Crisis of French power in West Africa

By Maryam Hadi

On May 11- 12, 2026, France sponsored the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. This was actually the 29th France-Africa Summit (re-branded for Nairobi as the Africa Forward Summit), yet the first to take place in a non-Francophone African country. The French insisted that a new era has arrived, one supposedly beyond the old paternalism of Franc-Afrique. But holding the summit in Kenya was not an innocent geographical change, it reflects the profound crisis of French power in West Africa and the Sahel.

The summit unfolded amid growing criticism over a recent defense agreement between France and Kenya alongside the arrival of hundreds of French troops into Kenya. The language of sovereignty in the conference was mocked by the actuality of foreign military consolidation and economic dependency.

Yet in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, the general mood is for sovereignty and against French neocolonialism. Popular uprisings and military ruptures in the entire Sahel have led to the dismantling of long-standing French military arrangements, and rejection of the political architecture through which Paris maintained its dominance. The new governments expelled French troops and terminated defense agreements while the force of popular anger destroyed the ideological legitimacy of French tutelage. These countries now have consolidated their unity against neocolonialism through the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).

Since that consolidation, France has pivoted eastwards to Anglophone Africa because it has been unable to restore authority in the Sahel, even through the use of military threats via Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States. It has now sought to rebrand itself as a partner of African sovereignty rather than as a custodian of neocolonialism.

Meanwhile, the forces of hyper-imperialism – France, the United Kingdom, and the United States – have retreated to the edges of the region. There is now a US military presence in Ghana and Nigeria, and a British military base in Kenya. Soon, there will be a French military base in Kenya. This military encirclement provides the Global North with the infrastructure to intervene at will against the Sahel states.

  It is against this backdrop that France sponsored this summit which none of the Sahel leaders attended.The French President Emmanuel Macron stood in front of more than thirty African heads of state in attendance and announced: ‘’We are the Pan-Africanists.’’  Analysts described this as an extraordinarily obnoxious comment that was sandwiched between bureaucratic banalities about ‘growth,’ ‘innovation,’ and ‘partnerships.’

In an open letter, Togolese writer, Farida Bemba Nabourema, responded that ‘’Pan-Africanism is, at its most fundamental, the political philosophy that said No to everything France spent three centuries saying yes to: slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism.This philosophy, born in the holds of the slave ships, in the plantation fields of Saint-Domingue by people who believe that African and African-descended people deserved to govern themselves, cannot be laundered by Macron’s charm offensive.’’

However, beyond the closed doors of the Africa Forward Summit, another Africa gathered for the Pan-African Summit Against Imperialism (PASAI) at the United Kenya Club, the first institution in colonial Nairobi that permitted membership to non-white people. This was a people’s counter-Summit that played host to genuine Pan-Africanists and internationalists who articulated a different future for the continent.

The organizers said that the Africa Forward Summit was nothing other than ‘re-colonization,’ with the new language merely updating older systems of extraction. The minerals required for Europe’s energy transition, the land required for carbon-offset schemes and the cheap labour necessary for transitional profitability to continue to flow out of Africa, leaving the continent with only poverty, debt, and ecological devastation.

“We shall not host our executioners,’’ PASAI’s declaration said, “We shall not be the barracks of colonial domination.’’ These words condense more than a century of African resistance against colonialism and neocolonialism. They speak not only to French power but to wider neocolonial structure that continues to subordinate African development to the needs of international finance capital.

Africa’s sovereignty cannot be negotiated in luxury hotels between Northern political elites, multinational executives, and local custodians of dependency. Sovereignty is not produced in communiques drafted behind closed doors but built through the democratic participation and organization of workers, peasants, students, and women. Beyond flag independence, genuine freedom requires an agenda to control resources, the direction of social development, and geopolitical alliances shaped by developing countries in the South.

France now seeks to reorganize its relationship with Africa through diplomatic realignment and finance capital, with sections of Africa’s ruling class willing to present dependence as modernization while millions of working people on the continent confront inflation, unemployment, land dispossession, debt, austerity, and expanding repression.

The critique from PASAI carried a particular weight in Nairobi because Kenya itself was forged through one of the great anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. The memory of the Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960) still lives beneath the polished language of investment summits and diplomatic buntings. The living legacy of anti-colonial resistance across Africa remains a decisive force in the struggle for sovereignty and genuine freedom.

The terms in the Africa Forward Summit official declaration came from a tepid non-governmental liberalism: co-development, digital transformation, green industrialization, mutual respect, inclusive growth, reform of global governance, and financial architecture. But beneath this NGO liberalism lays the familiar realities of imperial power: extractive investment, debt dependency, and, most dramatically, military agreements.

• Hadi writes from Kaduna.