Maada Bio of Sierra Leone (L) and Bassirou D.Faye of Senegal (R) exemplars of the new generation ECOWAS leadership.
By Lindsay Barrett
As the members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) gather on Sunday 22nd June 2025 for a major summit meeting in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, it will not be surprising if a pall of anxiety hangs over the venue. Although the organisation has turned fifty years this year its celebratory mood might have been disturbed by the fact that in recent times it has had to accept the reality of the devastating and effective multiple withdrawal of membership by three important countries.
The leaders of these countries Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have come to the conclusion that their economic and political interests will be better served outside of the precincts of membership of the organisation. The leadership that came to this conclusion did so because they were influenced by socio-political experiences that have shaped their nations since independence.
In the main those nations’ people have endured several decades of escalating insurgent conflict and public disenchantment over management of revenue from the natural resources of their lands. With these anomalies of basic public experience as the conventional historical backdrop to governance and sociological development, especially relating to their peculiar geo-political circumstances as Sahelian countries, their decision to change the system of leadership of each of their nations and therefore to develop an alliance of mutually beneficial purpose should be understandable.
Such an alliance should be supported by neighbouring states as its success should enhance the opportunities for stability and lasting prosperity in the entire region immensely, while its failure would provoke exactly the opposite consequence. For this reason, if for no other, ECOWAS’s cotemporary leadership must regard the objective of harmonious collaboration with the withdrawn nations as a major objective of its own agenda for the future.
The regional body’s leadership cadre has been transformed in fifty years from the founding conglomerate of nationalists, some of whom had been influenced by the ideological conventions and anti-colonial perceptions of early independence, into a coterie of holders of post-colonial national privilege. Having been founded in 1975 with Nigerian socio-economic superiority as well as its demographic ascendancy being taken for granted ECOWAS has developed gradually into a formal institution that has helped to liberalise relationships and interaction among all West African peoples.
However, the fundamental principles of regional solidarity in collective development and expansion of services have not borne fruit to the extent that was originally expected to take place by those who supported its formalisation most sincerely over the decades. This perception of a failed agenda has given the withdrawal from membership by disgruntled components of the body apparent relevance and a central imperative of the contemporary authority should be the reversal of this presumption.
In order to achieve this as a comprehensive and wholehearted diplomatic achievement, the ECOWAS Commission must devise a formal programme of communication between the Authority and the withdrawn members in which the support for their post-membership initiatives of development and security are supported and approved. In addition, ECOWAS must also offer formal collaborative status to observers from the three nations and in fact to all neighbouring countries to its deliberations.
Having achieved its fifth decade, the organisation should regard its formal aspiration as being to achieve objectives that are fundamentally derived from the popular will. An examination of the cause for the disenchantment with their membership elicited by the withdrawn members will explicitly expose why this is so. Now that the majority of ECOWAS leaders, especially those leading some countries that have overcome distressing encounters with the democratic process successfully, are members of the younger generation of post- independence leaders, this objective of the ECOWAS agenda must not fail.
