Ademola Araoye
The 7 July 2024 summit of the residue of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Abuja following the exit of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger was remarkable in many ways. The conference was instigated by the disappointing lack of progress in the panicky efforts at pacifying the radical junta-led Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. Based on a rather convenient narrative that abjures both the apparent simplicity and the nuanced complexity of the challenge of the Sahel Confederacy, the search is for mere pacification, or reconciling, with the revolutionary regimes or as some would advance, by the apex meeting of ECOWAS. At the summit, the heads of state of ECOWAS thus sought to formulate and deploy “more vigorous” efforts to avoid the disintegration of what the exuberant Nigerian representative of the African Union at the summit described as the model regional integration mechanism in Africa. Fundamentally, it may be asserted that no irreconcilable differences exist between the emerged Sahel Confederacy and ECOWAS other than the brash mismanagement of an inevitable historic evolution in the Sahel that, paradoxically, all progressive Africans are aligned with by ECOWAS. Ominously though, a rival summit meeting of Sahelian confederate states had been convened in Niamey on the eve of the ECOWAS summit. The alternate summit was to demonstrate the unwavering commitment of the Confederacy to their cause. Many observers interpreted the Niamey gathering as a bluff of ECOWAS by an assertive troika demonstrating growing confidence.
At the 6 July 2024 summit in Niamey, the leaders signed a confederation treaty that strengthened the existing mutual defense pact and the movement toward greater political, cultural, and economic unity. Assimi Goïta of Mali was elected as the new alliance’s leader even as the three leaders signed a pact committing their countries to creating a regional parliament and a bank to manage a new currency to replace the France-controlled CFA. They also committed to pooling their military resources to fight insecurity in their countries. The signing marked the conclusion of the first joint summit of the alliance. It may be recalled that the three juntas were initially mobilized by hostility toward former colonial ruler France and other Western countries in truncating democratic administrations in their respective countries. Threats of military invasion and imposition of economic sanctions by ECOWAS to reverse the military interventions in Niger thrust the sub-regional organization into direct conflict with the three revolutionary forces in the Sahel. The three signed a defense pact to protect their revolutions. The resulting ‘Liptako-Gourma Charter’ enjoins all three states to support each other in the event of rebellion, insurgency, or external aggression. Further, the confederate states turned to other elite partners in the global system such as Russia, Turkey, Iran, and, some suggest, North Korea for military support. Within Africa has also emerged an axis of radical states that are supportive of measures to dislodge neocolonial forces in whatever guise and their proxies from the continent by all means possible. The broader engagement of all these forces has altered the strategic template of the sub-region. Through the acts of the revolutionary forces in the Sahel, the evolution of the strategic configuration of the West Africa sub-region directly feeds into the turbulence of the evolving global order.
In the face of these developments, the 7 July 2024 summit of ECOWAS states was well worth the expense given the magnitude of the strategic consequences of the breakaway states in central Sahel for the sub-region. Yet, more critical for the way forward is the deft management of the global dimension to the ECOWAS challenge in a Sahel region that is now irretrievably thrust into the vortex of the turbulent evolution of the global order. Both France and the United States continue to explore ways to rehouse their forces dislodged from the Sahel. It is against this background that through the instrumentality of BRICS, the Confederation of States of the Sahel has counterpoised the return to ECOWAS at the cost of truncating potential preferential relations or even outright membership in the BRICS. There has been some momentum in that direction. The International Alliance for BRICS Project in early July 2024 presented Ibrahim Traore, the 36-year-old charismatic leader of Burkina Faso, whose radical policies and carriage are reminiscent of Thomas Sankara, with a medal. The award was to commend his courage and determination to assert the sovereignty of his people. The International Alliance for BRICS Project has announced plans to open an office in Ouagadougou to pursue cooperation in humanitarian, economic, and welfare between Burkina Faso and the representative of the BRICS geo-political bloc. It may thus be surmised that the elite powers driving BRICS, including Russia, China, and in a more nuanced manner, South Africa are sympathetic to the broader radical pan-Africa agenda of rooting out proxies of neocolonial forces on the continent even if such cronies had emerged through Africa’s instrumentalized democratic processes.
For a start, the emergence of the Confederation of States of the Sahel (CSS) has already profoundly altered the strategic construction of the sub-region and consequentially the balance of power. It has opened the doors to massive incursion of external forces in pursuit of larger global strategic objectives. What role BRICS may have assumed in the challenge in the Sahel would reflect convergences of the States of the Sahel and BRICS in the ideo-philosophical understanding of the global system and the critical appreciation of the locus of the constituent states of the Confederation of the States of the Sahel, and by extension of the African continental space, in the larger scheme of the evolution of the global order. This is a critical imperative that ECOWAS leadership must ponder. Leaders of ECOWAS states are seemingly unconditionally or conveniently wedded to the advancement of Western interests in Africa. This has often been expressed in very embarrassing tones, such as the President of Ghana unabashedly reporting the movement of the Prime Minister of a neighboring state to the United States Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken at a formal dinner. Or, what kind of relations can be expected between the French lickspittle in Abidjan with the flaming hot revolutionaries in the Sahel who are determined to drive his ilk and their West European paymasters from West Africa? Also in the same manner, Benin is sabotaging the economy of Niger by placing obstacles in the way of continued Niger’s export of oil from its port. In the climate of declining diplomatic civility, five Nigeriens were arrested in June at Seme-Kpodji, Benin, and accused of entering the Beninoise port illegally. Three of the five were later jailed. Relations between Benin and Niger have taken a nosedive since the coup that ousted President Mohammed Bazoum in Niger. Since then Benin’s port of Seme-Kpodji, which exports Niger’s oil has been a point reflexive of the crisis in bilateral relations. These confrontations have given rise in the capitals of the confederate Sahelian states to explicitly expressed suspicions that both Abidjan and Cotonou are harboring anti-revolutionary elements armed by France to destabilize Sahelian states. Cote d’Ivoire and Benin Republic are also allegedly accommodating French military bases with plans to sabotage the governments of the three countries. Although operating consistently within the ambit of sanctions imposed on Niger by ECOWAS after the coup, Benin closed the border with Niger, but has since reopened it. Paradoxically, Niger’s military rulers have refused to reopen their side of the border in the changed circumstances of the relations between the Sahel Confederacy and ECOWAS.
