Over the last twenty years, the Sahel and much of West Africa have turned into one of the world’s most explosive regions of terrorism and violent extremism. From northern Nigeria through Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and parts of Chad, armed groups and jihadist factions have gained ground, riding on long-festering political crises, historic wrongs, and extreme poverty. Although mainstream reports often paint the violence as mere religious fanaticism or a brief regional flare-up, the deeper causes are tangled. These include burnt lands from climate change, imperial plunder, fallouts from the fall of Gaddafi, systemic poverty, corrupt crooked leaders, rivalry between ethnic blocs, and a global profit system that keeps bleeding the continent dry.
The Accelerated Spiral: Nigeria, Mali, and Niger Under Siege
In Nigeria, Boko Haram’s insurgency and its splinter force, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), as well as the military which has also killed indiscriminately in this conflict, have taken tens of thousands of lives and pushed more than two million people from their homes. Even though the federal authorities keep insisting they are winning, assaults are now hitting the northwest and even the central belt far beyond Borno State. Several other violent militants groups have sprung up as well, wreaking havoc on poor rural communities and kidnapping travelers. As recently as mid-June, over 200 residents were slaughtered in Yelewata town in Benin State in a fit of barbarism.
The resilience of these groups points to something far bigger than terrorism, it shows a dysfunctional failed system where poverty, alienation, and daily brutality mix easily with superstitions and ethno-religious sentiments giving extremist ideas their best soil.
Mali has moved down a similar path. Since the 2012 Tuareg uprising and the jihadist grab of the north, it has fought to keep its borders intact. French and other foreign forces got involved, yet those fighters re-matched, teamed up with al-Qaeda and Islamic State, and now push into central Mali, Burkina Faso, and western Niger. In Niger, especially in Tillaberi and Diffa, their synchronized raids lay bare the weak state, erode trust in political institutions, and pull ordinary people towards insurgents promising justice, revenge, or just a way to survive.
These clashes are not just random and isolated. Together they form a growing web of violence that ties local anger to bigger global forces, showing up in the Sahel as a crisis of both local governance and world order.
Climate Change: Environmental Collapse as a Catalyst
Climate change has deepened hardship in the Sahel, a semi-arid region on the Sahara’s southern edge. The desert is spreading outward, rainfall is becoming erratic, and people have to increasingly compete for dwindling water, grass, and arable ground. Lake Chad, once a vital source of livelihood for millions in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, now covers just 10 percent of its 1960s original size. That loss has shattered livestock and farming incomes, spurred migration, fueled local clashes, and is ultimately feeding recruitment into extremist groups.
For herders like the Fulani, who follow seasonal grazing routes, a warming climate has nearly broken the old grazing rhythm. When cattle then encroach into farmlands and fields, bloody confrontation erupt between the nomads and the farmers. In turn, both state actors and armed militias see opportunity to weaponize these disputes, and quickly arm both sides, turning village conflicts into wider sectarian battles. Extremists groups grow out of or exploit the situation, promising guns, cash, or simple identity to people already abandoned by the state and exhausted by failing land.
The Toppling of Gaddafi: A Pandora’s Box Opened
The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya and the brutally massacred murder of Muammar Gaddafi did not result in freedom. It compounded the dynamics of devastation in the Sahel. Gaddafi, despite severe contradictions of his political regime, had managed to build a bulwark against the expansion of jihadism and patronage networks that kept a relative stability across the Sahara.
The regime’s collapse resulted in the release of a deluge of arms, combatants, and instability. Libyan weapons arsenals were pillaged, flooding the region with advanced military equipment. Tuareg combatants who had fought for Gaddafi came back to Mali, reviving the long-dormant rebellion in northern Mali. But this movement for ethnic secession was soon hijacked by jihadists, some of whom had been trained in Afghanistan or who had joined forces with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). They established proto-emirates in the vacuum created by the collapsing Malian state, further destabilizing an already volatile region.
The turmoil in Libya continues to reverberate. Cross-border arms smuggling has emboldened insurgents across the Sahel, and human trafficking and smuggling networks and slavery, often associated with militant groups, have prospered before the eyes of European nations more concerned with stopping migrants than the root causes of instability.
Western nations and the rich oil states of the Middle East have played significant roles in the rising instability. While local leaders often bear responsibility for corruption and misrule, they operate within a global framework that has for centuries pillaged Africa for profit. Western nations and their financial institutions have extracted minerals on the cheap and imposed austerity that has decimated public services leading to accelerated poverty, while Saudi Arabia and the UAE have funded ideological exports that have led to fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and fueled terrorist growth.
