. Paris closed its embassy in Niamey later that month, citing blockades and obstacles that made normal diplomacy impossible. Yet Niger's embassy in Paris stayed open, and that is the detail that should make every Nigerien pause. The junta wanted France out of Niger, but it kept a listening post in France's capital.

The pattern is not unique to Niger. In September 2025, France expelled two officials attached to Mali's embassy in Paris after Malian authorities arrested a French intelligence agent in Bamako and accused him of involvement in an attempted coup. After months in detention, that agent was pardoned and released in August of this year. Notice how these cases work. A junta accuses a foreign power of plotting, detains someone, extracts political theatre, then trades the prisoner back for a diplomatic win. Whatever the truth of each accusation, the methods are the same ones used by every regime that has ever mistaken control for legitimacy.

This matters beyond the Sahel because transnational repression is spreading across our continent like a quiet disease. When governments send intelligence officers abroad to monitor diaspora activists, journalists and opposition leaders, they export their authoritarianism. A Nigerien who flees to Paris to escape arbitrary arrest should not discover that the state he fled has followed him there. Exile is supposed to be the last refuge from tyranny. Juntas are now turning it into another front of the same war.

Let us also be honest about who benefits from this drift. Moscow is the most visible winner. Niger has moved closer to Russia, and the Alliance of Sahel States, bringing together Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, has pooled its defence and foreign policy under military governments that share the same allergy to accountability. They have launched a joint television channel, Tafouk TV, to push their own narrative to African audiences. Russian security personnel have stepped into the gap France left behind, and their presence comes with the same extractive logic we have seen from Wagner from Libya to Central African Republic: guns for access, silence for protection, and little concern for the civilians who pay the bill. Those who bleed are not the generals in Niamey. They are the market women, the students, the farmers and the young people who had hoped that democracy would one day deliver something better than the last coup.

So what must change? The answer begins with the African Union and ECOWAS, which must stop treating coups as an unfortunate detour and start enforcing the suspension and sanctions their own charters demand. The AU's Lomé Declaration and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance are not decorations. They are binding commitments, and the Union should apply them without the selective blindness that has protected too many generals. The UN Security Council should press for the immediate release of Bazoum and a credible, time-bound return to civilian rule, with a transparent electoral calendar. Foreign partners, including France, should match their rhetoric with consistent principles, because a democracy that tolerates authoritarian allies when it is convenient has no moral authority left.

We also have proof that a better path exists. Senegal showed in 2024 that an incumbent's attempt to postpone an election could be defeated by courts, civil society and citizens who refused to surrender their vote. Botswana has built an enduring democracy on accountable institutions and a respected civil service. Mauritius has shown that transparent governance and open markets can lift a nation into prosperity. None of these countries is perfect, but each proves the same truth: strong institutions, an independent judiciary, a free press and property rights protect citizens far better than a man with a rifle and a press release.

The junta in Niamey will keep telling you that defending Niger means silencing Niger's own children. Reject that lie. A country that must spy on its exiles is a country that fears its own people. Demand the release of Mohamed Bazoum. Demand an independent judiciary that can try those who seized power. Demand a dated election, observed by credible international and African monitors. Demand that every Nigerien abroad be free to speak without fear of surveillance, whether in Paris, Abidjan or Accra. Write to your representatives, support the journalists and civil society groups who still document these abuses, and refuse to let sovereignty be used as a costume for oppression. Sovereignty belongs to the people, not to the men who stole the state. We are Africans. Our future will not be written by spies, juntas or foreign patrons. It will be written by citizens who refuse to be watched into silence.

Based on reporting by RFI