Chad

Chad exists because France needed a buffer between its coastal colonies and the Sahara—and because power passes from father to son through the barrel of a gun. This landlocked territory became a separate colony in 1920, one of France's least developed possessions: desolate, inhabited mainly by nomads and fugitive slaves, its borders drawn across ethnic and religious fault lines that would define six decades of civil war.

The north-south divide was structural from the start. When François Tombalbaye became Chad's first president at independence in August 1960, his government and army were dominated by his ethnic group, the Sara, who are predominantly Christian and Animist southerners. By 1963 Chad was a one-party state; by 1966 the Muslim north had organized FROLINAT to fight it. Libya's Gaddafi, after seizing power in 1969, began backing the rebels and claimed the Aouzou Strip in northern Chad based on an unratified 1935 treaty. Tombalbaye was assassinated in a 1975 coup. What followed was a war of all against all, with Libyan intervention, French counter-intervention, and warlords switching sides based on tactical advantage rather than ideology.

Hissène Habré emerged from this chaos in 1982, backed by France and the United States as a bulwark against Libyan expansion. He became one of Africa's most brutal dictators, with tens of thousands tortured or killed. His security service, the DDS, operated detention centers where prisoners were executed, buried in mass graves, or simply disappeared. When Idriss Déby—a former army chief—overthrew Habré in 1990, he suspended the constitution and dissolved the legislature, establishing the pattern that would define his 31-year rule: military power, controlled elections, and oil wealth funding patronage networks.

Oil changed everything and nothing. Chad became an exporter in 2003, generating massive government revenues that Déby used to expand and heavily arm an army personally loyal to him. Yet only 10% of Chadians have access to electricity. The resource curse played out in textbook fashion: wealth concentrated at the top, population left in poverty, strongman rule entrenched.

Déby died in April 2021 fighting rebels—an unusual end for an African autocrat. His son, Mahamat Idriss Déby, immediately seized power in a military coup, suspended the constitution, and promised a transition to democracy that somehow ended with him winning a presidential election in May 2024 with over 60% of the vote. The opposition cried fraud. In February 2024, a 'self-coup' saw the leader of the opposition Socialist Party Without Borders, Yaya Dillo, killed when government forces stormed party headquarters. In January 2025, an attack on the presidency—blamed variously on Boko Haram and coup plotters—killed at least six.

Chad is now navigating a great-power reshuffle. In November 2024, the Déby government ended defense cooperation with France, evicting the 1,000 troops and aircraft that had been stationed there since the colonial era. Turkey is filling the vacuum, taking control of the Abéché base and deploying drones to Faya-Largeau near the Libyan border. Russia wants in—Chad borders CAR, Sudan, Libya, and Niger, all hosting Wagner forces—but Chad has so far resisted, jailing three journalists in March 2025 for allegedly spying for Wagner. The signal: Chad wants Russian options without Russian control.

By 2026, the Déby dynasty will likely consolidate further, balancing between Turkey, Russia, the UAE, and China while France's influence fades to historical footnote. The $30 billion 'Chad Connection 2030' development plan represents ambition; whether it represents reality is another question. Chad has exported oil for two decades and remains among Africa's poorest countries. Like the Lake Chad basin it's named for—shrinking, contested, divided—the country embodies what happens when colonial borders contain too many fractures to ever fully heal.