WESTERN analysts are running out of words to describe the growing number of cases of African soldiers peacefully leading bloodless military coups overthrowing decadent regimes propped-up by France across the continent over the long decades since French colonies gained their independence in the latter half of the 20th Century.
The latest popular changes in Burkina Faso, Gabon, Mali and Niger were all heartily welcomed by citizens, including opposition parties.

They have long ensured abhorrence of the likes of the French multinational oil company TOTAL, that’s been extracting in Gabon for the past 90 years, while the family of deposed ex-President Ali Bongo ruled for over 50 years, France and its African crony leaders together draining and squandering public funds while Gabonese starved from hunger.
Likewise, France has been depending on Niger to provide much of the uranium for its nuclear power, but Niger is largely without electricity, which it sources from neighboring Nigeria.

However, unlike the past, when coups were usually carried out by US and European-trained soldiers, the new breed of African military leaders is mainly home-trained, highly intelligent and well-schooled in French and international political and diplomatic strategies and tactics.

Their language differs greatly from their predecessors, stressing on protecting and preserving national resources, enforcing respect for sovereignty and eliminating institutions created to ensure and preserve permanent exploitation of former colonies decades after independence.

Burkina Faso, Gabon, Mali and Niger are all up against an arrogant refusal by France to accept that its former African colonies are in hot rebellion, Paris simply refusing to recognize the realities and instead fanning flames of possible military intervention, conflict and loss of lives on all sides.
In Burkina Faso, French troops ordered to depart are destroying everything – from motor cars to barracks to weapons – to ensure they leave nothing behind that works.

In Niger, the army is protecting the expelled but reluctant French Ambassador’s residence from being attacked by thousands, while France is praying for any excuse to justify intervention in the name of protecting its citizens or ‘interests’ there.
Paris is also praying that pro-Western regimes in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) will provide the fig leaves for African-led military intervention in Niger with ‘international’ support.

But Burkina Faso and Mali have given the clear message that any attack on Niger will also be seen as one on them.
In Nigeria, with the strongest contingent in the military forces ECOWAS can command and deploy, the parliament has voted against any military intervention in Niger.
Similarly, the populations of neighbouring nations, especially in border regions, already suffering the difficulties created by border closures and sanctions, fear for the worse if ECOWAS was to do the West’s bidding by invading any of the freed nations in transition.

Africa’s new military leaders are not in the tradition of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe, but they think and talk more like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, Jerry Rawlings and Thomas Sankara, whose common denominator was putting their people and nations first — and seriously confronting the entrenched colonial order after independence.

The leader of Burkina Faso – the youngest on the continent – best represents the new thinking, insisting (for example) that if France, Europe and the USA want to continue using Africa’s uranium for nuclear energy, they should establish nuclear plants in Africa.

He also says desperate Africans should be discouraged from risking their lives boarding rickety boats to seek better in Europe and instead encouraged to march on the national palaces where their decadent rulers live in extreme luxury.
Today’s younger African political leaders are also not about to hide their preparedness to seek assistance from Russia, if ECOWAS, African Union (AU), French or NATO troops enter, even under UN cover.

Unwilling to accept the stark new realities in Africa, France and other Western nations continue barking up a wrong tree and demanding the impossible — like immediate release of deposed dictators and return to dependence on the same unfree and unfair election machines they created to keep their families winning every poll, as in the case of the Bongo dynasty in Gabon.

Indeed, what’s turning out in Africa in 2023 is what former African Union (AU) Ambassador to the United States, Arikana Chihombori-Qao, exposed a couple years ago, when she revealed that France had tied its former African colonies to continuing post-independence exploitation through several outrageous agreements.

Those included unfair pacts for compulsory use of France’s national currency after independence and depositing their foreign earnings in the French national bank, with only limited and conditional access to 20%, while Paris invests the African nations’ deposits profitably.

Mali has cancelled such agreements that ensured French companies continued to exclusively extract all the natural resources on unfair terms — from oil to uranium and gold, plus other precious natural resources.
Any look at the map of any African nation today will still reflect the straight lines drawn at the Bandung Conference in Germany in 1885, when the continent was carved-up and shared between Europe and the USA.

What’s actually happening today is not a re-drawing of the lines dividing the continent, but of lines of engagement between former colonial masters and a brand-new breed of African leaders committed to finally confronting the former colonial powers.
France will eventually be forced to back-down; and the UN will also have to withdraw its tens of thousands of so-called Peace Keeping Forces (PKFs) that have miserably failed to keep any peace or protect citizens in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso – and now in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where 50 persons protesting against PKFs were killed by soldiers last week.

Yes, it’s another dawn of yet another new day in yet another part of Africa, very-much akin to the so-called ‘color revolutions’ of the ‘Arab Spring’ that the West initiated and supported from Tunisia to Egypt – only this time, it’s everything of a blooming ‘French Spring’ in Africa!