* Mikaela Nhondo Erskog is an educator and researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. She holds a master’s degree in history from the University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR) and a bachelor’s degree in humanities from the same university.
We contacted Tricontinental regarding their dossier on the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), titled “Sahel Seeks Sovereignty.” Erskog, one of the contributors to the dossier, responded to our questions with candor.
The alliance, composed of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, has come to the fore not only through nationalizations and mass popular mobilizations that have unleashed tremendous social energy, but also by drawing the ire of imperialism.
This alliance’s geography of sovereignty is shaped by multiple, intersecting factors: natural ones, such as encompassing a significant share of the world’s uranium reserves; military ones, such as hosting key U.S. regional drone bases (which were shut down after the establishment of AES for being deemed incompatible with sovereignty); and political ones, such as embodying the spirit of a decolonial uprising. It both possesses and generates these dynamics, while also carrying the legacy of Thomas Sankara, whose story upended the former French colony of Upper Volta and gave rise to Burkina Faso, the country of upright people.
Here are Mikaela Nhondo Erskog’s responses to our questions on AES:
1- We have seen once again through the West Sahel that resistance against French oppression is rising in Africa; French imperialism is losing blood and being expelled from its former colonies. Power shifts are also seen in regionalizing wars in different parts of the world. While it is true that French imperialism is losing power specifically in the West Sahel, how are other imperialist countries taking position?
France’s on-the-ground drawdown happened: the last French troops left Niger on 22 December 2023, ending a decade-long deployment and closing a chapter of Paris’s counter-insurgency footprint across the central Sahel. As that model collapsed, the U.S. also pivoted. After Niamey repudiated the SOFA, Washington shut down its compound at Air Base 101 (7 July 2024) and completed the pull-out from Air Base 201 (5 August 2024), with AFRICOM confirming completion in September 2024 – a clear shift to lighter, more relocatable force posture and leverage via political-financial conditionalities. The U.S. security posture is pivoting from the Sahel core to the Gulf of Guinea coast. Washington is now concentrating on “coastal partners” – notably Guinea and Benin – as hubs for basing, ISR and training. The U.S. has begun modernising an airfield in Benin and expanded special-forces advising and border-security training there; in effect, Benin could become what Niger was: a reconnaissance outpost supporting partner-led operations while keeping the U.S. footprint light and relocatable.
This re-posturing happens against a deteriorating security picture in the border belts. With Western air and recon support gone, ISGS, JNIM and allied extremist formations have more operational freedom and are probing south toward the Gulf of Guinea. That’s not abstract: northern Benin has suffered deadly attacks – including April 2025 strikes that killed dozens of Beninese soldiers – illustrating how the fight is spilling out of the Sahel into coastal states that lack sufficient capacity to deal with it.
At the same time, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have consolidated as the AES (Alliance des États du Sahel) deepening their own coordinated economic, political and security cooperation as well as security cooperation with others. For the AES, Russia’s “Africa Corps” – the formal successor to Wagner – is an explicit alternative to Western partnerships. Moscow’s offer blends trainers, kit, and political cover; it merges with the AES’s bid to run security autonomously from ECOWAS frameworks that were seen as punitive.
There’s also an Ankara angle. Türkiye has emerged as an opportunistic winner – Bayraktar TB2 drone sales to Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, private-firm training, and a surge in commercial presence. Turkish builders delivered the new terminal at Niamey’s Diori-Hamani airport and are tied to hospital projects in Bamako, while near-daily air linkshelp fill gaps left by curtailed French routes. This is classic Turkish state-commercial synergy: defence exports open doors that construction, logistics and aviation quickly walk through.
Looking ahead, the Trump-era policy horizon adds uncertainty. There is a potential “America First” retrenchment: USAID cuts, curbs on “democracy assistance”, even AFRICOM restructuring (fold-under EUCOM) – moves that would further shrink U.S. presence and influence just as Russia, Türkiye (and to a lesser extent China) gain maneuvering room.
The bottom line: the West is recasting strategy around coastal resilience and limited cooperation, but outcomes will hinge on whether these states can hold the line without robust air/ISR forces, and whether the AES uses its new leverage to institutionalise sovereign development – payments, public stakes in minerals/energy, and regional standards – so that any external partnership, Western or non-Western, is bent to popular mandates rather than dependency rotation.
2- Macron’s rhetoric against the alliance continues with an escalating aggressive tone. The legacies left by other imperialist states in the region are also clear. However, it is quite visible that sympathy for Russia and the People’s Republic of China is increasing in protests and diplomatic relations, and closer ties are being built with these countries. However, some people claim that this is nothing more than a change in the subject of colonial relations.
It is also important to note that serious dynamics of transformation are emerging step by step not only in the West but also in the Horn and the North.
How do you see this transformation for the peoples of the continent?
Let me start with a scene. At the solidarity conference in November 2024, alongside the AES flags, someone hoisted a Russian flag, and the boy holding it wore a tracksuit jacket with the Chinese flag. It felt like a big, unfiltered rejection the West – the crowd saying out loud what many had whispered for years: we’re done being told there is no alternative. That moment captures two layers of what’s happening now. First, a popular refusal of the old order; second, the work of statecraft to turn that refusal into concrete capabilities.
From the angle of political economy, Tricontinental’s Hyper-Imperialism (2024) study (which I collaborated in producing) helps explain why the flags matter but also why flags aren’t enough. Hyper-imperialism names a system where domination isn’t only about troops; it’s a dense web of finance, standards, sanctions, lawfare, data capture, and narrative power that keeps the Global South subordinate even when the old colonial uniforms are gone. In that system, “choosing partners” becomes meaningful only if you change the terms – local-content floors, public stakes, tech transfer, payments reform, and regional standards that prevent value drain. That’s precisely the institutional turn our Sahel Seeks Sovereignty dossier urges for the AES.
On the ground, you can see why people reach for Moscow as a security counter-weight and Beijing as an infrastructure and industrial partner. When France and the U.S. pulled back, Russia committed to back the AES joint force and regularised its presence via the Africa Corps (the post-Wagner formation), explicitly positioning itself as an alternative to Western “partnerships” that had become synonymous with conditionalities and vetoes. In 2024–25, Russian personnel deployed or re-flagged in the Sahel and Moscow publicly pledged equipment and training for the three governments. That is an unmistakable political signal, whatever one’s judgment of efficacy.
On the development side, China’s role is concrete. The 1,950-km Niger–Benin pipeline, built and operated by CNPC, took Niger’s first crude exports to sea in May 2024, survived a fraught summer of sabotage and cross-border spats, and resumed exports in August 2024 after negotiations – proof that a landlocked AES country can physically break to tidewater on its own terms. In Mali, the state used the 2023 mining code to raise its stake in the Goulamina lithium project to 35% in a 2024–25 reshuffle with Ganfeng, tied to a spodumene plant – a rare African example of translating battery-metal endowments into public revenue and at least a first rung of processing. These are not logos on a podium; they’re dated, checkable steps that expand fiscal and industrial room for manoeuvre.
So is this “just swapping patrons”? It can be, if states only rotate suppliers. But it doesn’t have to be – and that’s the hinge. The Hyper-Imperialism study argues the core of domination now is systemic; breaking it requires institutions that trap more value at home and in the region. The AES confederation treaty (Niamey, 6 July 2024) points in that direction: common security, payments and finance, public stakes in minerals and energy, standards, and logistics that bind the three economies into something more than a collection of export enclaves. If those institutions advance, then the boy with the Russian flag and the Chinese jacket was not celebrating new masters; he was signalling a bargaining strategy – use competing external ties to build sovereign capacity rather than dependency with a different flag.
In other words: the visible sympathy for Russia and China comes from lived experience – people saw Western “security” without security and “development” without industry. The transformation I see – across the Sahel but also in the Horn and North Africa – is the move from performing alignment to engineering autonomy. That’s the metric I use: not who stands on the reviewing stand, but whether there are more transformer stations, clinics, grain silos, generic drug lines, and processing plants under public direction next year than last. If the AES leverages Russian security support and Chinese industrial finance through regional institutions that lock in local content and tech transfer, then this moment becomes more than a protest gesture – it becomes the architecture of sovereignty that Hyper-Imperialism says is necessary to outflank a 21st-century empire
3- If we recall the speech given by Al-Hassan, Secretary General of the Nigerian School Union, at the November 2024 Conference, he said to the Alliance’s leaders, “We support you as long as you are for the people. Otherwise, we will fight you as we have fought the colonialists.” The deep exploitation of Africa by imperialism and the national liberation movements influenced by socialism, as well as Pan-African movements, have always co-existed. This struggle also created leaders such as Sankara, Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Lumumba. This is why Traore, in particular, is compared to Sankara and other African heroes as a figure. Do you think the leaders of the Western Sahel alliance countries embrace this responsibility/path?
We have to start with what this cycle of power shifts actually is and what consitutes them. Firstly, the head of the West African Peoples’ Organisation, Philippe Toyo Noudjenoume Archives, described these recent coups (starting in 2020) as “military intervention for sovereignty” – and it emerged from years of popular mobilisation against insecurity and neocolonial tutelage, not from palace intrigue. From 2017 to 2022, people marched against the CFA franc, blocked French convoys in Kaya, Burkina Faso (Nov 2021), denounced Bouti’s wedding-party airstrike in Mali (Jan 2021), and – after massacres like Ogossagou in MAli – forced the political question: who protects civilians, and on whose terms? Those streets set the red lines that later constrained the juntas.
