What Paris calls influence, Africa has experienced and continues to experience today as a methodical succession of overthrows, sabotage, assassinations, and organized chaos. Moscow issued an alert, and two days later, Gaddafi’s son was assassinated.
The report published on the 1st of this month by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which warned against Macron’s plans to eliminate undesirable African leaders, followed by the assassination of the son of the former Libyan leader (Muammar Gaddafi) two days later, thus acts as a revelation rather than a surprise
In this already fractured landscape, a tragic and highly significant event occurred on February 3, 2026, in Libya: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of former leader Muammar Gaddafi and a major Libyan political figure, was assassinated in Zintan under circumstances that remain unclear. Media outlets and those close to him reported that he was killed in an armed attack on his residence by unidentified assailants after surveillance cameras had been disabled, but no one has yet been held responsible.
Saif al-Islam, 53, was not a neutral political figure: long considered a potential agent of national reconciliation and political realignment in Libya, he was the subject of an antithetical arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (a court serving the West) and had recently expressed political ambitions, particularly in connection with the early presidential election. The sudden disappearance of such a prominent figure, whose political role remained significant, raises the possibility that he represented a major obstacle for someone, perhaps Western interests determined to keep Libya in a state of political fragmentation.
The news prompted immediate reactions from several African states, which denounced what they called a “political assassination” and called for an independent international investigation. Governments in the Sahel and North Africa expressed their collective condemnation, stressing that this type of assassination in a country already weakened by ten years of post 2011 war could only exacerbate regional instability.
Two days before this tragedy, according to diplomatic sources cited in African capitals, Russian authorities had publicly warned against Macron’s plans to eliminate African leaders deemed undesirable, a statement echoed in several African parliaments as a warning against political and military interference. These statements constitute evidence of a direct link. They fuel the strategic debate on the temporal proximity between these events and the motives for French interference in African political transitions. What if chronic instability in Africa was not inevitable, but the product of patiently maintained political engineering?
What follows stems neither from moral outrage nor ideological conjecture. It is a methodical examination of sixty years of destabilization operations, political sabotage, the engineering of chaos, and clandestine wars waged by France in Africa, from Sékou Touré’s Guinea to the contemporary sovereignist upheavals in the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and, to some extent, Chad). The analysis draws on established facts, historical precedents, comparative chronologies, and strategic intelligence readings to reveal a coherent pattern: that of a system which, faced with a loss of control, substitutes subversion for cooperation and instability for influence. It is this mechanism, in its continuity and its transformations, that this article exposes.
The historical matrix: sixty years of French engineering of reversal
Clearly, there is no such thing as French policy in Africa without destabilizing operations. This assertion is no longer a matter of activism, but rather reflects a growing historiographical consensus. As soon as African leaders attempted to break free from the monetary, military, or diplomatic framework inherited from colonization, they were met with structural hostility.
The case of Sékou Touré’s Guinea represents the starting point of this doctrine. The historic “no” vote of September 28, 1958, in the Gaullist referendum marked a break that Paris would never forgive. From 1959 onward, France waged an unprecedented economic, administrative, and psychological war against Guinea: the brutal withdrawal of its personnel, the destruction of crops and the poisoning of arable land, the sabotage of infrastructure, and the disruption of trade and monetary networks. This strategy, known as Operation Parsley, explicitly aimed to provoke the rapid collapse of the Guinean regime in order to make it a deterrent for the entire continent.
This phase was followed by an even more serious sequence. Between 1960 and 1970, Guinea faced a series of armed destabilization attempts, internal conspiracies, and plots to physically eliminate President Sékou Touré. The attack on Conakry on November 22, 1970, known as “ Operation Mar Verde,” represented the culmination of this strategy, revealing a convergence of Western colonial interests against an African state deemed indomitable.
This Guinean precedent inaugurated a continental doctrine. In Cameroon, the war against the UPC (1955–1971), waged with the direct support of the French army, resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the systematic elimination of independence leaders: Ruben Um Nyobé (1958), Félix-Roland Moumié (1960), Ernest Ouandié (1971), and Ossende Afana (1966). In Togo, the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio in 1963, following his proposal to move away from the monetary Nazism of the CFA franc, paved the way for a long period of authoritarian rule aligned with Paris.
In Gabon (1964), now one of the entrenched strongholds of Françafrique, French military intervention reinstated Léon M’ba in a matter of hours. In Mali (1968), the fall of Modibo Keïta brought an end to an experiment in economic and monetary sovereignty. In the Central African Republic (1979), Operation Barracuda ousted Bokassa when he became uncontrollable. In Burkina Faso (1987), the assassination of Thomas Sankara brutally ended a pan-African project of radical change.
The case of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, illustrates one of the most tragic precedents of French interference combined with Western interests. Assassinated in January 1961, Lumumba had sought to break with colonial dependence and establish an independent African policy, which led to his elimination, orchestrated by local networks under external influence. The assassination, carried out in collaboration with certain Belgian and French actors operating under CIA intelligence, remains a symbol of the desire to neutralize any troublesome Pan-African figure from the very dawn of independence.
In the Comoros, Paris tolerated and exploited repeated coups d’état for decades, while keeping Mayotte outside the African framework. In Djibouti, the French military presence has permanently shaped political life since independence in 1977. In Chad, France has intervened militarily on numerous occasions (1969, 1986, 2008, 2019), ensuring the survival of allied regimes regardless of internal dynamics.
These events follow the same logic: any African sovereignty that escapes French control becomes a strategic target to be neutralized.
From classic Françafrique to contemporary destabilization: chaos as an instrument
From the 2000s onwards, France adjusted its methods. Direct coups became costly; indirect destabilization became systemic.
