Mamadou Tandja
Mamadou Tandja was president of Niger from December 1999 to February 2010, the retired colonel who won the election held after the assassination of Baré. He served two full terms, the first president of the country to do so. He was removed by the army when he tried to give himself a third by a referendum his own constitutional court had forbidden. The country called it the tazarce, the continuation. The officers called it a coup against the constitution that they were reversing. He was a Kanuri from Maïné-Soroa on the Nigerian border. He was an officer of Kountché's coup of 1974, an interior minister and ambassador to Nigeria under the military. He was the candidate of Kountché's old party, the MNSD, in the elections of 1993 and 1996, which he lost, and of 1999, which he won with sixty per cent against Issoufou. The ten years were the uranium coming back. The price rose from 2003. The French Areva company's monopoly was broken by the licences he sold to the Chinese and the Canadians. The Chinese built the oil refinery at Zinder and the Kandadji dam was begun at last. The debt was cancelled in 2006. There was the famine of 2005, in which he said there was no famine while the aid agencies fed three million people, which the country did not forget. There was also the Tuareg rising of 2007 to 2009 in the Aïr, the Niger Movement for Justice, fought under a state of emergency in which journalists were jailed and the north closed, and settled by Gaddafi's mediation in 2009. There was the code of the family he would not pass because the marabouts did not want it. The end was 2009. The constitution allowed two terms and he wanted a third. The constitutional court ruled the referendum illegal in May. He dissolved the parliament in May and the court in June. He ruled by decree and held the referendum in August, which passed with ninety-two per cent on a turnout the opposition boycotted. He was president under a new constitution of a sixth republic for six months, until a squadron chief's men shelled the palace during a cabinet meeting on 18 February 2010 and took him out of it. He was held for fourteen months, charged with embezzlement, and released in 2011 when the charges were dropped. He lived quietly in Niamey until he died in November 2020, at eighty-two. The state that had removed him gave him a state funeral. By then the country had had Issoufou's two terms and was about to have Bazoum's one.
- Lived: 1938 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Nigerien
- Roles: president, army officer, politician
