Sahel crisis: Military coup adds to chaos but may also offer hope

An intrepid traveller would now be hard-pressed to traverse the African continent at its widest point, passing from the Red Sea to near the Atlantic, while staying within a country that is not being torn apart by a civil war or recovering from one, has not suffered a military coup since 2021, or is not a failed state occupied by a toxic mix of rapacious politicians, militia and Russian mercenaries.

- Jason Burke

The traveller's route would take them from the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray, at war until last year, then across Sudan, where an internal power struggle within a repressive regime has metastasised into violence, and into the Central African Republic, now seen by many as the best example of the worst that can befall a nation.

After this comes a difficult choice. A northern route could go via Chad, ruled by a 39-year-old soldier who seized power in 2021 when his father was killed in battle after three decades in power, and Mali, racked by insurgencies, Islamic extremists and Russian mercenaries hired by the second military ruler to take power in recent years. Another itinerary could take in Cameroon, convulsed by a civil war, and Burkina Faso, which suffered two military coups in 2022 alone. Either way, our traveller would need - along with some expensive insurance and much luck the means to cross the state of Niger, which has become the latest country to fall prey to what now appears to be endemic instability.

Quite what triggered this upheaval in the Sahel remains unclear. Only months ago, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, described Niger as a "model of democracy". This was based on the success of its president, Mohamed Bazoum, a broadly pro-western moderniser who won more than 55% of the vote in elections in 2021 to become the country's first leader to take power peacefully since independence from France in 1960.