What Are the Sahel's Civilian Prime Ministers For?
Mali's Choguel Maïga is out as PM...but did he ever wield real power?
On November 16, Mali’s then-Prime Minister Choguel Maïga gave a provocative speech in which he questioned his own superiors, namely Mali’s military authorities, over the dragging if not moribund “transition” they are supposedly overseeing. A key line: “Today, there exists no debate on the question; the Prime Minister is reduced to contenting himself with press rumors or a dicey interpretation of the acts and gestures of the Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization.” Maïga was fired four days later and replaced with General Abdoulaye Maïga (no relation I’m aware of), who had previously been the very Minister that Choguel Maïga had mentioned. There was also a moderately sized cabinet reshuffle, which consisted largely of sacking allies of Choguel Maïga; tellingly, two key junta members retain their posts as ministers of Defense and National Reconciliation, respectively, while General Abdoulaye Maïga retains his post as Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization in addition to his new post as Prime Minister.
The politics of this moment in Mali deserve standalone analysis but I thought I would instead talk here about the wider regional pattern. The Sahelian countries of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad all saw military coups between 2020 and 2023, as did nearby Guinea in 2021. And in all five countries, newly minted military rulers appointed civilian prime ministers, something I covered a while back at the old blog. Mali now becomes the first of these countries* to move towards an even more militarized government arrangement, although there are still prominent civilians in the new government as well.
What explains the preference that has held in Mali until now, and that seems to still hold elsewhere in the Sahel, for appointing civilians as prime ministers? Why have juntas not just appointed fellow soldiers to these key posts? I’m speculating, of course, but I can think of a few interconnected hypotheses:
Disciplining the “political class”: In all five countries, longstanding political parties and career politicians had been on the scene since the era of democratization (or, in the cases of Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Chad, pseudo-democratization) in the 1990s. Fatigue with that political class helps explain why the 2020s-era juntas were greeted with serious popular support. But by appointing civilians as prime ministers and to other government posts, juntas could show the political class that there were rewards for collaboration - namely, status in the present and hopes of future electoral success - just as there were costs for resisting, up to and including imprisonment and death.
Using civilians in public relations and diplomacy: Each junta, upon taking power, has promised a relatively rapid transition, except for Niger, the last of the five countries to fall to a coup. Civilians were, at first, a kind of “fig leaf” camouflaging the juntas’ seeming intentions to remain in power. Yet it has been clear since 2021 that the Malian junta, the first of the five to stage its coup, did not intend to carry through a rapid transition to civilian rule. The other juntas gave off a similar vibe upon taking power (and the juntas were learning from and communicating with one another). So from 2021 on, that “fig leaf” was less and less plausible - as time went on, there was not much to hide about the juntas’ will to power. Yet there was still some element of public relations at play; the juntas have paid vague lip service to the idea of transition.** Meanwhile, amid that lip service, civilian prime ministers and civilian foreign ministers have been useful tools for juntas, particularly in international fora and in diplomatic settings. Niger’s civilian Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine, for example, was a key interlocutor with the United States as negotiations over continued basing privileges broke down.
Managing the machinery of state: Having taken control of the state, the Sahel’s soldiers appear to need civilians to help them run it. The prime ministers and ministers brought in by the juntas often have long CVs, suggesting a fair amount of know-how when it comes to overseeing bureaucracies. Some prime ministers have been politicians, while others have been former ministers - Niger’s Zeine, for example, is a former finance minister and chief of staff to President Mamadou Tandja (in office 1999-2010). In Chad, the junta’s first choice for prime minister was Albert Pahimi Padacké, a veteran insider. Padacké had long alternated between running as a kind of loyal opposition candidate in presidential elections and then returning to government to serve President Idriss Deby (in power 1990-2021) in top posts. Padacké then reprised that pattern under Deby’s son Mahamat, author of the 2021 coup and Chad’s head of state ever since. Pliant civilians have helped the juntas keep civilian bureaucracies running without completing militarizing the state.
Pursuing continuity and/or rupture with the past: Part of the juntas’ own politics involves both hearkening back to earlier eras and breaking with their own immediate predecessors. The continuity is most evident in Chad, obviously, but the junta in Mali has in some ways gestured back to the era of military leader Moussa Traoré, the junta in Burkina Faso has evoked military leader Thomas Sankara, and the junta in Niger has some connections to the administration of soldier-turned-President Tandja. Bringing in members of former administrations and eras can help solidify those images and connections. Meanwhile, empowering opponents of recently overthrown civilian presidents, or at least alternatives to them, can help cement the sense of a break or even, in the juntas’ telling, a kind of national self-reinvention and awakening.
Having someone to fire: Juntas aren’t going to fire themselves, obviously, unless there is some kind of internal power struggle. But having civilian officials can come in handy when there is a need for deflecting criticism, shaking things up, or simply keeping politicians and the public guessing. Some Sahelian military rulers have stuck by one civilian prime minister (Choguel Maïga, in fact, had a fairly long run under the circumstances, clocking more than three years in his post), but others have cycled through multiple prime ministers already, as has occurred in Guinea. Sometimes the sacking of prime ministers reflects intra-cabinet tensions, or in Choguel Maïga’s case tensions between a junta and its prime minister, but cycling through prime ministers can also be politically advantageous for juntas - Chad’s, for example, twice brought key opposition politicians into the post of prime minister, arguably to defang and domesticate them. And the ability to fire someone is also a reminder, to the political class and to the public, of where the power lies.
In short, then, I see someone like Choguel Maïga as someone who was used more than as someone who built meaningful power in a hybrid military-civilian arrangement. He was, along with the Chadian opponents-turned-PMs mentioned above, the most politicized of the Sahel’s recent prime ministers, and now he is “returning to political life,” but without, I think, any immediate prospects for building mass support or genuinely challenging the junta. The whole episode cements my sense that meaningful transitions are not coming any time soon in the Sahel or Guinea.
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*Abdoulaye Maïga did serve as interim PM for a period in 2022 while Choguel Maïga was on medical leave, but this time is quite different and, from what I can tell, more permanent. Also, of course, above I was referring to the current wave of juntas and coups, not to the deeper past when there were certainly even more militarized governments in the Sahel in various periods.
**In Chad the “transition” is formally complete, although the same people are in power in 2024 as were in power when the coup occurred in 2021 (and those people are a continuation of the political dispensation that began in 1990, in fact).