Niger on the edge of the French energy empire
Uranium wasn't important enough to transform the country
In 1965, the French discovered uranium in Niger. Here is what the New York Times had to say about it in 1969, right before production began. It makes for fascinating reading.
The paved road comes to an end in this isolated, dust-colored market town on the southern shore of the sand sea known as the Sahara. About 300 miles farther north, along an ill-defined track, lies the town of Agadez. About 150 miles beyond that, near the jumbled boulders of the Air Mountains, the village of Arlit is rising. Where nothing more than tumbledown mud huts stood two years ago, French and African workmen are building cement-block houses, shops, an electrical generating plant big enough for a city of 40,000 — and two uranium processing plants.
The uranium will be produced by a company in which the government of Niger holds 20 percent, German groups 10 percent, and the French Atomic Energy Commission and two French mining companies 70 percent ...
In a country where the per capita income runs about $75 a year ($867 in 2015 dollars), peanuts and bony steers constitute the only significant exports, where fuel is so scarce that technicians once tried and failed to make a power plant run on peanut husks, the discovery of uranium was an extraordinary event.
Niger will receive about 40 percent of the company’s profits ... Niger is counting on only $4 million a year in revenues by 1975 — about a tenth of the current national budget. “Even with this strike,” said a local economist this week, “this is never going to be a rich country — unless they find a market for sand.”
Getting the uranium out of land-locked Niger poses a problem. Niger has no railroads, so the uranium will have to travel hundreds of miles by truck to railheads in Dahomey or Nigeria, by truck across the Sahara, or perhaps by air directly from Arlit to Marseilles. But as one Niger official puts it, “You can’t run a country on peanuts, so we will have to do what we can with the rest of what we have.”
They eventually decided to truck the stuff out through Dahomey, now Benin. This information sheds some light on why Nigerien uranium is more expensive than uranium from elsewhere. Transport costs come out of that price, and I can’t imagine that it costs more to get the stuff from Australia or Canada or even Kazakhstan. We would need to calculate that differential to see how much Niger really benefitted (or suffered) from its informal imperial link with France. As for that $4 million in revenues … well, the article points out that it was only a tenth of the national budget, and French aid to Niger in 1969 already came to $22 million.

The article predicts the unhappy ending that Niger actually got. In 2022, the World Bank estimated Niger's GDP per capita to be a ridiculously precise $546 per capita in 2015 dollars ... less than it was in 1969. It might be hard to find direct evidence of a resource curse in Niger, but there isn’t much evidence of a blessing.
Would the story be different if the French Community still existed out on the Saharan energy frontier? I am not sure that it would. Direct French aid to Niger during the last year of the Community (1960) was only $2 million, quite a bit less than it would become a decade later. Meanwhile, France didn’t limit Africa migration to the Hexagon until 1974 — and Nigerien emigration rose substantially despite that.

It is a rather depressing story. But how could it have turned out differently?