He himself proudly displayed it on his social networks. The pan-Africanist and supremacist activist Kemi Seba and black supremacist, self-proclaimed fighter of “Françafrique”, was appointed “special advisor” to the military junta in Niger, being granted a diplomatic passport by General Abdourahamane Tiani himself. “Nothing touches me more than to see the most revolutionary government currently in Africa decide to grant me this protection and recognition,” he wrote.
A critic of the “neocolonialism” of Western powers in Africa, close to Dieudonné, Kemi Seba is the former leader of the Tribu Ka, a small group that claimed its anti-Semitism and advocated the separation of blacks and whites, dissolved by the French government in 2006. Convicted several times in France for incitement to racial hatred and group violence, Kemi Seba (real name Stellio Capo Chichi), the Franco-Beninese founded a new NGO in 2017, Urgences panafricanistes, aimed at fighting against the “neocolonialism” of France in Africa, in particular the CFA Franc. Kemi Seba was finally stripped of his French nationality last July. At the start of the procedure, he had staged himself on video burning his French passport.
“Dear French neocolonial government, thank you for your stupidity”
It is perhaps not so surprising to see Kemi Seba given such a role with the military junta in Niamey. Since General Tiani’s putsch in the summer of 2023, Niger has chosen to fully assume the extreme conflictualization towards its former French ally, denouncing the influence of “Françafrique” in the region as the cause of all the problems of recent years. A reading of events shared with Kemi Seba: as the newspaper recalls The worldKemi Seba himself had visited Niamey twice since last summer. First in September 2023, to welcome the withdrawal of French troops from Niger, and last May, this time for the start of the departure of American soldiers.
For the Nigerien leaders, who better than Kemi Seba to continue to show their absolute hostility to Paris. “Ultimately, the French authorities thought they were burying me, while by persecuting me, they have, once again, involuntarily contributed to strengthening me. Dear French neocolonial government, thank you for your stupidity,” writes the activist on his social networks, also very active in the French overseas territories in recent months to denounce the “colonial system” and call on blacks to rebel for the independence of their “countries”.
The Kremlin’s network of influence
Kemi Seba and the Niamey regime share another common point: an assumed rapprochement with Russia. In 2022, several media outlets, including Young Africa, Arte and the German daily newspaper The world revealed that Kemi Seba had received approximately $440,000 from entities controlled by the Russian paramilitary group Wagner between May 2018 and July 2019 to organize anti-Western demonstrations or relay pro-Kremlin propaganda on the African continent.
As L’Express recalled, Kemi Seba had also proudly posed for a photo with Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin in Moscow in 2017, and had been the guest last February of the Multipolarity Forum in the Russian capital, opened by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov himself. Renaissance MP Thomas Gassiloud, chairman of the Defense Committee of the previous legislature in the National Assembly, had then accused Kemi Seba of being a “relay of Russian propaganda” and of serving “a foreign power that fuels anti-French sentiment.”
For Kemi Seba, becoming a “special advisor” to the Nigerien military junta is not insignificant in this sense, as the latter continues to turn fully towards the Kremlin. After the French military, General Tiani’s regime definitively chased out last July the last American soldiers who were in the country on their mission to stabilize the Sahel, leaving the field open to Wagner’s Russian mercenaries. “Any political force that resists neocolonialism will be a force that the Pan-Africanists will support,” Kemi Seba had assumed on Nigerien national television, as recalled The world.
Like other countries in the region, Niger also decided to break off diplomatic ties with Ukraine on Tuesday, August 6, following accusations of interference by Kiev with separatist groups in Mali. A new pledge sent to the Kremlin, despite the largely disappointing military results of Wagner’s paramilitaries. It remains to be seen whether the new “special advisor to the president of the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Homeland of Niger”, General Tiani’s official title, had a say in this decision.