Ademola Araoye

ECOWAS at 50, Rigor Matters,

Ademola Araoye

It is the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). But the wine glasses are clinking in a seemingly subdued celebration. The local commemorative seminar featured the usual heavyweights in politics, past and present, and of the ubiquitous establishment intelligentsia. There were no exuberant frills in the atmosphere. As not unexpected, the offerings were in tamed linearity of packaged hopeful perspectives and familiar consensual singular narratives of a yet to arrive greatness. The restrained mood is sadly rightfully so. Yet, no visionary, whatever the prevailing odds, abandons hope in navigating the stormy seas of the largely unpredictable. This is even more so in managing foreign and security policy. Based on evolving tough empirical realities though, that hopeful futuristic transformation of current situation, in this instance, can only be actualized only through the infusion of greater analytic rigor and enhanced rationality in policy processes to cure the critical bane of Nigeria’s foreign policy making. That bane is simply the source of the woes of ECOWAS. For some time now, a yawning dearth of rigor has marked the descent to glorified mediocrity in all aspects of Nigeria’s national life. The effect of the spillover of the encroaching national decay has been felt in the ineffectuality of Nigeria’s role at the international level.

Propaganda may disorient the local population for a while, but it does not cure the impactful odious reality of a state or its administration. Against that background and to state the obvious, a basic fact is that ECOWAS is Nigeria and Nigeria is ECOWAS. ECOWAS is thus gone the way of Nigeria, just like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is impacted by the goings-on internal to the United States of America. There are definitive implications when a hegemonic actor around which other states gravitate is not properly aligned to manage seminal momentous thrust in a system and sub-system alike. There are seminal conjunctures in the evolution of the strategic constructions of global systems. The outcome of the management of the critical challenges at such critical moments in the trajectory of global order can be decisive for both the global and international orders. The global political order refers to the arrangement of power and authority that provides the framework for the conduct of diplomacy and world politics on a global scale. The international order is in reference to issues and concerns of two or more countries. International order applies to sub systems such as the West African region and ECOWAS.

It is the contention here that Nigeria paid no heed to the implications of the radical evolutionary processes that has been unfolding in its sub-region in the last two decades. ECOWAS is bearing the brunt of the failures of its preeminent state actor. The unheeded processes, though substantively radical, presented, within the historical context of West Africa, the opportunity to consolidate the desired integration of the West Africa. It is thus a rueful paradox that Nigeria missed the boat. That was in the early 2000s. The failure to perceive the opportunities presented by the evolution of political thought and transformed consciousness in Francophone West Africa is responsible of the current unfortunate circumstances of ECOWAS. That threatening calamity is marked by a widespread loss of institutional integrity and the diminution of its perceived salience as a constructive element in the evolved progressivism in the sub-systemic order. These are the outcomes of that lack of analytic rigor and rational policy processes that was fully manifest in the handling of the Ivorian crisis. Nigeria, then and as now, an unconsolidated democracy itself, touting a strangest policy of the assumption of a role of the gendarme of democracy in Africa, misled ECOWAS to the current avoidable impasse. The unimpeachable extenuating circumstances of the radical evolution both in Abidjan and, more recently, in the Sahel were completely lost on process formulation. Abuja’s stance in the Ivorian crisis, on the side of France and in alliance with the very cohorts of the historic traducers of Africa, was against the more perceptive John Attah Mills administration in Ghana, a key ECOWAS state. The Nigerian position on the Ivorian crisis, just as in the Sahel, also baffled elite afro-centric African states, led by South Africa. For the second time after Africa’s first continental war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, African forces threatened to confront each other in Abidjan. Admittedly, Nigeria won a pyric victory so damaging to the integrity of the country and the sub regional organization that it has continued to haunt them both. That empty but noxious victory in the Ivorian crisis is the albatross Nigeria, and by extension, ECOWAS, has hung around their necks till date. It has remained the badge of a nation so hollow as to be oblivious of its own interests.

