Sahel Military Regimes Cement Break from ECOWAS (2024)

Welcome toForeign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: President William Ruto holds dialogue with Kenya’s protesters, negotiators seek a peace deal in Sudan, andthe new U.K. government scraps the Rwanda asylum plan.

If you would like to receive Africa Brief in your inbox every Wednesday, please sign uphere.

West African Juntas Double Down on ECOWAS Exit

Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger announced on Saturday that they have formalized their Alliance of Sahel States—just one day before the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional bloc held a summit in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to discuss ways to bring them back into the fold.

The three junta-led Sahel nations signed a defense treaty cementing a new confederation, which was originally announced late last year. Military leaders from the three nations said they had agreed to create a joint investment bank and stabilization fund, and to pool their resources for projects in key sectors such as mining, energy, and agriculture. They also agreed to build a common infrastructure that would facilitate the free movement of citizens between the three countries—essentially agreeing to forge their own ECOWAS. Citizens of ECOWAS are free to live and work in member nations and can travel visa-free—much like the European Union.

After quitting the bloc in January, the three nations have now ruled out returning to ECOWAS, which they see as biased toward Western interests, including in its continued use of the French-backed CFA franc instead of prioritizing the launch of a common West African currency.

“Our people have irrevocably turned their backs on ECOWAS,” said Niger’s head of state, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, at the Sahel group meeting in Niger’s capital, Niamey.

In February, Tchiani had suggested the three Sahel states would set up their own currency, which he argued was “a first step toward breaking free from the legacy of colonization.”

At the Saturday meeting, Burkina Faso’s leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, accused ECOWAS of cowering to Western interests. “This continent has suffered and continues to suffer from the fire of the imperialists,” said Traoré. “Westerners consider that we belong to them and our wealth also belongs to them. They think that they are the ones who must continue to tell us what is good for our states. This era is gone forever; our resources will remain for us and our populations,” he added.

The head of the ECOWAS Commission, Omar Alieu Touray, warned that the withdrawal of the three nations risked the bloc’s future. “Our region is facing the risk of disintegration,” he said.

Africa’s youngest democratically elected leader, Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, was selected at the ECOWAS summit to be an envoy to engage the three breakaway nations in reconciliation. Since his election in March, Faye has been vocal about prioritizing African integration. He shares many of the military leaders’ concerns and has insisted that any new partnerships with former colonial power France be mutually beneficial.

Legally, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso will remain ECOWAS members for one year.

“I hope that by the end of the [one-year] notice period, we will have had enough conversations to reconcile views and strengthen the organization so that it can better tackle our shared challenges,” Faye said on Monday.

In Niger, the U.S. military announced on Sunday that it had completed the withdrawal of its troops from Niamey and will fully depart from its base in Agadez by August, ahead of a Sept. 15 deadline set by the country’s military leaders. The U.S. military had spent more than $100 million to build an airbase in Agadez, located to the northeast of Niamey, in 2013 to fight jihadi threats. Since its July 2023 coup, Niger’s junta had been hostile toward most Western nations—except the United States. But in April, failed talks with U.S. diplomats led to an unceremonious rejection of U.S. troops. The German military is also due to exit in a month.

All three juntas have scrapped military treaties and have asked Western troops to leave, instead signing defense deals with Moscow.

A decision by Nigerian lawmakers to put the country’s own security challenges first rather than lead a military force into Niger to restore democracy further signaled to belligerent nations that the bloc lacked strength. Abuja has the largest army within the bloc but has been weakened by various internal threats, which in turn have diminished ECOWAS’s ability to extend a show of force in troubled member states.

Yet the three nations will face some difficulties by choosing to exit a $702 billion trade market. “These countries are already landlocked, already facing quite a bit of transaction costs in terms of their trade with the rest of the world,” Abebe Selassie, the International Monetary Fund’s Africa department director said during a media briefing back in February.

Regardless, it will be a tougher ask for Faye to bring the three nations back, given that the pressure to return to democratic rule would still remain. It has not helped that those negotiating with the Sahel nations, such as Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé, have been allowed by ECOWAS to carry out what their opponents view as their own constitutional coups.

Gnassingbé changed the constitution, potentially allowing himself to remain in office for life and carry on his family’s 57-year-rule—making him a problematic choice to carry out negotiations, given that many Sahel citizens have supported recent coups against leaders who had refused to be accountable to their people.

As Jessica Moody wrote in Foreign Policy, “the failure of ECOWAS to do much to prevent constitutional coups and flagrant violations of democratic norms sent a message reverberating across the region that democracy was there to be challenged.”

The three nations may look to broker sea access through Togo, directly negotiating with a fellow undemocratic leader who openly sidesteps ECOWAS’s democratic ethos and thereby circumventing higher transaction costs on exports.

The Week Ahead

Wednesday, July 10: The United Nations Security Council’s report on the Red Sea is due.

Friday, July 12: U.N. Security Council holds a briefing from the U.N. Office for West Africa and the Sahel.

