Let Them Go!

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) leaders’ summit that held in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, on December 15, 2024, seemed, at last, to have come to terms with the exit of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from their ranks come January 31,  2025. This is in line with the group’s charter that members who elect to leave must give a year’s notice at the end of which their departure would be effective. Mediation efforts led by the leaders of Senegal and Togo, respectively, have not managed over the course of the intervening year to dissuade the three countries from bolting the community.

Before the summit, the three countries announced that their decision to leave ECOWAS is irreversible and proceeded to organize their own meeting to preempt that of the association. Unfortunately, instead of accepting the reality of this exit and focusing on building a more solid association founded on very clear and binding principles—more about this anon—they resorted to dithering and opening a six-month extension for the exiting countries to change their minds and come back into the fold with no fuss.

This is where we come in. ECOWAS is a voluntary association with clearly articulated aims and objectives to which all who consent to be members are committed to helping to realize.  Simultaneously, whenever those aims and objectives no longer command the adherence to and confidence in them by any members, they should be free to exit. Where ECOWAS is concerned, there is a snag respecting the sort of social contract involved in its original inception.

We need to be reminded that the two principal proponents of ECOWAS at its inception were authoritarian rulers, and the membership reflected an array of rulers and political systems that took no notice of any unifying or even preferred modes of governance among them, talk less of an ideological consensus.

How times have changed. The tragedy of military, personal, and other forms of misrule from the late sixties to the nineties of the twentieth century has led African countries, like others across the world that had also borne the burden of similar misrule, to express, time and again, a preference for some form of liberal representative democracy undergirded by the principle of governance by consent over the last thirty or so years. However imperfectly realized, there is strong evidence that, again, as in other climes, Africans, too, want to have governments based on their consent and responsible and responsive to them and their yearnings for freedom and life more abundant.

West Africa has not remained aloof from this ferment. Despite occasional setbacks—Togo, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire, come to mind here—represented in dubious constitutional sleights of hand to illegally elongate tenures, the trend in this region has been in the direction of increasingly regular and better political transitions from governing parties to opposition parties and vice versa, credible elections, and more and more boisterous commitments to freedom and governance by consent. On this score, the scorecard is impressive.

In the period under review, the people of Senegal have frustrated three different no-good, pretend democrats who sought to elongate their tenures at the head of the republic.  We must salute the Senegalese people for showing that the principle of governance by consent and following the rules laid down for succession do not come with geographical, cultural, religious—Senegal’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim—or any other bylines.  They are good from Mongolia to Somalia, from Finland to Argentina.  Liberia and Sierra Leone, two countries that suffered total state collapse in the nineties of the last century, have curated smooth transitions from one regime to another, exchanged governing parties for opposition parties, and have continued to strengthen their political institutions.  Ghana is gradually settling into a two-party system, and such is the success the country has had that, in the most recent elections, the incumbent did not even wait for the election authorities to announce the official results before conceding to the opposition candidate who won once it was clear to him and his party that they had lost.  We have witnessed similar transitions in Nigeria and Bénin and, until the recent development, Niger.

The upshot of the preceding is that West Africa is trending more and more towards the institutionalization of the principle of governance by consent and a dim view of autocratic, personal, or authoritarian rule.  By the same token, the investment in election observers, mechanisms for ensuring free, fair, and credible elections in ECOWAS is all the evidence we need for the changing character of the group from what we reported earlier to one marked by a collective commitment to continuing progress towards “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people”.

This is the ferment into which poured the coups d’état in Mali, Guinea, Niger, and Burkina Faso. As befits a community that aspires to be showcases of governance by consent, even though one would have wished for a more robust affirmation of this commitment, the members immediately suspended the membership of the four states and made a return to civilian-led democratic rule in the shortest order as a condition for reabsorption.

For those of us who are unswerving in our support of governance by consent, this was a sea change in the quality of political commitment in the region. We expected that the community would be steely in its resolve to ensure that never again would Africans allow ourselves to be throttled by the jackboots of thugs-in-uniform by whatever name called.  Doubtless, we are not concerned with ex-rulers and self-serving professors and other intellectual types in the media, on the pulpit, or in civil society organizations, who always hanker after the blandishments of Babylon, have never come across a laurel or cheque from the “evil West” that they have not fallen in love with, and remain impervious to their sheer hypocrisy in using the facilities that the “evil West” gifts them to counsel their own people to accept lives that do no credit to their human dignity.  As we have said above, Africans are showing that they are no longer buying into such shams!

We were then disappointed when ECOWAS lifted the sanctions they imposed on the erring states. It was as if the rest of the community was panicked.  But, fortunately, the coupists thumbed their noses at their colleagues. In response, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, declared that they had constituted themselves into the Alliance of Sahel States. In an attempt to curry what we’d call “cheap popularity”, they began to crow about “sovereignty” and “Pan-Africanism” which, unfortunately, they entrust to Russian non-state and state actors to guarantee and defend. We say to them, good luck under the Russian thumb!

For us, we would like to advise ECOWAS to seize the moment. No extension should be entertained.  LET THEM GO NOW! The rest of the community should resolve to become a club of democrats who, henceforward, would not be indifferent to civilian coups disguised as constitutional changes for unlawful tenure elongation, would apply more vigour in undermining any kind of personal or autocratic rule, and subscribe to an unqualified, unwavering commitment to human dignity that is at the base of the principle that no one should be subject to the dictates of a government in the constitution of which he or she has not had a hand.

We end with a prediction for all who wish to kiss the rings of the thugs-in-uniform who hold sway momentarily in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Each regime in each member country of the Alliance of Sahel States is one coup d’état from collapse and, hence, unless the Alliance finds a way to make itself legitimate via the formal signal of the consent of the governed, beyond street demonstrations, it itself is a mere coup in any of its member states away from collapse.

ECOWAS should march towards becoming a club of democratic countries committed unstintingly to governance by consent undergirded by the freedom and inviolate dignity of their citizens without regard to nationality, religion, gender, age, class, or any other contingent identities we assume in society. Only if Mali, Niger, Guinea, and Burkina Faso embrace this commitment should they have any place ever again in ECOWAS.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A. He can be reached at ot48@cornell.edu.

READ ALSO: ECOWAS defends Nigeria against Niger’s destabilisation claims