The Ivorian crisis was a second seminal moment for Africa. The first was in the ouster of Sese Seko Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Abidjan is part of and at the same presaged contemporary developments and the strategic puzzles that they have posed to ECOWAS. The challenge of the Sahel and reverberations in Senegal, and now Chad, are rooted in the concept of Youth Patriotism of Ble Guede under the heavy influence Laurent Kudus Gbagbo, the former radical leader of Cote d’Ivoire who was hounded out of office by France, with the tacit connivance of Abuja. The man, a deeply insightful historian and a politician of socialist and humanist orientation, has turned out to be grandfather of the ideas driving transformative revolutionary movements of francophone West Africa. Gbagbo was contemptuously dismissed in preference for a predictable crony of France by the all-knowing political and intellectual godfathers of Nigeria. Nigeria claimed to be protecting a democracy that it barely could boast of  at home. But Gbagbo was well appreciated in more revolutionary climes in Africa, who cultivated an alliance even through his trauma of the international mill of injustice. The alliance of positivistic afro-centric human agencies and state actors still subsists today. In light of the deeply disappointing role of Nigeria in Abidjan, it was natural for the ardency of Laurent Gbagbo for an integrated West Africa under the leadership of Nigeria to fade. Embittered, two decades after, his stout ideas and invisible hand shape the revolutionary trajectory in Francophone Africa. The influence of his ideas runs from the Sahel, through Senegal and now Tchad. Gbagbo believes there is no role for ECOWAS in the on-going emancipatory process in Africa.

For greater illumination, the initial development of certain ideas, principles, trends, and patterns constantly serve as the ideational motor in the establishment of the global or sub-systemic political order. Also, the ideological factor has a definitive impact on the character of power relations across the global system. For a long time, the consolidation of imperialist hegemony in the post-colonial universe was founded on imposed ideological preferences and the acceptance of an unquestioning subordination in the ideological camp simply qualified the rule of the African despotic as a success. Understanding that embedded condition in Africa’s democratic experience was a critical imperative for rigorous and rational policy making in the context of the advancement of liberation as a philosophy of holistic emancipation. Thus, the comprehension of these ideas or ideologies is extremely important for the analysis of the mechanisms related to political orders at all levels. Youth patriotism is one such revolutionary concept that has implied a constructive and transformative movement for emancipation of the sub region, if not Africa as a whole. In the particular case of Cote d’Ivoire, the setback suffered by the forces of progressivism, represented by the movement of Patriotic Youths, did nothing to abort the future of a West Africa free from the broken tentacles of France. The ideas roared back to life in the Sahel.

Meanwhile, the Ivorian crisis was a seminal moment for the forces seeking consolidate their stranglehold over the country and by implication, the sub-region. This was against endogenous radical forces determined to resist continued domination under whatever guise. As I highlight in Cote d’Ivoire: the Conundrum of the Still Wretched of the Earth (Africa World Press, 2012), the weakness of democratic imposition in Africa is reflected in the ludicrous construction of the democratic circles in the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. The key allies of France and the U.S. in their pretext of the advancement of democracy in Côte d’Ivoire were Omar Bongo, Sassou-Nguesso, Blaise Compaoré, Abdulaye Wade, and Olusegun Obasanjo. These octogenarians or near so, however, were far from being the supermodels of democracy. Their sordid profiles clearly told different stories. Indeed, it was a travesty of democracy that a military dictator who oversaw the killing of over 300 students in 1978 and the brutalization of countless civilians as an elected leader to be presented as a poster-child strutting the stage for the cause of democracy in Africa. Nor could Africa accept that a vicious impostor who murdered one of the most charismatic leaders to emerge in Africa to derail a popular revolution and who had then remained the life-ruler of Burkina Faso, be passed as a democrat. Nor for that matter could a senile septuagenarian president seeking a third term of six years in office by tinkering with the Constitution, not only to guarantee his third term but also to assure the ascendancy of his thirty year old son after papa’s twelve years in office in Dakar- a la France approved monarchical democracy of post-Bongo Gabon- be foisted as the paragon of democracy. Nor could even the French contrived reverence of an antiquated stooge-sage-democrat who ruled from adolescence to the grave and who let loose armed lunatics that tore into shreds the entirety of the social fabric of West Africa beginning with the murder of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, to Liberia and, finally, to Sierra Leone hold water. The association of ECOWAS with the activities of all these dubious actors undermined the integrity of ECOWAS. Finally, the triumph of France in Côte d’Ivoire, with Nigeria in tow, turned out to be pyrrhic victory at best for Nigeria and ECOWAS. The outcome only secured the ascendance of a neo-imperialist plot in a Euro-America dominated post-Cold War world order. Through the beneficiary of the proclaimed winner, Alhassane Ouatara, as President of Cote d’Ivoire, ECOWAS was stuck with an inflexible stooge of France whose sole mandate in ECOWAS is to derail every movement toward regional integration. Notably, he has done a good job of his brief as a spoiler of sub regional integration.

