France’s Retreat from the Sahel: What the End of Françafrique Means for West African Security

In August 2022, the last French Barkhane troops withdrew from Mali after nine years of counterterrorism operations against jihadist groups across the Sahel. In December 2023, France closed its last military base in Niger, expelled after the July 2023 coup brought a military junta to power that had made the removal of French forces a central political demand.^[1] By early 2025, France retained no permanent military presence in any of the three countries it had regarded as the core of its Sahel security architecture: Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger had all expelled French forces, withdrawn from ECOWAS, formed the Alliance of Sahel States, and signed security cooperation agreements with Russia.

This is not a minor diplomatic setback. It is the most significant collapse of French strategic influence in West Africa since decolonisation, and it has happened within a period of roughly three years. Understanding what produced it, what has replaced it, and what the consequences are for regional security requires a clear-eyed analysis that goes beyond the convenient framings offered by both Paris and the military governments that expelled it.

France did not lose the Sahel simply because Russia offered a cheaper security alternative. It lost the Sahel because the model of influence it had sustained for six decades, the system of political relationships, monetary arrangements, military basing agreements, and commercial privileges that analyst’s term Françafrique, had accumulated contradictions that made it politically unsustainable.^[2] The military juntas that expelled French forces did not create the anti-French sentiment they exploited. They mobilised it. And they were able to mobilise it because it was genuine, widespread, and had been building for years.

What Françafrique Actually Was

Françafrique is a term coined by Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1955 to describe the special relationship between France and its African territories. It was later repurposed by critics as a label for the network of political, economic, and security relationships that France maintained with its former colonies after independence: relationships characterised by presidential diplomacy conducted outside formal channels, commercial privileges for French companies in extractive and infrastructure sectors, monetary sovereignty constrained by the CFA franc arrangement, and military presence maintained through bilateral defence agreements that allowed France to intervene in African political crises when French interests were at stake.^[2]

At its height, Françafrique was a system of genuine mutual benefit for its participants, even as it was deeply harmful to the African populations it governed over. French companies received preferential access to uranium, oil, and other resources. African presidents received diplomatic cover, security guarantees, and personal enrichment. France maintained geopolitical influence disproportionate to its actual global power. And African states received a degree of security stability, however conditional and patronage-dependent, that allowed some of them to function better than their governance structures would otherwise have permitted.

The system’s contradictions accumulated over time. France’s military interventions, including Operation Serval in Mali in 2013 and the broader Barkhane counterterrorism mission that followed, were initially welcomed by Sahelian governments and populations facing genuine existential threats from jihadist armed groups.^[1] But the mission’s failure to produce durable security improvement, combined with its visible association with governments that populations regarded as corrupt and unresponsive, gradually transferred the anti-establishment sentiment onto France itself. By 2021, polls in Mali and Burkina Faso showed majority populations holding unfavourable views of the French presence. The juntas that took power had a ready-made political constituency.

9 yrs

Duration of France’s Barkhane mission in the Sahel before expulsion 2013 Operation Serval to 2022 Mali withdrawal — at peak cost of €600m per year

 

3	Sahel countries that expelled French forces within 36 months Mali (2022), Burkina Faso (2023), Niger (2023) — all now members of the Alliance of Sahel States

 

14	Countries using the CFA franc, pegged to the euro and administered partly through the French Treasury BCEAO / BEAC zone members, 2025 — monetary sovereignty debate now the most contested Françafrique legacy

Russia’s Entry: What Wagner and the Africa Corps Actually Offer

The narrative that Russia simply replaced France in the Sahel overstates Russian strategic capacity and understates the agency of the African governments involved. What is accurate is that Russia’s Wagner Group, rebranded as the Africa Corps following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in August 2023, has deployed in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and the Central African Republic, providing the military juntas with a security partner that asks fewer questions about governance and human rights than France or its Western partners.^[3]

The offer Russia makes to Sahelian governments is transactional and explicit: security forces in exchange for mining concessions, diplomatic alignment, and political cover at multilateral forums. In Mali, the Africa Corps has been deployed to operations in the country’s centre and north, where Barkhane had operated. Reports from Human Rights Watch, the UN Panel of Experts, and multiple investigative outlets document serious abuses by Africa Corps personnel and Malian forces operating alongside them, including the Moura massacre of March 2022 in which several hundred civilians were killed.^[3]

The security outcomes of the Russia partnership have not been markedly better than those of the French mission they replaced. Jihadist territorial control in Mali and Burkina Faso has expanded, not contracted, since the expulsions. Civilian casualty rates from armed group attacks remain high across all three Alliance of Sahel States countries. The military juntas have found in the Russia partnership a tool for political survival and resource extraction that is structurally distinct from, but no more effective at, addressing the underlying governance and development failures that produce jihadist recruitment.

