Overwhelmed demonstrators stormed, in the middle of the day on Thursday, July 27, 2023, the national headquarters of the PNDS Tarrayya, the main ruling party deposed the day before by a military junta (CNSP). The premises were vandalized and vehicles in front of the building were set on fire while party cadres were in a meeting. What amplify the panic within the population, and particularly in the ranks of those responsible for the training of deposed President Bazoum Mohamed.
The imposing building which served as the national headquarters of the PNDS Tarrayya, located in the city center of the capital, was stormed by demonstrators while party officials were holding a meeting on the situation the country. The day before, a military junta indeed came to put an end to the power that the socialist formation had assumed since April 2011. Onlookers began to throw projectiles in the direction of the building as well as cars massed in its front. They were later joined by a large crowd and the situation ended up degenerating.
Some party activists who tried to flee the scene caused accidents that injured people, which amplified the anger of the demonstrators whose slogan they were responding to is unknown. The party headquarters ended up being besieged by the crowd composed mainly of onlookers who set fire to the vehicles on the spot before ransacking the facilities while others took the opportunity to loot the premises. In the middle of the day, a real fire broke out in the area and it took the intervention of the fire brigade to put out the fire and the police to contain the demonstration and save what could be. Nearly fifty vehicles were burned or ransacked while the compound that housed the offices was vandalized.
Wind of panic in a context of uncertainty
This demonstration comes the day after the seizure of power, led until then by the PNDS Tarrayya, by a group of officers from the Nigerien Defense and Security Forces (FDS), united within a National Council for the Protection of Fatherland (CNSP). In its first statement, the junta announced that it had dismissed President Bazoum Mohamed and decided to suspend all national institutions from the 7th Republic.
The day before, while the situation was still confused, demonstrators mostly belonging to the party of the ousted Head of State organized demonstrations of support and in Niamey, they then converged on the Presidential Palace where Bazoum Mohamed had been detained since in the morning by elements of his Presidential Guard. They were stopped a few steps from the entrance to the presidential complex by warning shots from the Praetorian Guard, which caused a real stampede of demonstrators. Injuries were recorded and a little later in the evening, the leaders of the parties member of the presidential movement met to deliver a declaration in which they denounced “the kidnapping since this morning by certain elements of the Presidential Guard of the President of the Republic Bazoum Mohamed as well as the Minister of the Interior, Hamadou Souley Adamou, acting as the Minister of National Defence”. They also launched “an appeal to the democratic forces and to the people of Niger as a whole, to mobilize massively, from this moment, on the whole territory, by occupying all the streets and all the public spaces, as long as this group of ‘lost and thirsty for salon privileges [the mutinous officers, editor’s note] does not renounce its disastrous project and block this absurd attempt to destabilize our dear country”.
In the afternoon, the situation was relatively calm in the main arteries of the capital despite the incidents of the morning. A curfew was introduced by the new military authorities from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Calls to demonstrate in support of the CNPS, the military junta, are published on social networks for the afternoon of tomorrow Friday, after the great midday prayer. In a press release, the political opposition said it supported the declaration of the takeover by the officers who are members of the military junta which, for its part, decided “to suspend until further notice, the activities of the political parties “.
Calls for calm and restraint are also launched on social networks but the uncertainty which still prevails at the top of the State as well as on the situation which the country is going through is not without causing a real psychosis on riots or a witch hunt against members of the former ruling party and their families and property.
