AS ECOWAS COMES APART…
The failure to bring the three countries back into their fold could have significant impact on business and trade in the region
In a significant blow to regional unity and efforts to boost economic and security cooperation, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has approved the joint withdrawal of three of its founding members from the regional body. The three departing
countries, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, all ruled by military juntas, will formally leave the bloc in January 2025. Even though they have been offered a six-month grace period to reconsider their decision, there is nothing to suggest that any of them will. They will be joining Mauritania that left the bloc in 2000.
With their exit, the 15-member bloc will lose about 76 million of its more than 400 million people, and more than half its total geographical land area. The withdrawal of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso marked the culmination of a turbulent period in the Sahel, where series of coups since 2020 have brought military authorities to power. ECOWAS has directed the Council of Ministers to convene an extraordinary session during the second quarter of 2025 to consider and adopt both separation modalities and the contingency plan covering political and economic relations with the breakaway states.
The imminent unravelling of the 50-year-old ECOWAS is partly the result of recent regional and international developments. Democratic rule has failed to bring neither security nor economic contentment in most West African countries. Jihadist insurgency in the Sahel has spread southwards to unsettle dirt-poor states with weak military forces led by politically ambitious young officers. A shrinking French interest and capacity to pay the bills of its former colonies has also attracted a newly ambitious Russia to explore the region for extractive territories.
As an ideal and a reality, ECOWAS has largely failed to realise its originating objectives. Neither economic development nor meaningful integration can be said to have been realised. The free cross border movement of poor and hungry citizens and scraggy livestock is by no means a sensible definition of economic integration. Even then, as has been demonstrated by the plight of the European Union (EU) after the disastrous Brexit gambit by the United Kingdom, the use of hasty political expediency to dismantle long standing regional cooperation bodies often ends badly.
The three states had last January announced their decision to withdraw from the body, accusing the regional bloc of treating them badly, and criticising the imposition of sanctions, and the threatened military interventions. They argued that ECOWAS failed to help them fight raging jihadist insurgencies and complained that it was working too closely with France and other Western powers. The three countries are increasingly gravitating towards Russia, at the expense of France, their colonial ruler, to fight armed jihadists who are waging an insurgency in the region.
But for ECOWAS, failure to bring the three countries back into their fold could have significant impact on business and trade throughout the region. Border closures create uncertainty, slowing economic activity and impacting local industries dependent on trade. This is particularly true on reinstatement of tariffs, and an end to free cross-border movement of people. But the coastal states would also be affected too as most are largely dependent on livestock from across the Sahel. More than half of the meat consumed in Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, is reportedly produced in the Central Sahelian States. Besides, infrastructural projects like roads and others like Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline may suffer.
Worse still, to allow transient military autocracies to damage long standing regional institutions signals a far-reaching danger for the political future of a region whose member nations are both poverty-stricken and militarily weak. A new wave of Russian dominated instability may be in the horizon. It signals an impending distortion and complication of the untidy emerging world order. For Nigeria and the rest of ECOWAS, therefore, the immediate challenge is that of mature diplomacy and committed statesmanship.
Mature statesmanship should encourage the return of civil rule in the rebelling countries as quickly as expedient. Sanctions should only be applied to encourage reasonable political behaviour, not necessarily to punish coup makers per se. More importantly, the attention of the United Nations should be drawn to the nefarious activities of Russia in West Africa. Nigeria’s leadership of the regional body should not just end with picking up the bills. It must do more to contain the increasing Russian influence, and even more, stem military dictatorships in the sub-region.