“France did not lose the Sahel to Russia. It lost it to a generation of Sahelian citizens who concluded that six decades of Françafrique had produced security for French interests and insecurity for their own. Russia simply arrived when the door was already open.” Africa & Global Power  —  Day 24 Editorial Position

The CFA Franc: Françafrique’s Most Contested Surviving Institution

While the military dimension of Françafrique has collapsed most visibly, its monetary dimension remains intact and is now the site of the most consequential ongoing debate about French influence in West Africa. Fourteen African countries use one of two CFA franc currency zones, both of which are pegged to the euro at a fixed rate and backed by the French Treasury through an operations account arrangement.^[4]

The CFA franc’s defenders argue that the peg provides monetary stability and low inflation in economies that might otherwise face currency crises, and that the arrangement gives CFA zone countries access to French financial guarantees that reduce their borrowing costs. The critics, whose voices have grown considerably louder since the Sahel coups, argue that the peg constrains monetary policy flexibility, that the operations account arrangement involves an obligation to hold 50 percent of foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury, and that the overall system represents a continuing exercise of French monetary sovereignty over nominally independent states.

ECOWAS’s long-discussed plan to introduce a single West African currency, the Eco, was partly conceived as a vehicle for eventually replacing the CFA franc. That plan has been indefinitely deferred, for the structural reasons examined in Day 19. But the political pressure to reform or exit the CFA arrangement has intensified across the region, particularly among younger populations who have come to associate it with the broader system of French influence they have rejected.^[4] How France manages this transition, whether by reforming the arrangement on terms acceptable to African partners or by clinging to the existing architecture until it collapses less gracefully, will be the defining question of the post-Françafrique monetary relationship.

The Security Vacuum and What Fills It

The expulsion of French forces has created a security architecture problem that neither Russia, the Alliance of Sahel States, nor any other actor has credibly solved. The jihadist armed groups operating across the Sahel, principally Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, have exploited the transition period between French withdrawal and the establishment of replacement security arrangements to expand their territorial presence and intensify their operations.^[5]

ECOWAS, which suspended Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger following their respective coups and later faced the formal withdrawal of all three from the bloc, has no operational security presence in the region. The African Union’s G5 Sahel Joint Force, which France helped establish and fund, has effectively ceased to function as a coordinated entity. The United States has reduced its counterterrorism footprint in Niger following the coup, and the diplomatic dispute over the presence of American forces resulted in their withdrawal from the Agélal airbase in 2024.^[6]

The security vacuum is therefore real, substantial, and growing. The populations bearing the consequences of it are not the French taxpayers who funded Barkhane, nor the Russian state that supplies the Africa Corps, nor the military officers who govern in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey. They are the rural communities of the Sahel’s centre and north, whose access to markets, schools, and healthcare has been severed by jihadist territorial control and whose displacement has swelled into one of the continent’s largest and least-reported humanitarian crises.

What France’s African Partners That Remain Are Watching

France’s remaining Sahel partners, principally Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Chad, are navigating the transition with considerable care. Senegal’s new government under President Faye has indicated a desire to renegotiate the terms of France’s bilateral defence agreements, though without the abrupt expulsions that characterised the Alliance of Sahel States approach.^[7] Côte d’Ivoire, where France retains a base at Port-Bouët, has been more cautious, balancing the domestic political cost of visible French presence against the genuine security benefit the relationship provides in an unstable neighbourhood.

France’s response to the collapse of its Sahel position has been a gradual reorientation toward a “partnership of equals” rhetoric that acknowledges, at least in language, the legitimacy of African sovereignty concerns. President Macron’s 2023 speech at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, in which he stated that the era of Françafrique was over, was an explicit attempt to signal a new approach.^[8] Whether that signal translates into a substantive change in the structures through which French influence operates, in the CFA franc, in the bilateral defence agreements, in the commercial relationships that give French companies preferential access to African markets, is the test that African governments and populations will apply to the new rhetoric.

Verdict: The End of Françafrique Is Not the End of External Interference. It Is the Beginning of a More Contested Space.

France’s retreat from the Sahel does not represent the end of external interference in West African security. It represents a transition from one pattern of external engagement, organised around a French-centred system of political and military relationships, to a more contested multipolar landscape in which Russia, Turkey, the Gulf states, China, and a weakened France all compete for influence in a region whose governments are simultaneously more assertive about sovereignty and more dependent on external security partners than at any previous point since independence.

The key question for West African security is not which external power fills the space France has vacated. It is whether African states and regional institutions can build the domestic security capacity, governance legitimacy, and economic foundations that would allow them to manage their own security challenges without the structural dependency on external patrons that Françafrique represented. The Sahel’s experience with both the French and Russian models of security partnership suggests that external forces can suppress symptoms of instability without addressing causes. The causes are governance, poverty, and the absence of state presence in the community’s jihadist groups have filled.^[9]

Addressing those causes requires African political will, African institutional capacity, and the fiscal resources to build both. It requires, in other words, exactly the kind of long-term investment in governance and development that neither Barkhane nor the Africa Corps was designed to provide. The end of Françafrique clears the space for something better. Whether something better actually fills that space depends on choices that African governments, not external powers, will have to make.^[10]