Monday, July 15: Rwanda will hold parliamentary elections.

Thursday, July 18: South Africa observes Nelson Mandela Day, a public holiday marking Mandela’s birthday.

What We’re Watching

Kenya’s Ruto faces citizens. Kenyan President William Ruto hosted an X Space discussion—a live audio conversation streamed digitally—on July 5 as protesters called for his resignation. The conversation was the first such dialogue initiated by a sitting Kenyan president. The forum was attended by more than 150,000 listeners. Ahead of discussions, Ruto announced cuts to several government departments, including plans to scrap $9.4 million allocated to the offices of his wife and the wife of his deputy. Ruto said his government will halve the number of government advisors, implement a pay raise freeze for state officers, and eliminate 47 state corporations with overlapping duties—addressing some of the key demands from young Kenyans.

On Sunday, activists held a memorial concert in the capital, Nairobi, for the 39 protesters killed in demonstrations against Ruto’s finance bill. The concert was held the same day that Kenyans observed the anniversary of the July 7, 1990, “Saba Saba” protests—which were held against former Kenya’s dictator and mentor to Ruto, Daniel Arap Moi.

Ruto’s now-withdrawn bill had intended to raise $2.7 billion through higher taxes to ease a debt burden. That effort was part of a fiscal pledge to keep in line with a $3.6 billion International Monetary Fund program agreed in April 2021 as well as a $1.2 billion World Bank loan approved in May this year. But Kenya’s young activists demanded that state graft be tackled instead to release funds. Ruto’s new plan will now cut $1.39 billion from the budget and borrow the difference, which will likely result in future economic pain. Credit ratings agency Moody’s cut Kenya’s sovereign rating deeper into junk territory on Monday.

Young Kenyans say they will continue to hold politicians accountable on corruption, and that it will not be business as usual.

Sudan cease-fire bid. Sudanese political and civil society groups met over the weekend in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital, located to the east of Cairo, to discuss pathways toward peace as war between Sudan’s rival armies intensified. The Sudanese Political and Civil Forces Conference was attended by armed groups participating in the war, including the federal army-aligned Democratic Bloc. It included representatives from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the African Union, the Arab League, and the United Nations.

But without the direct involvement of Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his rival and former deputy, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, there are few expectations of an end to the conflict. After 15 months of fighting, around 10 million people have been forcibly displaced.

Rwanda-U.K. asylum deal. The Labour Party’s landslide victory in U.K. elections on July 4 has effectively killed a controversial pact to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda. New U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Saturday that he was scrapping the deal, calling it “dead and buried before it started,” though he warned that it will take time to fully reverse the policy.

The U.K. has paid 320 million pounds (about $409 million) to Rwanda under the deal, but only five asylum-seekers have been sent to the country. In a separate negotiation, one asylum-seeker was paid 3,000 pounds (about $3,700) to move to Rwanda in May. The U.K. National Audit Office estimates that the scheme will leave Britain with a total bill of 370 million pounds in fixed development aid to Rwanda by 2026 regardless. Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s government said in January that it would consider a U.K. request for a refund, but the U.K.’s home office had already incurred direct costs of 20 million pounds by February in setting up the deal—not including the costs of detaining those to be sent to Kigali.

This Week in Gas-for-Grain Diplomacy

Algeria and the Italian firm Bonifiche Ferraresi signed a 420 million euro (about $455 million) agriculture deal on Saturday to help Algeria produce more wheat, lentils, and beans in the south-central province of Timimoun. The deal—under which Algeria will provide 49 percent of the funding and the Italian grains and vegetables company the remainder—covers about 36,000 hectares (about 140 square miles) worth of land.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in January unveiled the “Mattei Plan,” an investment scheme worth more than 5.5 billion euros, aimed at reducing irregular migration from Africa to Europe while increasing access to African energy resources. Italy has signed similar deals with Libya—both nations increasingly export liquefied natural gas to Italy’s southern shores via a pipeline as it diversifies away from Russian gas.

FP’s Most Read This Week

This Time, NATO Is in Trouble for Real by Stephen M. Walt

Why the U.S. Needs To Upgrade Its Fighter Jets Now by Kamran Bokhari

What if Russia Wins? by Carl Bildt

What We’re Reading

Algeria’s pan-African vision. In New Lines Magazine, Hanna Bechiche recounts the often-forgotten role that the militant Algerian National Front of Liberation (FLN) played in African nations’ independence movements throughout the 1960s, as well as Algeria’s history of support for South Africa’s African National Congress. “Because Algeria had gained recognition as the first African country to win its independence by means of force, it became natural for the FLN to advocate for the country’s responsibility to help other African nations win back their freedom,” she writes.

Nigeria’s creative paradox. Despite harsh anti-LGBTQ+ laws—including up to 14 years in prison for same-sex unions—Nigeria’s successful creative industry often provides a haven for LGBTQ+ individuals that isn’t extended to ordinary Nigerians. In National Geographic, photographer Yagazie Emezi profiles the country’s popular queer and nonconformist creators.