Niger

The Republic of Niger is a landlocked Sahel state of around 28 million people, with its capital at Niamey and the CFA franc (XOF) as its currency. Article 12 of the March 2025 Charte de la Refondation made Hausa the national language and designated English and French as working languages, while recognising Niger’s broader multilingual landscape. The country has been governed by transitional military authorities since the 26 July 2023 coup, when the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP) led by General Abdourahamane Tchiani overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum, with the coup statement broadcast from the studios of Niger’s national broadcaster. Tchiani was sworn in as the 11th President on 26 March 2025 for a five-year transition, and Niger withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States together with Mali and Burkina Faso on 29 January 2025 to consolidate the Confederation of Sahel States (AES). Adji Ali Salatou has served as Minister of Communication and New Information Technologies since the 17 April 2025 cabinet reshuffle.

Three state media outlets are tracked in the State Media Monitor dataset for Niger, all classified as State-Controlled (SC): the national broadcaster Radio-Télévision du Niger (RTN), the publishing house Office National d’Édition et de Presse (ONEP), editor of the daily Le Sahel, the weekly Sahel Dimanche and the quarterly Sahel MAG, and the state news agency Agence Nigérienne de Presse (ANP). They form an unusually tight institutional cluster: three state-owned établissements publics à caractère industriel et commercial (EPICs) supervised by the same ministry, with leadership installed or confirmed in a single November 2023 Council of Ministers wave that installed Abdoulaye Coulibaly at RTN, Alou Moustapha at ONEP and reconducted Malam Mamane Dalatou at ANP. RTN and ANP had undergone statutory reforms shortly before the July 2023 coup (RTN’s April 2022 reform with statutes confirmed by decree of 12 May 2022, ANP’s restated EPIC framework by Decree n° 2023-319/PRN/MC of 6 April 2023) while RTN’s board framework was further adjusted during the transition; ONEP’s EPIC basis dates to Ordinance n° 89-26 of 8 December 1989.

The regulatory environment has been substantially reshaped during the transition. The constitutional sector regulator, the Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC), was superseded by the Observatoire National de la Communication (ONC), created by ordinance on 1 September 2025 under Article 71 of the Charte de la Refondation, with the journalist Ibrahim Manzo Diallo as its president and the new body sworn in on 21 November 2025. The umbrella body Maison de la Presse had already been suspended by a late-January 2024 ministerial order, reported by ANP on 31 January 2024. The 7 June 2024 Tchiani ordinance n° 2024-28 reintroduced prison terms : one to three years for defamation or insults via electronic communication, two to five years for dissemination of data deemed likely to disturb public order or undermine human dignity, with mitigating circumstances expressly unavailable. A foreign-media suspension cycle that began with RFI and France 24 in the days following the coup and extended to the BBC in December 2024 culminated in the ONC’s decision of 8 May 2026, reported on 9 May, suspending France 24, RFI, AFP, TV5 Monde, TF1 Info, Jeune Afrique, Mediapart, LSI Africa and France Afrique Média. Niger fell from 83rd to 120th of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index, with a score of 46.02 in the “difficult” band — a 37-place drop that RSF identifies as the steepest single-year fall in the entire 2026 Index.

The SC classification rests on a convergent institutional and editorial picture. All three outlets are state-owned EPICs with boards appointed by the government and Directors-General installed by executive decree; none has an independent oversight body or published editorial charter; all three are primarily state-funded with no recent audited financial reporting. Editorial alignment with the transition authorities is documented across the cluster: RTN was decorated with the Médaille de la Souveraineté Sarauniya Mangou in October 2024 for its role in junta communication and its Director-General was convicted of defamation in February 2026; ONEP’s Director-General personally authors signed editorials in Le Sahel advancing the refoundation agenda, with state support extending to an August 2024 four-colour Heidelberg printing machine at around XOF 1 billion and an ONEP INFO mobile application launched in September 2025; ANP’s leadership has explicitly positioned the agency within the government’s Plan de Réhabilitation, and the agency is the institutional vehicle for the emerging pan-AES information architecture, with a tripartite cooperation protocol with Burkina Faso’s AIB and Mali’s AMAP signed on 2 October 2025 and a 14-member committee installed in May 2026, with ANP and ONEP representatives as rapporteurs to draft the legal texts for an AES press agency headquartered in Niger. The coup did not move the typology: each outlet was SC under the civilian government and the developments of the review period have intensified rather than altered that framing. The SC classification continues to apply to RTN, ONEP and ANP for 2026. No sector-specific rules on AI-generated or synthetic news content in Niger’s state media were identified during this review.

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