Nobody has heard from Moussa Kaka since Monday evening. The director general of Radio Télévision Saraounia, a well-known figure in Niger’s media landscape and a former RFI correspondent, vanished in Niamey under circumstances that remain, for now, entirely unexplained.
The facts, pieced together by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) from several consistent sources, are stark in their simplicity. On August 31, around 7pm, Moussa Kaka left his office in Niamey to head home, just as he does every evening. This time, though, he never got there. Since then, silence. Neither his family nor his colleagues have been able to reach him. His phone goes unanswered, and his car, too, has never turned up.
A journalist from his newsroom, speaking to RSF on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Kaka hadn’t shown up at the office since that Monday night. His family, meanwhile, is left with nothing to go on regarding his whereabouts, and his absence was reported to close collaborators soon after. A handful of accounts, still unconfirmed, suggest he may have been intercepted somewhere along his route home.
This disappearance did not happen in a vacuum. It comes barely two days after a mutiny attempt shook Niamey on August 29, rattling the grip of General Abdourahamane Tiani, who has led the ruling junta since the 2023 coup. The regime eventually regained control, but arrests have been piling up in the aftermath. Former defence minister Kalla Moutari was detained on September 1 in Dakoro, in the Maradi region, reportedly by armed men.
It is against this backdrop of mounting political and security tension that Kaka’s disappearance unfolds, deepening fears over what may have happened to him.
Kaka is no stranger to friction with the authorities. He founded Radio Saraounia back in 1999 and secured a television frequency in 2011, gradually building one of the country’s most widely followed media groups. His career has also been marked by repeated run-ins with successive governments. As far back as 2007, he was arrested and held for months over his contacts with the Tuareg rebellion while working as an RFI correspondent.
More recently, in November 2025, he was again taken into custody, alongside RTS editorial secretary Abdoul Aziz Idé and Souleymane Brah, a journalist with the online outlet La Voix du peuple, on charges of « complicity in distributing material likely to disturb public order. » He was later released on bail. Three other journalists, including RTS’s Ibro Chaibou, were placed under formal pre-trial detention over the same case. Chaibou only regained his freedom on August 28, after nearly ten months behind bars. Kaka, notably, was there when he walked free, just days before his own disappearance.
RSF has responded with growing alarm. On Wednesday, September 2, the organization said it was « concerned » and pressed Niger’s authorities directly. « The disappearance of Moussa Kaka, a well-known journalist, is particularly worrying at a time when Niger is going through a fresh period of intense political and security tension, » said Sadibou Marong, RSF’s Sub-Saharan Africa bureau director, calling for an immediate investigation to locate the journalist and establish the circumstances of his disappearance without delay.
So far, no Niger official has commented publicly on the case, nor offered any indication of where Kaka might be. In a country where press freedom has come under repeated strain since the junta took power, that official silence is only adding to the unease surrounding his fate.
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