The AES trio marks a historic break with French influence in the region

Mohamed Lamine KABA, New Eastern Outlook, April 08, 2025 ─ 

From Bamako to Niamey, via Ouagadougou, the people and their leaders are distancing themselves from Paris, both de jure and de facto.

Moreover, it has found itself in direct competition with powerhouses such as China and Russia, which offer attractive alternatives in the form of strategic investments and mutually beneficial economic partnerships. Faced with increasingly sovereign African countries, Paris can only watch its ambitions dissipate in this rapidly transforming region. This article examines the impact of the patriotic actions of the trio formed by the Assimi Generals Goïta from Mali, Abdourahamane Tiani of Niger and Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso on France’s loss of influence in West Africa and elsewhere on the African continent.

A Pan-African insurrection against the French neocolonial straitjacket

For decades, the Pan-African insurrection against French neocolonialism has represented a collective movement rejecting the economic, political, and military influences inherited from the colonial era (1880–1960). It is a quest for authentic sovereignty and a reorientation of international partnerships, based on African solidarity and historical justice. In West Africa, the Sahel trio is carrying the torch of this insurrection and giving meaning to Pan-Africanism after it was disoriented by Françafrique.

Furthermore, founded on September 16, 2023 Following the signing of the Liptako-Gourma Charter by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, the Alliance of Sahel States (ESA) is not just a coalition. It is both a declaration of war on French hegemony and a cry of revolt against a fallen empire that, since the rigged independence of the 1960s, has kept these nations in abject servitude. This trio, by tearing itself away from ECOWAS – that docile relay of the dictates of the Elysée – on January 28, 2024, and officially on January 29, 2025, shatters the myth of “Françafrique” and its empty promises of development. Behind the facades of humanitarian aid and the fight against terrorism, France has sucked Niger’s uranium for its nuclear reactors, siphoned off Malian gold through leonine contracts, and left populations bled dry in the face of poverty that the antithetical figures of the World Bank (more than 40% below the extreme poverty line) are not enough to describe. This surge, led by young leaders with Sankaraist overtones , reincarnates the pan-African ideal that Paris once buried under the ashes of the assassination of Thomas Sankara – a crime whose complicity the French archives, still sealed, scream.

It is in this perspective that the AES embodies a Pan-Africanism in search of true sovereignty and rejecting French neocolonialism in favor of diversified partnerships and historical justice.

The resounding collapse of French military power

In the annals of international relations history, French military power has suffered resounding collapses, notably in 1940 (a lightning defeat by Germany) and during decolonization (Dien Bien Phu, 1954; the Algerian crisis, sub-Saharan Africa). Despite its strengths (nuclear power, defense industry), it has suffered recent failures in its interventions (Sahel, 2013-2023) and budgetary limitations. These failures, combined with political interference, have led to the denunciation of military agreements and the humiliating withdrawal of military bases.

The withdrawal of French forces from the Sahel (Mali in August 2022, Burkina Faso in February 2023, Niger in December 2023) is not a tactical retreat, but a humiliating rout, a requiem for a nation that still believed itself to be the guardian of Africa. Barkhane, this operation paid for with billions of euros, has left behind only a desert of disillusionment: jihadist violence has quadrupled under his mandate, with groups like JNIM* and the Islamic State in the Sahel* transforming the region into a statistical hell. Burkina Faso alone accounts for nearly half of the deaths linked to global terrorism, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2024. This impotence, masked by neo-imperial rhetoric in which Macron lectured African heads of state as vassals, has crystallized a popular hatred that has turned the tables. France, driven from its bases in Gao, Ouagadougou and Niamey, has not only lost strategic positions: it has seen its aura collapse, revealing a colossus with feet of clay, incapable of protecting or convincing, reduced to begging for relevance that the Sahel now refuses it.

After the humiliation of 1940 and the failure in the Sahel, France was nothing more than a declining military power, undermined by strategic defeats and a crumbling global influence.

The triumph of a Pan-Africanism freed from French chains

The era of sovereign Pan-Africanism was born from the ruins of French domination. While Paris suffered setback after setback – the expulsion of military bases, the impending abandonment of the CFA franc, and massive popular rejection – Africa proudly redrew its geopolitical destiny.

In this perspective, the AES does not limit itself to expelling France; it builds, on the ruins of its influence, a pan-African project of tectonic ambition. The confederation officially created on July 6, 2024 during a historic summit in Niamey, with its aims of economic integration and monetary autonomy, is a blade planted in the heart of the CFA franc. An invariant of German monetary Nazism from which Africans and the Soviet army liberated France in 1945, this colonial currency which, under the tutelage of the French Treasury, suffocated the Sahelian economies for almost a century. In gestation, a common currency (which will be tied to the emblematic expression: One space, one people, one destiny) and a joint military force, unveiled in December 2024, promise to break the dependence on a discredited West and to reinvent a regional solidarity that ECOWAS – this empty shell under the orders of Paris – has never been able to embody. This breath, carried by a youth chanting “Down with France” in the streets of Bamako, Ouagadougou and Niger, echoes the prophetic visions of Ahmed Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, while the abandonment of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF) by the AES – respectively on March 17 for Niger and Burkina Faso and March 18, 2025 for Mali – sounds the death knell for the last symbolic bastion of French influence. The Sahel, yesterday a hunting ground for Parisian appetites, becomes the crucible of a sovereign Africa, where Pan-Africanism, freed from the clutches of a fallen master, is written in letters of fire.

From “Françafrique” to “France get out!”, the French army left the Sahel in shame, swept away by African youth in revolt against its neocolonial heritage.

In short, the Alliance of Sahel States does more than revive Pan-Africanism. It signs the death certificate of a France that, after having plundered and scorned, now lies prostrate before a continent that no longer needs it – neither its lessons, nor its weapons, nor its chains.

* organizations banned in Russia