In the rational permutation of the risk-acceptant leadership of the Sahelian states, the cost-benefit analysis in the prevailing global context does not look promising for a return to an ECOWAS largely populated by regimes with stout credentials as national elite criminal syndicates beholden to Western neocolonial powers. Conceptually, the agendas of ruling elite criminal syndicate regimes have no bearing neither on the immediate welfare of the population nor the longer-term struggle for the holistic emancipation of black humanity. In essence, the ideo-philosophical drivers of the CSS and the underpinnings of ECOWAS are poles apart. They are clashing opposites whose confrontation and outcomes, in the longue duree would define the placement of West Africa in the turbulent evolution of the global order in the emerging post-Soviet strategic configuration.
Given the transformed sentiments against neocolonial regimes in the continent, military interventions to remove their proxies were seemingly inevitable. The epidemic of coup d’etats, and it is foreseen not to have run its course yet, in the Sahel is a direct consequence of frustrations arising from the impact of historic and, more critically, contemporaneous intensification of Western interventions in the affairs of Africa. The coups were executed within the context of the paralyzing impact of the crisis on the peculiar praxis of democracy across the continent. The outcome of the recent Western interventions, which were orchestrated against the will of Africa, accelerated the process of disenchantment against the West. The disenchantment and accompanying demystification of the West undergird the revolutionary impulses driving the removal of local sympathizers and proxies of the West from their often pivotal roles in the public realm. The development constitutes a historical juncture on the continent characterized by the confrontation between state actors and leaders of confrontational ideo-philosophical hues in defining the future direction of the people of Africa.
On the one hand, there are progressive and often radical state actors and leaders imbued with a heightened consciousness of the ruin that the imposed terms of the interaction of Africa with the West had brought the continent. The progressive forces recognize the imperative to begin a process of restoration to achieve equity and parity with other actors in the universe. On the other hand, there are conservative elements attached to the status quo mobilized by the old tradition of subordinated Africa and its pliable leadership in the service of hegemonic forces that provide assurances for their life stewardship to themselves and foreign handlers. It is the process of assuring the longevity of proxies in office that has enabled the entrenchment of the distorted caricature of democracy as normative on the continent. This instrumentalization of democracy to distort its essential values has been implanted with the connivance of the West in Africa. The Instrumentalized democracy deviates from the core tenets of democracy by replacing the sovereign interests of the people with the personal interests of the individual actor. In this context, the narratives of self-anointed guardians of democracy in the search for social and political stability on the continent are ironical in their paradoxes.
Meanwhile, democracy in most of Africa has become the tool of choice for autocrats in the service of interests extraneous to the will of the people. In the new age expressed in the ascent of progressive pan-African sentiments across the global black universe, including the Caribbeans, the schisms, traditionally non-kinetic, of the geopolitics of African states revolve around the clash between two opposing ideational poles. The tension between the breakaway confederate states in the Sahel and ECOWAS is a classic case in point. One aisle is mobilized by revolutionary visions of a restored Africa, and by implications of the global black universe. This group of state actors is constituted by mostly consolidated states with functional institutions that infuse in the state the capacity for radical rational action to demand the repudiation of the subsisting subordinate status of Africa and its tangential location in global affairs. The other aisle, constituted by mostly deconsolidated states, brings together status quo and conservative elements operating from fragilized states often led by malleable elements protecting personal political fortunes. These are often, in their orientations, delinked from the existential realities of the people. Yet, they are protected through various disingenuous devices in connivance with their metropolitan handlers in the service of foreign interests. While other factors peculiar to each state actor may modify its alignment on specific geopolitical challenges, differences along the lines of revolutionary or status quo orientation have a significant explanatory capacity of policy preferences in cases such as the response to the challenge posed by the coups in the Sahel. The geopolitics of the coup in Niger thus seeks to understand how the interactions of domestic, sub-regional, and regional forces and factors interact with the diverse interests of elite forces engaged in the sub-regional theater. The interactions at these multiple levels create a dynamic that may advance the revolutionary objectives of the junta and the radical aisles of Africa. The resulting dynamic may however also impede the actualization of the vision of more equitable relations with the external order through the re-imposition of the conservative status quo.
Considering that the challenge of the Sahel could have been avoided with a more deftly managed and astute diplomacy, the need for Nigeria to revamp its diplomatic structures and institutions is imperative. The slide of its capacity to address substantive challenges through diplomatic channels precedes the current debacle. For too long, the emphasis has been on coercion. This approach has elicited failures of unprecedented magnitude in the history of the country. The decline has been a long time coming. Nigeria needs a truly nurtured professional career in diplomatic service with skills honed to mediate, negotiate, and navigate the slippery terrains that define international strategic conundrums. The current debacle in the Sahel results from the weakened capacity of the Nigerian diplomatic service. This weakness has spilled over into ECOWAS and probably manifest in the African Union.
*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).