Secondly, these coup leaders suggest a different class interest, not the “colonel coups” that usually emerge out of elite factionalism and opportunism, but “captain coups” of people closer aligned to the mass sentiment. Their class links and life-paths run through rural districts, market towns, public universities, and the same austerity-wracked spaces as their supporters. It’s why a figure like Traoré resonates – his register is explicitly anti-imperialist and popular-sovereigntist, not technocratic “stability” talk. These interventions are different from the 1960s–80s coup playbook. Then, militaries often overthrew anti-imperialist governments and anchored themselves in foreign patronage. Today’s leaderships, to varying degrees, are breaking with external vetoes, asserting regional autonomy through the AES confederation, and spelling out political intent in official communiqués saying things like: “decisions will be made in Bamako, Ouagadougou, Niamey – not Brussels or Paris”. It’s an ambition to reverse dependency – even if the administrative capacity to match it is still uneven.
Thirdly, the role of the grassroots organisations’ patticipation – whilst uneven in the three countries – has been central. The mass fronts that ringed embassies and bases in Niamey did not mobilise to cheer a junta; they mobilised to impose terms – eject foreign garrisons; publish the deals; return value. That’s the logic behind the students’ line in Niamey: “We support you as long as you are for the people; if not, we will fight you as we fought the colonialists.” This conditional mandate is the single most important accountability mechanism in the Sahel right now.
Lastly, we are seeing some attempts at nation-building projects beyond the hard security frame. This is where I look for Sankara-style responsibility. If we’re serious about sovereignty as more than a slogan, Mali’s current turn is instructive. Mali’s National Strategy for Emergence and Sustainable Development 2024–2033 – grounded in the foresight report ‘A New Mali: A Vision for 2063’ – roots renewal in three civilisational pillars: the Manden Charter (1236), the Massina Empire’s legal codes (1818–1862), and the Timbuktu manuscript traditions. The point isn’t heritage for display; it’s a working grammar for statecraft: social justice, collective governance, environmental stewardship, and legal checks on power. That’s why the Vision talks about forging a “new Malian individual (Maliden kura)” – a citizen formed for sovereignty – so reconstruction is both political and civilisational. So what? It mandates a strong, economically sovereign state asserting control over strategic sectors, built through popular participation and a “new endogenous development model” (Mali Kura Taasira) across governance, education, justice, and economic policy – a clear break from donor templates by putting cultural integrity and sovereignty at the centre of development.
And Burkina Faso is translating that same spirit into practical governance. That’s not PR; it’s curriculum, teacher training, and administrative guidance designed to re-knit a battered social fabric. Economically, domestic savings mobilisation (CDI-BF) is about funding development on national terms; the state has revived dormant industries, expanded agro-processing (tomato, cotton), and trialled bioclimatic school designs so classrooms remain workable in Sahel heat. In Aug 2024 the state nationalised Boungou and Wahgnion and, across late 2024–2025, consolidated assets into SOPAMIB while enforcing a 15% free-carried state stake in the new code and threatening to withdraw non-compliant permits. That’s an institutional, not performative, turn.
The path is uneven but real. The street created the mandate; the AES gave it a regional form; and now the state apparatus is being refitted – somewhere between assertive and improvisational – to retain value and deliver basics. If these governments publish contracts, seat unions and women’s/youth organisations in oversight, and convert resource gains into clinics, power, irrigation, and schools, the Sankara comparison moves from metaphor to method. If they slide into opacity or substitution of flags without social delivery, the same movements that opened the door will close it. That’s the dialectic – and the guarantee.
4- It is well known that ECOWAS still has some influence in the same region, despite its influence decreasing. Nigeria also has significant military power in the region. At this point, is it possible for these two alliances to coexist?
Coexistence is possible if we abandon the fiction that West Africa must choose between a single, unreformable regionalism and none at all. Variable-geometry regionalism already exists worldwide. A pragmatic path would be:
- Economic interoperability despite political disagreement: keep cross-border trade corridors open; mutual recognition of standards; joint disease surveillance and meteorological services.
- Energy and payments cooperation: even with political rifts, interconnectors and clearing mechanisms reduce costs for citizens; nobody benefits from duplicated infrastructure.
- Security de-escalation channels: a standing forum of chiefs of defence to prevent border incidents and miscalculation.
- ECOWAS reform on sovereignty clauses: move away from regime-change mandates toward people-centred development compacts – public investment coordination, food reserves, and shock buffers.
