There is this tension between Western influence, namely in the form of France, the United States.

France has this current control over the region, so there's very little financial autonomy for these states.

You have ECOWAS, which I've heard described as sort of an African NATO proxy organization

with the same way that NATO has the Western

alliances and people think it's basically just puppeted by the United States, although there

is a sensible autonomy. And so that on one side you have the Nigeria as a strong Western ally

in the region, an ECOWAS threatening to send troops in and oust

the coup, Western support for the ostensibly elected government that was just overthrown,

but also in the background, a feeling as though the elected government, the overthrown

government, wasn't necessarily democratically elected

in the first place. And I also saw some polls from this economist article from about a week ago

that were suggesting that majorities in Niger actually supported the political agenda of the

coup government. Does that sound accurate? Am I summarizing that accurately? Okay. So I'll come back to you, Dr. Silla,

then. As an anti-imperialist American observer, I think it can be difficult to wrestle with the

optics of a coup, the optics of something that is kind of sort of plainly undemocratic and so far

as that the coup government is not elected,

but on the background of a system where already there's a sentiment that there is not a lot of

democracy going on in the first place. So how should we interpret polls that suggest that there

is sympathy for the coup government? How should we interpret the fact that on the date, August 6th,

that the Eaglewas countries were given as a deadline for the coup government to leave?

You had this massive protest in this Chinese-built stadium where the public seemed to be demonstrating support of the coup government.

How should the left be appropriately assessing what the will or the at least popular consensus of people in Niger is right now?

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