By Olivier Walther. 1/30/2024, updated 2/2/2024
On January 28, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger announced their unilateral decision to withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional bloc founded in 1975. ECOWAS is one of eight regional economic communities recognized by the African Union to foster regional integration on the continent.
Over the years, progress towards regional integration has been slow on the continent. Political elites bear a great part of the blame for this. In a patrimonial system that relies on interpersonal relations, regional integration goes against the informal arrangements that politicians have established with wealthy traders. As a result, there is a mismatch between regionalism as it should be on paper and regionalization as it is experienced on a daily basis.
Political elites have also encouraged the multiplication and overlap between regional organizations, because this is a source of continental and international legitimacy, well-paid jobs, and diplomatic relations. The result is that most African economies are highly integrated functionally, through informal trade, but poorly integrated institutionally.
The fact that regional bodies have been instrumentalized by political elites doesn’t mean that Africa needs less integration. It needs better integration. Since 1975, ECOWAS and its sister organizations have implemented numerous policies that aim at improving how African countries trade with each other, and how they are connected to the world.
For example, our studies have shown that ECOWAS is the most important organization supporting women entrepreneurs in West Africa, thanks to regional initiatives such as SWEDD+ that facilitate women’s access to education and health services
Why three landlocked countries, among the poorest in the world, would leave an organization established to foster free movements of people, goods and capital across the region, is therefore puzzling. West Africa is one of the most expensive regions to do business in the world, due to poor road conditions, roadblocks and border delays. Burkina, Mali and Niger’s withdrawal from ECOWAS can only make things worse for the majority of the Sahelian population.
Economic consequences
From an economic perspective, there is little doubt that Sahelian countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger depend more on regional trade than coastal countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana or Nigeria. This is because Sahelian countries are far less urbanized and industrialized than their neighbors. They tend to produce the same agricultural commodities, which they typically trade with other countries located on the Gulf of Guinea rather than with themselves.
Livestock trade between the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea is also highly dependent on free movement between West African countries. Close to two thirds of the livestock movements recorded in West Africa through 2017 cross an international border, usually from the Sahel to big southern markets such as Abidjan. A purely Sahelian bloc, like the recently created Alliance des États du Sahel, would never be able to replace ECOWAS, simply because of the regional nature of human and economic flows in West Africa.
Because Sahelian countries have hardly any industries, they import much of what they consume from the West African and global market, particularly from China. Much of the cement, petroleum products, cars, textiles, wheat, rice and plastics sold on the markets of Niamey, Ouagadougou and Bamako were produced elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles from the Sahel. For that, they depend on the ports of the Gulf of Guinea.
Coastal countries are far from being self-sufficient too. They import large quantities of onion from the Sahel for example, and benefit enormously from import-export trade with the landlocked countries of the Sahel. Some of them, like Benin and Togo, have transformed into ‘entrepot economies’, as John Igué showed. Goods imported through the ports of Cotonou or Lomé are often reexported illegally to neighboring countries, where they are banned or subject to heavy taxes.
In the past, border closures between Sahelian and coastal countries have had devastating consequences on the regional economy and the livelihoods of millions of farmers, herders and city dwellers, who depend on regional trade perhaps more than anywhere in the world. It is precisely to foster these complementary relationships between the Sahel and the Gulf that ECOWAS was established in Abuja nearly 50 years ago.
Withdrawing from ECOWAS is likely to have major consequences on the regional economy as a whole. Because of their landlocked situation, however, Sahelian countries will be more affected than the rest of the region by the reintroduction of tariff barriers. Without free access to the ports of Cotonou, Lomé, Abidjan or Tema, Sahelian imports will be far more expensive.
Leaving ECOWAS will also affect Sahelian exports, which should become less competitive on the regional (onion, fish) and global market (gold, uranium). Informal trade, which is already the dominant form of economic exchange on the region, will most probably experience an unprecedented boom, particularly along the borders between Niger and Nigeria.
In addition, leaving ECOWAS and its free movement protocol could have catastrophic consequences for millions of Sahelians who live in or wish to migrate to coastal cities. Migration is mostly intraregional in West Africa, which means that most Sahelians tend to migrate to the Gulf of Guinea, while most migrants from coastal countries go to Europe through the Sahara and, increasingly, to the United States.
Sahelian traders have also developed extensive trade networks across West Africa to take advantage of the liberalization of trade that has characterized the region since the 1980s. From Abidjan to Lagos, these trade networks that rely on well-established diasporas would be particularly affected by trade restrictions and immigration policies.
Political motivations
The decision to leave ECOWAS has little to do with these economic considerations, though. It is primarily motivated by the fact that ECOWAS’s approach to region-building is not confined to economic integration.
In 1999, ECOWAS adopted a Protocol Relating to the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peace-Keeping and Security in Lomé. In 2001, ECOWAS adopted another Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, which clearly adopted a zero tolerance policy “for power obtained or maintained by unconstitutional means”.
The main goal of these agreements was to promote democracy as the dominant form of governance in the region and prevent the recurrence of violence, notably through military coups.
These agreements were signed at a very important moment in the history of the region. The 1990s was the worst decade ever for the countries of the Gulf of Guinea, which were affected by a series of major military conflicts. ECOWAS and its multilateral armed force ECOMOG were mobilized in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau, under the leadership of Nigeria.
Article 25 of the 1999 protocol authorize external interventions without state consent under certain conditions, including “in the event of the overthrow or attempted overthrow of a democratically elected government.” This, rather than trade liberalization, is the main reason why the juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have decided to leave ECOWAS.
Photo: One-Stop Border Post, Gaya-Malanville, by Moustapha Koné (2017).