In 2005, then president Mamadou Tandja scoffed at the very suggestion that there was widespread famine in Niger, even while international aid agencies like Goal were fanning out across his country, delivering food and medical assistance to tens of thousands of starving men, women and children.
The off-hand callousness of his remarks gave some indication of where the welfare of fellow citizens ranked on Tandja’s list of priorities.
At the time, Niger was ranked by the UN as the poorest country in the world, despite having some of the richest mineral deposits on the continent of Africa.
Today it is still officially the poorest country in the world, even though it receives billions of dollars every year from the major international companies who mine its minerals, and still further billions in direct aid from the EU and the UN.
Recently Tandja introduced legislation by diktat that would, in effect, lead to his becoming president-for-life. When the Niger parliament protested, he suspended it, and likewise the Niger constitutional court.
Tandja first emerged to lead his country with high-blown promises of political reform and fiscal efficacy, but nothing much changed in the daily lives of his citizens. The new leader, whatever his original intentions, soon developed a taste for power and untold wealth, to the extent where he moved to ensure that he would hold on to both for life. Now he has been toppled in a military coup.
It is a pattern all too familiar to peoples right across Africa. It is also a sure bet that whoever replaces Tandja, and regardless of the promises they make, the ordinary people of Niger will still be left living in rags – no matter how many multi-billion dollar investments in their country, or how much international aid money is poured in.
This, sadly, is how it will remain for the poor benighted peoples of such countries while the west continues, either by action or inaction, to pander to and prop-up the various dictators and crooks who lord it over them.
John O’Shea
Goal
Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin
