Hama Amadou, West African Political Phoenix, Dies at 74

Hama Amadou, a West African politician who alternated stints in high office in Niger with prison and exile, a reflection of his country’s turbulent politics, died on Oct. 24 in Niamey, the capital. He was 74.

His death in a hospital, from malaria, was announced by the state news agency, Agence Nigérienne de Presse. He had long been in poor health after repeated terms in jail.

Mr. Amadou was the second-longest-serving prime minister in Niger’s history and a onetime president of its national assembly. He was also the country’s most embattled politician: His sometime allies in Niger’s shifting coalition of political parties repeatedly brought charges against him, jailed him at least five times and forced him into opposition and exile.

Since Niger’s independence from France in 1960, jail has been just another tool in its rough-and-tumble politics, and his opponents made use of it throughout his career. He was imprisoned, on charges ranging from embezzlement to a peculiar trumped-up baby-trafficking accusation, in 1996, 2008, 2015, 2020 and 2021.

He almost always rose from the ashes; indeed, he became known as “the Phoenix.” He founded what proved to be a powerful political party during one jail term and ran for president, unsuccessfully, during another.

He was immensely popular, retaining his hold on the masses in one of the world’s most impoverished countries, a hot, arid land that moves at the slow rhythm of the encroaching desert. He advocated a brand of nationalism rooted in self-sufficiency and pragmatic governance, and he connected with his working-class supporters through storytelling in the West African griot tradition.

At his rallies, rapturous supporters — small farmers, shopkeepers, peddlers, taxi drivers — would paint crosses on their cheeks in homage to the crosslike scarification on Mr. Amadou’s. As military dictators alternated with civilian presidents in a country dependent on foreign aid, Mr. Amadou popped up with Zelig-like resiliency, always drawing big crowds.

In November 2015, he returned from exile in Paris knowing that there was a warrant for his arrest after President Mahamadou Issofou accused him of baby trafficking. Gendarmes were waiting for the airplane doors to open at Niamey’s airport and promptly took him to prison.

“My adversaries believe that to get rid of me they have to imprison me,” Mr. Amadou told an interviewer in 2020, after the country’s constitutional court had ruled him off the ballot because of his prison record. “Do you really believe there is independent justice in Niger?”

Analysts praised his resilience and his subtle appreciation of the political game as practiced in Niger.

“He was probably the most expert politician in the country’s history, in his way of conducting politics,” Abdourahamane Idrissa Abdoulaye, a Niger scholar at the University of Leiden’s Africa Studies Center, said in an interview. With his booming voice, wide smile and self-confidence, Mr. Amadou “was the only one with charisma,” Dr. Idrissa said.

Mr. Amadou was fearless in addressing the third rail of West African politics: the staggering birthrate of more than seven children per woman in a country 10th from the bottom in United Nations poverty tables. Political leaders in that predominantly Muslim country have always been wary of taking on the issue because of strong opposition from the imams.

“He said we’ve got to do something about that,” Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, an expert on the region at the International Crisis Group, said. “There was a sense of courage about him.”

Throughout his career, Mr. Amadou maneuvered through Niger’s repeated transitions from military to civilian rule and back again. In the late 1980s, after a promising start in the country’s nascent civil service, he served as a top civilian official under the generals who ran Niger. After the military regime collapsed in 1991, he was largely responsible for creating the country’s major political party, the National Movement for the Development of Society, known by its French initials as the MNSD.

Another coup, more military rule and another brief imprisonment followed. Mr. Amadou was “instrumental in fanning civil disobedience” against the military dictatorship, Dr. Idrissa wrote in his “Historical Dictionary of Niger” (2012). After the military government was overthrown in 1999, Mr. Amadou was appointed prime minister under President Mamadou Tandja, and he held that post for seven years, an unprecedented tenure at the time.

But as Mr. Tandja’s rule devolved into dictatorship, Mr. Amadou distanced himself. He spoke out on the vast famine that overtook Niger after a prolonged drought in 2004 and 2005, while Mr. Tandja, for reasons of national pride, was denying its existence.

Mr. Amadou let loose with a blistering speech expressing frustration with Niger’s dependence on outside help to ease the hunger. “It’s useless,” he said, “to continue, through the intermediary of the press, mobilizing occasional help which might tamp down for a moment the anguish of a mother, but above all prepares her for the inevitable loss of her child, and uncertainty about whether his brother and sister will be born in the same conditions, because of the poverty strangling all of them.”

Mr. Tandja resented the challenge and responded by having Mr. Amadou arrested in 2008 on corruption charges. Mr. Amadou put his jail time to good use: He planned a new political party, the Nigerien Democratic Movement for an African Federation, which would become a major player, challenging his old party, the MNSD.

He was released in 2009 because of ill health and went into exile soon after. It would not be the last time.

Hama Amadou was born on March 3, 1950, in Youri, a town south of Niamey. His father was a farmer and a nomadic cattle herder, his mother a homemaker.

Hama attended secondary schools in Niamey and received diplomas from the National School of Administration of Niger as a customs inspector in 1971 and as an administrator in 1978.

After serving in Niger’s provincial administration in the north and west in the 1970s, he became director of the state broadcasting company in the mid-1980s and chief of staff to two of the country’s military rulers at the end of the decade.

When that wave of military dictators subsided, he helped found the MNSD in 1991. He was elected to the national assembly from Niamey, then briefly became prime minister until Gen. Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara took power in a military coup in January 1996.

After Niger’s latest coup d’état, in July 2023, brought the country under military dictatorship yet again, Mr. Amadou returned to Niamey from Paris, hoping that the generals would quickly restore civilian rule, as had occurred in the past. They didn’t.

Mr. Amadou is survived by his sons, Ismael and Iliane; his daughter, Lalia Amadou; and his wives, Hadiza and Hariatou.

At his death, his house in Niamey was flooded with his followers, his family and uniformed government officials.

“For many, he represented hope, the man of the last chance, the one who was never afraid to go up against the powerful to denounce injustice,” the Nigerien press agency wrote in an obituary. “He was an indefatigable fighter.”

Omar Hama Saley contributed reporting from Niamey, Niger. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.