HOPE IN A FRACTURED REGION

 OLU JACOBS  examines President Tinubu’s leadership of West Africa’s regional body

There is a viral video of the Ghanaian President, Nana Akufo-Addo, arriving the Ouagadougou airport and being shunned by Burkinabe ministers who refused to shake his hand, as their leader, Ibrahim Traore, looked on smugly.

The video supposedly illustrates the fact that all is not well with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), since the Sahel coups and the series of sanctions slammed on the coupists – leading to the famous declaration by Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso in January that they would be leaving to form their own fringe group instead.

The real story behind the video, however, had less to do with ECOWAS and more to do with the comment the Ghanaian president made over the alleged flirtation of Burkina Faso with Russian mercenaries and the implication for the war on terror in the region.

Still, the last one year has tested the unity of the regional group more than any other period in its nearly 50 years of chequered growth.

By the time President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was handed the reins in July 2023 at the 63rd Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, barely two months after he won a fiercely contested election in Nigeria, the ECOWAS community was facing some dire crisis. Three member states, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea had seen five coups in three years. Mali was moreover beset by a jihadist insurgency across some of its 4500 miles of porous borders and the violence had spread to Guinea and Burkina Faso so that, “the Sahel region now ranks as the world’s epicenter of terrorism,” according to the Global Terrorism Index.

Drought had also led to famine in these landlocked states and the millions of displaced persons presented an impossible refugee crisis. Indeed, the whole West African region was going through severe economic downturn, and the almost universally poor leadership had worsened the poverty,

inflation and jobless rate that had pushed the largely youthful population into the desperation of crossing the Mediterranean on dodgy boats.

In his very first speech as chairman, President Tinubu acknowledged that democracy had not been as successful as it should be in the region but said it remained, “the best form of government,” despite “being tough to manage.”

Flush from his own victory in Nigeria’s redoubtable presidential polls, he gushed that the region was set to set an example for the rest of Africa, and for the world. “We will not allow coup after coup in West Africa, ” he warned.

Almost as if on cue, two weeks later, a coup led by General Abdourahmane Tchiani, toppled the government of Mohamed Bazoum in Niger and thus began a firestorm of events that may come to define the first tenure of president Bola Tinubu as chair of the regional body.

In its initial response, ECOWAS under its new chairman, who had promised to give no quarter to coupists, was decisive, even dismissive, giving the junta all of seven days to step down and return Bazoum to power. Tinubu’s anger was palpable, as was his concern that another coup in the Sahel could cause a domino effect. “They cannot use the gun given to them to protect the sovereignty of the country and turn it against the people of the country,” he vowed.

ECOWAS imposed the most severe sanctions in the group’s history on Niger: the closure of land and air borders, the institution of a no-fly zone on all commercial flights, the suspension of all commercial and financial transactions, the freezing of assets in ECOWAS Central Banks, and the suspension of Niger from all financial assistance and transactions. Nigeria also cut power supply to Niger and the Authority of Heads of State threatened to use force to eject the soldiers, as enshrined in the Community’s 2001 Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance.

Tinubu received justifiable praise from the African Union, European Union, United States government and the international community. As the German ambassador to Nigeria Annett Gunter said recently, “President Tinubu had made it clear that ECOWAS will not tolerate such actions and I think that is the right approach. Democracy is a fundamental principle of ECOWAS and it is essential to uphold it.”

Soon after, however, things got complicated. The sanctions, as sanctions are wont to do, were hurting the people of Niger more than their targeted leaders.

Food security worsened, inflation skyrocketed, and border closure with Nigeria particularly along Maradi and half a dozen states in northern Nigeria shut down the roughly $500 million annual trade in transport, electricity, tobacco, cement, livestock-derived products, fruits and refined petroleum between both nations.

Beyond the sanctions, ECOWAS plan to activate the deployment of its “Standby force with all its elements” didn’t sit well with many who said a war in the region with its attendant refugee problems would do more harm than good. Experts feared that with the four juntas forming a military pact to face the ECOWAS joint attack, West Africa may be in for a long siege.

