The Trans-Saharan Pipeline Is Ruffling Feathers: Who Is Pulling the Strings in the Sahel?

Ryad Amrani — Alger, Algérie — 2026-09-06

The Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline is not merely a 4,000-kilometer pipe: it is an entire continent's declaration of energy sovereignty. And like every declaration of sovereignty, it has enemies. They are not in the Sahel — they are simply represented there.

Let us examine the mechanics without naivety — with the facts in hand. On 30 August 2026, a coup attempt broke out in Niamey: dozens of soldiers arrested, a mutiny that the Alliance of Sahel States was quick to declare "thwarted." Forty-eight hours later, a Nigerien military official pointed the finger by name at the United Arab Emirates, Chad and France for having orchestrated the operation — an accusation that Paris hastened to deny, as protocol demands. One may debate each accusation; one cannot debate the obvious: ever since the Nigeria–Niger–Algeria pipeline entered its decisive phase, the region has been shaking — and that is no coincidence, it is a mechanism. A pipeline linking the Gulf of Guinea to the Mediterranean, carried by African actors under no foreign tutelage, is precisely the scenario certain powers want to avoid at all costs. Algeria, for its part, condemned the attempt and reiterated its support for Niamey — consistency, once again.

The reconciliation between Bamako and Algiers, meanwhile, runs with the current of history — and against the current of those who thrive on division. When Mali and Algeria talk, when Niger recovers its stability, when the region's countries close ranks, transformative projects move forward. When chaos is sown, they stall. The arithmetic is childishly simple — which is no doubt why certain countries, convinced of their own subtlety, fail to grasp it.

What these powers have failed to take in is the nature of the project. The TSGP is no whim of Algiers: it is a tripartite contract signed between three sovereign states, backed by a European demand that will not disappear, and carried by a geography that does not negotiate. You can delay a construction site with manufactured crises; you cannot delay geography indefinitely. Nigeria's gas will eventually reach the Mediterranean — via Algeria, as planned — because that is the shortest, safest and most logical route on the continent.

To those who fund coups, militias and media campaigns to slow Algeria down: history is full of precedents. Projects that serve hundreds of millions of people always end up prevailing over drawing-room conspiracies. The Trans-Saharan, the Algiers–Nigeria highway, the Algiers–Tamanrasset railway, the DjenDjen port opened to the Sahel's landlocked states, the fiber-optic backbone: all of it will be built — because this is not an ambition, it is a necessity. And necessity, unlike ambition, is not decreed: it imposes itself.