Poverty and Underdevelopment: A Powder Keg
The Sahel remains among the poorest regions of the world. Over 40% of Niger’s population lives under the poverty line. Youth unemployment in Mali and northern Nigeria is staggering. Basic infrastructure like roads, electricity, schools, and hospitals are either nonexistent or are very inadequate. The majority of the Sahelian countries rank at the bottom rungs of the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index.
This institutionalized deprivation is not random. It is a product of centuries of colonialism followed by decades of neo-colonial dependency. National governments usually supported by foreign powers, prioritize the interests of ruling class and international capital over those of the working class which comprises the vast majority of the countries’ populations. Public services are severely underfunded, while political office is used as a vehicle for the enrichment of the few people in power and their cronies. Under these conditions, bands of insurgents can move into the gap, posing as alternatives to a state that has longlost legitimacy.
Divide and Rule in Interethnic Conflict.
West African ethnic tensions have a long history, but in recent years, intentional manipulation and state failure have exacerbated them. While militant organizations take advantage of communal grievances to recruit fighters and justify atrocities, political elites frequently use ethnic identities to support their positions of power.
Nigeria’s Fulani-Hausa farmer-herder conflict has been especially lethal. In Mali, Dogon militias have reportedly started pogroms against Fulani communities, claiming that they aid jihadists. These conflicts encompass underlying socioeconomic battles, draping theidentity ideologies over contestation for resources, and land.d They are actually hardly eversimple ethnic disputes. However, they spread into violent cycles that extremist organizations are all too happy to take advantage of in the absence of development, justice, or mediation.
Political Corruption: A State That Destructs Itself
The governments of West Africa have demonstrated time and time again that they are unable to deal with the underlying causes of terrorism. Instead, they have weaponised anti-terror campaigns to stifle dissent, abused foreign aid, and enriched themselves through graft.
Nigerian troops are underequipped and morale is low as a result of embezzled military budgets intended to combat Boko Haram. Several coups have been carried out in Mali and Burkina Faso in the name of re-establishing order, but security has not significantly improved. The public’s trust is further eroded by frequently rigged electoral processes. As a result, states that fail to serve and protect their citizens are increasingly viewed as problems rather than answers, leading to a serious crisis of legitimacy and turns to alternatives.
Fundamentalism in Religion: A Tool, Not a Cause
Even though religion is a major part of the ideology of organisations like Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) and Boko Haram, it is more of a tool than a cause. These organisations use Islamic rhetoric to cover up social, political, and economic grievances. They frequently deliver food and services, establish order where there was previously anarchy, and offer basic justice systems in places where the state has abandoned its efforts.
Where there is no hope, fundamentalism flourishes. It provides a sense of meaning in the midst of despair, brotherhood in alienation, and certainty, even if in a warped sense, in uncertain times. However, in the end, it is reactionary, strengthening authoritarianism, sectarianism, and patriarchy. Religious extremism substitutes one type of oppression for another, far from freeing the masses.
Toward a Socialist Workers’ Revolution: The Only Way Out
The crisis in the Sahel and West Africa is not an isolated regional concern. It is a manifestation of global injustice where profit is prioritized over, extraction of resources supersedes equity, and repression rises above justice. Imperialism, climate change, state-failure, and religious fundamentalism-all these are manifestations of the global capitalist order.
True solutions could never come out of foreign troops, military juntas, or reactionary ideologies. They must arise from the very masses of workers, peasants, youth, and women who have borne the brunt of this crisis. The promise of change lie in the set-backs of popular mobilizations: from the union movement, cooperatives, student movements, and community organizations that reject imperialism and extremism. Therefore, a socialist workers’ revolution is neither merely a dream nor simply an option. It is about democratic control of resource, investment in public services, environmental sustainability and breaking out of neocolonial dependency. It is about fighting across ethnic, religious, and national divides for dignity, justice, and liberation.
It is a difficult journey ahead requiring radical tenacity and revolutionary persistence, even when there are challenges that seem insurmountable. But the alternative is continued decay, war, and despair. From the dust of collapsed empires and burning villages, a new dawn will rise, when the people themselves grab hold of the future with revolutionary courage and socialist vision.
by Emmanuel EDOMWONYI