Nigeria’s domestic needs – jobs, power reliability, farmer security – converge with Sahelian priorities. Cooperation on rail, fertilizer, and electricity swaps could anchor coexistence on deliverables rather than rhetoric.
5- Dozens of reports are floating around on social media about mines and pharmaceutical companies etc. being nationalized. It would be bold to say that the alliance will adopt classic socialist central planning right away. But would it be bold to say that there is a tendency towards socialist economic policies?
Mao and Fidel only formally declared the socialist character of the state project a few years after their respective revolutions. Revolutionary leaders like Amilcar Cabral did not publically declare himself a socialist, yet his analysis and practice – centered class, culture, and production for people’s needs – sit comfortably within the socialist tradition. I’m cautious about insisting that today’s leaders adopt a label; names can divide where practice can unite. At the same time, it’s fair to say that certain choices create room for socialist ways of working, whether or not we call them that.
Seen in that light, the Sahel’s direction looks like a sovereign mixed economy oriented to public purpose, not classic command planning, but a toolkit many on the left would recognise:
- Resource sovereignty with follow-through. Public stakes (“free carry” plus paid options), selective nationalisations where justified, tighter audits-and in-country processing targets so value is captured beyond extraction.
- Development finance for production. Public lenders that back domestic value-added and jobs; payments and FX arrangements that reduce leakage and keep earnings circulating locally.
- Lowering the cost of essentials. Grain boards, storage and logistics to stabilise food prices; essential-medicines strategies and phased local pharma; universal electrification anchored in public grids-all translating sovereignty into everyday affordability.
- Learning by building. Local-content floors with genuine tech transfer, apprenticeship pathways, and public R&D tied to mines, energy, and agro-industry-because sovereignty needs capability, not just ownership.
- Organised participation. Budget hearings, social seats on sector councils, and union/community oversight of state firms and big concessions, so “for the people” becomes a lived governance practice.
Is the AES already there? Partly, and unevenly. We can point to firmer state stakes, code enforcement, domestic-savings mobilisation, new agro-processing, and values-led education reforms-real steps that move policy closer to social needs.
So my view is gentle but clear: let’s not force declarations; let’s nurture content. If AES governments keep expanding public command in strategic sectors, reduce the cost of living through de-commodified essentials, and embed popular oversight in how revenues are used, they will be opening genuine socialist space – with or without the word. That feels true to Cabral’s spirit: judge by material gains and class effects, and keep the door open for broad, hopeful coalitions.
6- What should we learn from this struggle of the West Sahel peoples?
Sovereignty is physical infrastructure. The Niger–Benin pipeline shows how a landlocked country reaches tidewater and sells crude; when flows resumed in August 2024, it wasn’t a slogan – it was millions of barrels moving, revenues booked, bargaining power gained.
Regionalism from below can force elite re-alignment: the Niamey confederation treaty and the formal ECOWAS exit (29 Jan 2025) happened under mass pressure for dignity and development, paired with a program for common institutions rather than isolation.
Vigilance keeps leaders honest: SOMAÏR’s nationalization (June 2025) only becomes a win if contracts are public and operations steady – hence the miners’ union stating production would continue.
A final lesson is sequencing. The dossier argues for payments/finance reform, standards, and logistics to come with resource policy so revenue bumps don’t leak out via imports and FX drain. That means grain boards and cold-chain for food security, essential-drugs strategies for generics, and rail/power interconnectors – the mundane hardware of sovereignty that converts anti-imperialist posture into schools, clinics and jobs.
7- Is there anything else you would like to add?
Despite the symbolic and strategic gains to date, the AES project will stand or fall on institutions. The hinge is whether the alliance can build durable bodies, foster real economic integration, and align internal goals with regional stability so that sovereignty becomes routine rather than episodic. I read the new initiatives – regional coordination on resource management; proposals for a Sahelian currency; an AES passport for free movement; power-grid and transport interconnection; a standing joint force; and an explicit turn to South–South cooperation – as first steps toward a development paradigm rooted in sovereignty, self-reliance, and popular participation. None of this is guaranteed; the paradigm is fragile and capacity is uneven. But it marks a decisive rejection of the imperial command model and opens a political horizon that resonates with the emancipatory aspirations of the Global South. For me, that’s the test going forward: turn big words into everyday institutions that people can feel – payments that clear, borders that work for workers, standards that lift wages, and public services that arrive on time.
And none of it will hold without solidarity from below. Not just state-to-state gestures, but people’s solidarity: unions coordinating wage and safety standards across borders; farmers’ and women’s organisations shaping food and health systems; student exchanges and technical training that move skills, not just speeches; media networks that defend truth against disinformation; and practical support – medicine, seed, parts, power and payments – when one country is squeezed. If sovereignty is to be real, the people must feel it – and help build it – together.
