In 1965, the French discovered uranium in Niger. Here is what the New York Times had to say about it in 1969, right before production began. It makes for fascinating reading.
The paved road comes to an end in this isolated, dust-colored market town on the southern shore of the sand sea known as the Sahara. About 300 miles farther north, along an ill-defined track, lies the town of Agadez. About 150 miles beyond that, near the jumbled boulders of the Air Mountains, the village of Arlit is rising. Where nothing more than tumbledown mud huts stood two years ago, French and African workmen are building cement-block houses, shops, an electrical generating plant big enough for a city of 40,000 — and two uranium processing plants.
The uranium will be produced by a company in which the government of Niger holds 20 percent, German groups 10 percent, and the French Atomic Energy Commission and two French mining companies 70 percent ...
In a country where the per capita income runs about $75 a year ($351 in 2008 dollars), peanuts and bony steers constitute the only significant exports, where fuel is so scarce that technicians once tried and failed to make a power plant run on peanut husks, the discovery of uranium was an extraordinary event.
Niger will receive about 40 percent of the company’s profits ... Niger is counting on only $4 million a year in revenues by 1975 — about a tenth of the current national budget. “Even with this strike,” said a local economist this week, “this is never going to be a rich country—unless they find a market for sand.”
Getting the uranium out of land-locked Niger poses a problem. Niger has no railroads, so the uranium will have to travel hundres of miles by truck to railheads in Dahomey or Nigeria, by truck across the Sahara, or perhaps by air directly from Arlit to Marseilles. But as one Niger official puts it, “You can’t run a country on peanuts, so we will have to do what we can with the rest of what we have.”
They eventually decided to truck the stuff out through Dahomey, now Benin. This information sheds some light on the mystery of the high price of Nigerien uranium. Transport costs come out of that price, and I can't imagine that it costs more to get the stuff from Australia or Canada or even Kazakhstan. I'll need to calculate that differential to see how much Niger really benefitted (or suffered) from its imperial link with France.
The story's ending isn't happy, as the article alludes. In 2008, the IMF estimated Niger's GDP per capita to be a ridiculously precise $361 per capita ... basically the same as it was in 1969. It would be hard to find much evidence of a resource curse in Niger, but there doesn't seem to have been too much of a blessing either.
I have to wonder how, if at all, this story would be different if a formal French empire still existed out on the Saharan energy frontier.
Hello I am from Niger and I just read your blog , about my country , but i live in New york City , I have a blog myself that s viewed by thousands who are concerned about Niger worlwide
It s called http://www.niger1.com
May i ask you why would you ve interested in Niger case , did you live there, Have you been there once ?
I know a lot of about the uranium case if you go on myblog you will read bout the ceasefire
If you want to meet for a byte in an African restaurant and discuss further about Niger in NYC email me at [email protected]
just read http://www.niger1.com
Posted by: Niger | May 17, 2009 at 07:05 PM
Hello, Niger! I'm writing a case on Areva, the French nuclear company, and putting together an MBA course on the business and politics of energy. Hence, my interest in the country and its odd relationship with France. Unfortunately, I haven't visited Niger yet, but I have a reputation among my colleagues for adventure research, and have every intention of seeing the mines up-close as soon as I can.
What do you do in New York?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | May 17, 2009 at 07:45 PM
What do you mean by a formal French Empire?
The 5th Republic on the Sahara? Or the way the actual empire was run?
Posted by: Scott Blair | May 17, 2009 at 10:01 PM
The actual empire, post Loi Cadre, which I suppose you could call "the Fifth Republic on the Sahara."
De Gaulle appears to have wrapped up the Community for two reasons. (1) The U.N. had created a norm of absolute juridical sovereignty that made it hard to justify a halfway house like the Community. (2) There wasn't much benefit to maintaining it, when all the benefits could be obtained from a combination of "cooperation treaties," informal links between the African elites and the French bureaucracy, and muscle. Plus, annoying parts of an informal empire could be written off at no political cost, something harder to do with a formal one.
So let's say they didn't run down the flag for whatever reason but left the mushy and confused Community in place as a juridical entity. Would much be different? There's a case that the answer is "no." Maybe you'd have a couple of battalions of French troops out on the frontier with the Tuareg instead of a small 15-advisor cadre, and maybe aid flows would be a bit higher. Or maybe not --- over the past five years, Niger received $113 million per year in French ODA money; in 1950-55 it received only $14,000 in FIDES funds, and that's before inflation.
So what would be different? Access to French courts? Hell, if the French had been more beneficient they could have kept that after the tricolor came down. After all, that's what Britain did in the Caribbean.
It looks and quacks a lot like the dying days of the French Community. I'm not sure much would be different if there Niger was merely an autonomous part of the French Community rather than an independent state.
No? I often miss obvious things in these speculations.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | May 17, 2009 at 10:51 PM