Irrespective of the outcome of the Ivorian crisis, the ideology of Youth Patriotism has driven transformative developments in West Africa. Senegal, in particular, managed to bring the Senegalese to reject the status quo through democratic elections. The latest icons of Africa’s revolutionary youth patriotism campaigned on a project to restore Senegal’s substantive national sovereignty from the traditional flag independence of post-colonial African states. The PASTEF affirmed the pursuit of a radical policy of “left-wing pan-Africanism” as the main thrust of foreign policy. The implications of these monumental projects at the domestic level and in interaction with the external environment, are historic. In sum, they represent an unprecedented impulse toward radical restorations of quintessential essences of a humanity that were dislodged by the colonial experience and consolidated in neo-imperialism. The project of radical restoration will manifest critically in the rebalancing of Senegal’s foreign economic relations, in particular with France. The realignment may be expected to, in particular, bring the country more closely aligned to the radical axis of consolidated Africa’s states that are mostly found outside the immediate West African sub-region. These states operate on the basis of a fundamental and cardinal precept of a demystification and denunciation of all that Western Europe has historically stood for and continues to advance in Africa. The radical pan-African states are accordingly mobilized by the implacable repudiation of all neo-colonial relations that is expressed in the repudiation of embattled France as the most brutal and vexatious expression of neo-colonial enterprises in Africa. Thus, through the ballot box has emerged another figure with revolutionary credentials in francophone West Africa, in a country with a close sociological affinity to the peoples of the Sahel. It is the gross inability of Nigeria and ECOWAS bureaucrats to read, and analytically dissect the new forces and integrate the evolved reality into policy formulation that has ruined the promise of ECOWAS as a critical institution for positive transformation. As a further empirical fact is the stark mismanagement of similar expressions of the Ivorian challenge in the Sahel. Again, Nigeria allowed the false allure of being the subordinate darling of the West in Africa, to becloud its rationality. It waffled its way to the strategic cul de sac of being on the side of France humiliated out of the Sahel. Nigeria had learnt no lesson from its horrible outing in Cote d’Ivoire two decades later. Rigor matters in policy formulation process and a lack of it can be very costly. Such rigor includes constant reviews of successes and failures as well as the lessons that they offer for the future.

Policy formulation at the national level currently has been characterized by fixations in old ideas, jaded sentiments and base regurgitations of seemingly commonsensical mantras. These are often proven suspect and unsound when weighed against sterling and informed ideational parameters. That indeed has been the fate of foreign and security policy making in the last two decades or so. As suggested above, the current uncertainties around ECOWAS is reflexive of the massive failure of foreign and security policy of Nigeria. That failure is traceable to a lack of analytic rigor or a deliberate rejection of sound professional advice that may be inconsistent with the personal political agendas of the dominant men in the public sphere of a few years back. It is a known fact that Ambassador Raph Uwechue, envoy of ECOWAS in Abidjan, was untiring in alerting Abuja of the waywardness of the policy of Nigeria and ECOWAS on the Ivorian crisis. His entreaties bounced on a brick wall. History has proven him absolutely right. ECOWAS lost, big time.

A culture of cultivated dissonances is integral to intellectual growth. Nigeria should move away from the tendency of one brain, one expert, one narrative or even one intellectual culture in all facets of its national and international life.  It must embrace the practice of marrying theoretical traditions in policy formulation. Life itself is a cacophony and a serious nation must jettison the impression of being stuck to one understanding of the universe or just one perspective to complex phenomena. Associated with this is the national orientation of groveling sycophantic adulations that goes with expecting crumbles from the table of the perceived high and mighty. It is the quid pro quo of services rendered. A mafia-like god father orientation in all matters is pervasive. This inhibits the demands of rigor requiring the jousting of contrasting ideas and perspectives in a dynamic intellectual environment seeking the very best outcome for its investment of energy for the common good. More importantly, it is key to the stoutness and the efficiency of policy outcomes. Rigor matters in distilling the complex nuances of presumably simple challenges into systematic policy frameworks that are efficient in constructive management of foreign and security objectives. It is exactly the lack of criticality in deciphering the empirical to illuminate the future that has ruined the ECOWAS party at 50.

Yet still, I stretch my calabash for a spout from the farm-fresh gourd of palm wine. I join in the cheerful three mighty Gbosas to ECOWAS at 50!