Niger’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, claimed that the military junta that overthrew him and is refusing to transfer power is keeping him in isolation and making him eat only dry rice and pasta.
Bazoum said in a series of texts to a friend that CNN had access to that he had been “deprived of all human contact” since Friday and that no one had been bringing him food or medicine.
Bazoum claimed that since Nigeria cut off the electricity in response to the coup, all Nigerien citizens have been experiencing a week-long period of living without electricity.
According to Bazoum, all of the perishable food he was given has since gone bad, so he is currently subsisting on dry pasta and rice.
Bazoum has maintained touch with the outside world despite being denied the opportunity to talk with acting US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland during her visit to Niamey, the capital of Niger, on Monday.
Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou, the prime minister in Bazoum’s government, told French TV that the president was in good spirits despite being held in a “catastrophic situation.”
Senior coup leaders met with Nuland on Monday for a meeting that lasted more than two hours and had “extremely frank and at times quite difficult” discussions. The junta abruptly called off a face-to-face meeting with representatives from the UN and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that was scheduled to take place in Niamey on Tuesday.
In a letter, Junta leaders said that the meeting’s postponement was “necessary” given “this atmosphere of threatened aggression against Niger.”
The junta would like to keep talking to ECOWAS, the group that has been spearheading the regional response to the political crisis in Niger, though, according to Mahamadou, the prime minister of Bazoum, who spoke to the French state-funded network TV5-Monde.
ECOWAS leaders are due to meet on Thursday in Nigeria to discuss the coup, though specifics regarding the gathering remain unclear.
The regional bloc had given the junta one week to return to their barracks and reinstall Bazoum, but that deadline came and went on Sunday without any change.
