Whenever major political events shake the foundations of the State and its institutions, the issue of community balances resurfaces beneath the surface. The persistence of this reflex speaks volumes about the country’s difficulties in moving beyond clan-based selfishness to build citizenship finally free from ethnic considerations.
The ethnocentrism of the dominant classes fatally hinders the emergence of a shared national narrative, without which no republican project can take shape.
This ethnic question thus constantly returns to the Nigerien public debate, yet it always struggles to find a true place within it. Some view it as a rear-guard battle, an instrumentalization inherited from imperialist logic; others as a convenient denial, intended to preserve post-colonial advantages that are themselves founded on an ethnic essentialization. Between these two stances, a reality imposes itself and resists all denials: our countries are composed of a mosaic of socio-cultural communities. Whether they are called ethnicities, tribes, regions, or peoples changes nothing about this constitutive diversity. To deny it is to refuse to look at the country as it is, and it matters little whether yesterday’s colonizer or today’s predators, both internal and external, have instrumentalized this reality for political purposes: this does not authorize erasing it.
For in our African societies, the individual identifies first through their family, tribe, or ethnicity. Their fulfillment, like their conception of development, comes through the recognition of this historical and cultural heritage, which is also their own contribution to the common heritage of humanity. To deny them this right amounts, in effect, to imposing another identity upon them—an identity that draws its legitimacy not from sharing, but from the ethnocentrism of those who define it for them.
This is the whole paradox: those who most loudly denounce the ethnocentrism of others are generally those whose own ethnicity has monopolized the country’s political and cultural system to the point of imprinting only its own reference points upon it. They themselves are steeped in an ocean of exclusion toward everything outside their own framework, but the habit is so deeply rooted that they no longer even perceive the extent of the contradiction. Their ethnocentrism, never named as such, thus boils down to contesting any ethnocentrism that is not their own, and to the certainty that their symbolic domination does not need to be debated.
The same blindness runs through part of the African intelligentsia, still incapable of freeing itself from a conception of development that requires abandoning one’s own socio-cultural framework. For these minds, accessing modernity and the universal presupposes denying one’s specificity and adopting values coming from elsewhere, imposed in reality by force as much as by the manipulation of minds. To accept this interpretation is to accept an alienation that persuades us a little more each day that there is only one path toward progress: the one that others have charted in our place. Ultimately, it is also to prove right those who claim that we have no history of our own and that we would be incapable of reaching modernity on our own.
Why, however, should the Republic be by nature unsuited to enabling communities that have lived together for centuries to coexist with respect for their diversity? Why should this diversity be erased, most often for the benefit of a single community, to conform to the injunctions of a standardization presented as universal, when it is merely the conformism of a particular domination? Who has ever truly looked into the definition of Nigerien identity: its history, language, heritage, values? The very people who castigate the ethnocentrism of others are not surprised that Tifinagh is still not recognized as a national alphabet, a source of shared pride. Nor do they denounce the use of a common good—the State—put at the service of promoting only certain languages and certain identity traits to the detriment of others. This silence is not neutral: it organizes a tacit hierarchy among citizens whose language and culture are deemed worthy of making a Republic, and the others.
The real subject, almost never posed in these terms, is therefore this: how to manage this diversity with respect for all its components? Answering this first requires facing a glaring imbalance, too often contested by ignorance or bad faith. It suffices to examine the composition of the senior administration, the military hierarchy, the diplomatic corps, access to study scholarships, or the formation of major fortunes largely backed by state public procurement contracts to measure it.
The defenders of the current system often take refuge behind an argument that is none at all: they put forward the fact that Nigerien families are frequently composed of individuals from multiple communities, as if the debate were situated at that level. Yet the question is not about individuals’ identity choices; everyone remains free to define themselves as they see fit, whether or not this corresponds to their ethno-cultural origins. The question lies elsewhere: how does the State manage the diversity of communities that each have their language, their cultural reference points, their own history? To confuse the two is to shift the debate onto terrain that is not its own, so as to better avoid answering it.
More insidiously still, this imbalance shapes the ordinary Nigerien’s perception of their own identity, forged by the way the State occupies the public space and by the image it projects of the country, both internally and externally.
The national melting pot cannot remain the prerogative of a few communities that would alone set its content, relegating others to the rank of components ordered to align themselves with it, under pain of being labeled as subversives, irredentists, or secessionists. A truly shared national narrative, integrating the most significant contributions of each specific heritage, is on the contrary the only path toward a truly inclusive Nigerien identity, one that would allow the country to focus its energy on the harmonious development of all its regions and territories.
What is the solution, then? First, to recognize that we still live within a state architecture designed and maintained by the former colonial power to preserve, for as long as possible, its interests in the country, and that the successive regimes since independence have not deemed it useful to refound it to make it conform to our realities and our diversity. Second, to lay the foundations for this refoundation by lifting the taboos that currently block the debate, and by unleashing a discourse allowing all national components to truly participate in defining the common country. This will require enlisting traditional legitimacies as much as national experts in history, law, and social sciences, in order to propose a state organization capable of supporting the fulfillment of all territories in a spirit of unity, cohesion, and solidarity. It is from this approach, and not from a blueprint inherited from the former colonizer, that a fully embraced Nigerien identity will be born—it being understood that we must retain at least this much from the colonial endeavor: having brought our communities together into an entity recognized by the international community, thereby laying the foundations of a State capable of equipping itself with modern governance.
It is in these terms that the Refoundation led by the CNSP could have been understood, and fully deserved its name. Yet the methodological approximations observed during the convening of the national conferences and the formation of the Consultative Council for Refoundation immediately revealed the limits of the approach, limits stemming, at best, from a deficit of vision, and at worst, from an absence of a true will to overturn the system in place. The tensions recently appearing within the Defense and Security Forces serve as a reminder of the fragility of this process and the risk of even more marked weakening, at a time when insecurity and geopolitical disorder are worsening across the entire sub-region.
Nevertheless, the CNSP has opened an ambitious project that could constitute an authentic turning point in nation-building. But such a project demands courage, a clear vision, and appropriate tools, enabling the truly inclusive involvement of all citizens, without a priori bias or exclusion. Only under this condition—that of a Republic capable of organizing its diversity and opening to everyone the hope of fulfillment rooted in their own history, will the Refoundation be able to take shape and become, for Niger, a true renaissance.
Unification is not homogenization.
Abdoulahi ATTAYOUB
Lyon (France), September 16, 2026
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