Crucially, the historical affinity between the people of northern Nigeria and Niger Republic also dampened any thought of killing “our brothers across the border.” In the end, the plan was shelved and in February 2024 the sanctions were lifted, “with immediate effect,” said the president of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission, Omar Alieu Touray who said the decision was based “on purely humanitarian grounds” to ease the suffering of Nigeriens.

At the summit, President Tinubu said ECOWAS “must re-examine our current approach to the quest for constitutional order in four of our Member States” and urged Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso to “reconsider their decision” to withdraw from the body and “not perceive our organisation as the enemy.”

The decision all but saved ECOWAS from further fragmentation. By dialing back, Tinubu proved to be sensitive to the mood of the region. Still, critics worried that the decision to halt military intervention made ECOWAS look weak. Yet, whenever it becomes necessary to kill people in order to prove your power over them, you have already failed.

At the sideline of the election in Senegal, the ECOWAS commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Amb. Abdel-Fatau Musah, told this reporter that ECOWAS never planned to actually invade Niger anyway. “We haven’t really done that in a long while,” he said. “It was always going to be a last resort.”

In many ways, the political option has been given teeth since Tinubu came to office. A number of crisis, and even potential disasters, have been averted with his deft interventions. In December 2023, he sent a high powered mission led by Ghana’s Akufo-Addo, and Macky Sall of Senegal to negotiate the relocation of former Sierra Leone President, Ernest Bai Koroma who was charged for treason in connection with a failed coup, to Nigeria. The matter had threatened to engulf the country in another conflagration until Tinubu’s carrot and stick approach led to an agreement that saw the former president being flown to live in Nigeria on January 4, 2024.

Then there is the critical role ECOWAS, under Tinubu played in the success of the Senegalese election of 24 March 2024 when the arrests of opposition members and the postponement of the polls led to riots and mayhem. President Tinubu had made strong statements assuring the people of Senegal that ECOWAS stood with them in their quest for a successful transition. He had then deployed a fact finding mission to interrogate the electoral process and meet with stakeholders. A long term observer group soon followed, and another 130-member mission under Ambassador Ibrahim Gambari arrived Dakar, Senegal to witness the polls and dialogue with the then president, Macky Sall, civil society groups and leading candidates in the election.

Tinubu said the success of the Senegal election was proof that democracy remains the popular choice of the people of the region and military rule was an aberration.

Also, under his leadership, ECOWAS has upped the process of reducing the cost of elections in the region, capping campaign finances, and establishing a logistic depot to produce ballot boxes and other generic election materials to aide nations holding elections. It has since deployed a mission to Ghana, which goes to the polls at the end of the year, to discover anything that may stand in the way of a hitch free election.

It is interesting that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who in his inaugural speech as Nigeria’s president promised to retool Nigeria’s foreign policy to more actively lead the regional and continental quest for collective prosperity, has managed to use his chairmanship of the regional body to achieve his foreign policy mandate. His famous 4D doctrine, “which is anchored on Democracy, Developments, Demography and Diaspora” seemed to have aligned with his core mandate at ECOWAS as captured by his maiden speech: “I make a pledge here that in furtherance of our region’s economic recovery and growth we will commit to democracy and promote democracy and the rule of law…we will work collectively to pursue inclusive economic integration of the sub-region.”

As ECOWAS continues to engage with the juntas in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea, it must also look at the way some democracies in the region tinker with their nations constitution to give themselves a third term or confer undue advantages on the ruling party. By employing its peer review mechanism to sanction the excesses of their colleagues, the Authority of Heads of States will further demonstrate the impact of ECOWAS and bring the Community closer to the grassroots, assuring the citizens that the body cares for their wellbeing.

As Tinubu has noted in the past, it is by “providing good governance that tackles the challenges of poverty, inequality and other concerns of the people that we would succeed in addressing some of the root causes of military intervention in some of the civilian processes in our region.”

 Jacobs, a former newspaper editor, writes from Abuja