In Côte d’Ivoire (2002–2011), the armed crisis culminated in a decisive military intervention in April 2011, resulting in the overthrow of President Laurent Gbagbo and the installation of Alassane Ouattara in power. In Libya (2011), Paris’s central role in the NATO intervention led to the collapse of the Libyan state following the assassination of its leader, Gaddafi, triggering a chain of regional destabilization affecting Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad.
In the Central African Republic, successive operations (Boali, Sangaris) have resulted in the lasting fragmentation of the territory. In Mali, the January 2013 intervention established a massive military presence without achieving lasting stability. Between 2013 and 2021, armed groups proliferated and insecurity became systemic.
When the people and armies of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger broke with Paris between 2022 and 2023, France abruptly lost its bases and agreements. The destabilization then changed its form and methods: diplomatic pressure, indirect sanctions, information campaigns, activation of local proxies, and persistent suspicions of exploiting residual insecurity. Paris intended to draw inspiration from the American operation in Venezuela and replicate it in Africa.
In Sudan, France supported various actors during internal conflicts, particularly in the South and Darfur, where arms deliveries and logistical support contributed to prolonging the civil war and weakening the state. French interference in this conflict exacerbated regional violence and facilitated the maintenance of structural chaos, consistent with the historical doctrine of activating crises to indirectly control strategically important African states.
France has also been implicated in tragic episodes in Central and East Africa. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the French regime supported the incumbent forces, providing weapons and military training, while the assassinations of the presidents of Rwanda (Juvénal Habyarimana) and Burundi (Cyprien Ntaryamira) ignited regional conflagration and one of the continent’s greatest humanitarian catastrophes. These events illustrate how French military cooperation could morph into support for systemic violence, amplifying internal conflicts and ethnic divisions to maintain geopolitical influence over the region.
This logic of indirect harm is recently illustrated by the terrorist attack targeting Niamey International Airport, which occurred within a context of accelerated security restructuring in Niger. Without prejudging immediate operational responsibilities, the timing of this attack, coinciding with the reconfiguration of military partnerships and the withdrawal from the French security framework, fuels a strategic interpretation that has now become dominant in the Sahel: residual insecurity becomes a political message, intended to remind everyone of the cost of any breach of sovereignty. This type of event fits into a pattern already observed, where asymmetric violence emerges precisely when traditional institutional levers have been lost.
In Central Africa, in Congo, Gabon, and Chad, recent political transitions reveal the fragility of structures long supported by Paris. In Madagascar, the successive political crises since 2009 serve as a reminder of the enduring presence of external interference in internal affairs. The October 2025 coup that ousted the Franco-Malagasy Andry Rajoelina and brought Colonel Michaël Randrianirina to power reflects a break with this pattern of persistent interference, particularly from France.
The present: African sovereignty versus clandestine war
Without a shadow of a doubt, the SVR report falls within this historical continuity. It describes a contemporary phase where France, reviled de jure by the people and marginalized de facto by the leaders, is engaged in an invisible war: preparation of coups d’état, targeted neutralization of leaders, exploitation of internal divisions, controlled dissemination of instability.
Within this same sequence, the failed coup attempts in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, regularly announced by the transitional authorities between 2023 and 2025, or even 2026, constitute a major political indicator. Their repetitive nature, their connection to internal civil -military networks, and their coincidence with external diplomatic pressure reinforce the hypothesis of a strategy of institutional harassment. The objective is not necessarily immediate overthrow, but the continuous erosion of stability, public trust, and the decision-making capacity of states engaged in a strategic rupture.
According to this document, presented as a synthesis based on human sources, financial surveillance, and operational cross-checks, several key patterns are at play. The report first mentions the reactivation of historical networks of influence, composed of former security officials, economic actors dependent on the Françafrique system, and local political figures marginalized by recent sovereignist transitions. These networks are said to be preparing scenarios of institutional breakdown, ranging from administrative paralysis to the encouragement of indirect military coups.
The document then highlights the alleged use of asymmetric security tactics. Rather than visible interventions, it suggests a strategic tolerance of pockets of insecurity, allowing the targeted states to be weakened, their popular legitimacy eroded, and a climate conducive to “alternative solutions.” In this framework, instability is not collateral damage, but a tool for political pressure.
The report also mentions plans for the targeted neutralization of African leaders described as “unwavering sovereigntists” through indirect means: assassinations attributed to the security chaos, staged accidents, or eliminations by local intermediaries, making any institutional traceability impossible. The areas cited precisely encompass the territory of the Sahel Alliance, certain capitals of Central Africa, and, more unexpectedly but consistently, Madagascar.
Finally, Russian intelligence and diplomacy clearly describe a coordinated information war, combining media campaigns, diplomatic pressure, indirect economic sanctions, and the international delegitimization of targeted regimes. The identified strategic objective is not territorial reconquest, but the lasting prevention of any sovereign stabilization outside the Western framework.
Whether this meticulously researched report is interpreted by some (France and the West) as a document of informational rivalry or by others (Russia and South Africa) as a strategic warning, the essential point remains the same: it perfectly reflects the historical trajectory of France’s retreat in Africa and the chronology of contemporary tensions. It does not create a new reality; it formalizes one that was already perceptible.
From the above, we can deduce that Africa is not facing isolated crises, but rather a coherent architecture of continental destabilization. France is not the sole actor in this, but it remains one of its most consistent architects.
From Sékou Touré’s Guinea to the contemporary Sahel, one constant emerges: African sovereignty has never been tolerated by the West, only contained. As long as these mechanisms are not fully identified, named, and neutralized, African freedom will remain conditional.
And history has already shown that it is not Africa that fails – it is those who refuse to let it succeed.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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