Quote (ofthevoid @ Aug 5 2023 04:53pm)
Just kind of lazy to research it but what exactly is the motivator for Nigeria to go in? From what I understand they have pipelines through Niger going up north and eventually to ports headed for Europe but aside from that is there anything else? Are they scared it can be come a hub of terrorism or something?
Many months ago I pointed towards the fact that there was this mood that Europe can basically replace Russian energy by going to either far away places or start relying on less secure sources, this being a prime example. I'm still kind of shocked how cucked Europe is in basically giving up cheap Russian energy which made them competitive to pay way more from other places.
Also what kind of bothers me is when stuff like this happens the first thing we and many aid givers do is freeze aid. These are extremely poor countries and freezing grain or other type of food items donations accomplishes what exactly? In the history of these conflicts, how many of these juntas actually change course or yield when the aid stops? I feel like it's close to none, so you're really hurting the poorest and most vulnerable there. To put some numbers behind it ~40% of Niger's budget comes from foreign aid and about 3 million were already facing acute food shortages there prior to this.
Well aside from Nigeria beholden to western interests and in particular Shell Oil, their self-interest in keeping Niger as the last Sahel state in the western sphere would arguably be to serve as a buffer against the militant islamists who threaten Nigeria so much. There's no imaginable world in which a totally sovereign Nigeria would want to risk embroiling itself in an east-west proxy war against Wagner mercenaries, and Nigeria clearly has more independent self-determination than a true CIA puppet state like post-Maidan Ukraine.
But yeah what's the status quo going to be? Freezing all aid and electricity to a state that was already dirt poor and vulnerable and starving, because they don't adhere to our geopolitical whims? We give money to Mali and Burkina Faso after their coups, so would this just be a fuck-you-in-particular to Niger? Or are we going to have to walk back the sanctions and bluster before status quo sets back in?
Quote (Plaguefear @ Aug 5 2023 07:05pm)
This is great, they have stopped scam calling me.
naw
those are the guys who want to invade niger, if the richest man in niger actually owns a phone he'd still only be able to call you speaking hausa or maybe djarma, most of them don't even speak french let alone english
its one of the few places in the world where lingua franca doesn't apply because its such an utter irredeemable shithole, something like 10-15% of niger has internet access
Its hard to understate just how abandoned and exploited by foreign powers- both east and west- Niger has been historically, because unlike the oil baron states like Nigeria that profited and have at least started modernizing, the average monthly income for a Niger man is about $50 USD. And that's for a country with a large uranium mining and export industry, owned by their historical slave masters in France and largely taken over by Indian, Chinese, Canadian and Australian interests. We estimate about half of all Niger children age 5-14 are working and at least 5% of them working in the mining industry.