They console themselves by accusing Russia of dark machinations. In reality, they are only reaping the fruits of what they have sown for 12 years. This has nothing to do with what colonialism and Françafrique were. This is exclusively the consequence of making the French army available to US strategy.

Faced with the wave of regime changes in French-speaking Africa, the French media are stunned. They fail to explain France's rejection.

The old refrains about colonial exploitation are not convincing. For example, we note that Paris exploits uranium from Niger, not at the market price, but at a ridiculously low one. However, the putschists never raised this argument. They are talking about something completely different. The accusations of Russian manipulation are no more credible. Firstly because Russia does not seem to stand behind the putschists in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger or Gabon, but above all because the evil long predates their arrival. Russia only arrived in Africa after its victory in Syria in 2016, even though the problem dates back to at least 2010, if not 2001.

As always, what makes the situation illegible is forgetting its origins.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States assigned a role in Africa to its vassal, France. It was a matter of maintaining the old order there while waiting for AfriCom to establish itself there and for the Pentagon to be able to extend to the Black Continent the destruction of political institutions that it was already carrying out in the “Broader Middle East”. Gradually, Republican policies gave way to tribal policies. From one point of view, it was an emancipation from heavy French aid, from another, it was a formidable step backwards.

In 2010, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, probably on the advice of Washington, took the initiative to resolve the Ivorian conflict. While the country was going through a tribal conflict, an operation led first by ECOWAS, then by the Kenyan Prime Minister, Barack Obama's cousin, Raila Odinga, attempted to negotiate the departure of Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. Their problem is not Gbagbo's authoritarian regime, but the fact that he transformed himself from a submissive CIA agent into a defender of his nation. Paris intervenes militarily after the presidential election to arrest Gbagbo – allegedly to stop a genocide – and replace him with Alassane Ouattara, a long-time friend of the French ruling class. Subsequently, Laurent Gbagbo will be judged by the International Criminal Court which, after an interminable trial, will recognize that he never committed genocide and that, de facto, France was not justified in intervening militarily.

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