The Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG), a group committed to supporting the intellectual struggles of working people against imperialist exploitation and local repression, has posited that Alliance of Sahel States (ASS’) exit from ECOWAS will be impactful and that “Its full implications will become clear only with time and will depend on how different players respond to the new situation in the weeks and months ahead.”
ASS’ exit from ECOWAS will be impactful. Its full implications will become clear only with time and will depend on how different players respond to the new situation in the weeks and months ahead.
The Pan-Africanist community should continually assess these developments. It is important now that Pan Africanists especially those in West Africa meet and deliberate on these developments, SMG stated in a press release dated 5 February, 2024.
The three countries that make up the Alliance of Sahel States (“ASS”), Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger announced that they were exiting ECOWAS because it had abandoned its founding mission; subordinated the interests of West Africa to neo-colonial interests; failed to support ASS countries in struggles against Jihadist insurrection; and threatened violence and sanctioned them when they acted to solve their problems.
Read below the full unedited statement signed by its General Secretary, Kwesi Pratt Jnr.:
PRESS STATEMENT ECOWAS’ DEEPENING CRISIS: A CALL TO PAN-AFRICANIST
ACTION
On 27 January 2024, the three countries that make up the Alliance of Sahel States (“ASS”), Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger announced that they were exiting ECOWAS because it had abandoned its founding mission; subordinated the interests of West Africa to neo-colonial interests; failed to support ASS countries in struggles against Jihadist insurrection; and threatened violence and sanctioned them when they acted to solve their problems. This announcement was presented as an accomplished fact and ignored the one-year notice required by the ECOWAS treaty
As previously indicated, SMG views the events that have taken place in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in 2022-2023 with cautious optimism. The transitions that have taken place there are a) popular, b) anti-imperialist and anti-neo-colonialist, and c) Pan-Africanist.
We support the move toward ASS unification. We support ASS’ struggle for accelerated development, deeper democracy, internal security, and continental unity. We recognise fully the dangers implicit in concentrating power in the military and will work with progressive forces to press for an acceleration of the processes initiated.
ASS’ exit from ECOWAS will be impactful. Its full implications will become clear only with time and will depend on how different players respond to the new situation in the weeks and months ahead.
The Pan-Africanist community should continually assess these developments. It is important now that Pan Africanists especially those in West Africa meet and deliberate on these developments.
SMG offers some preliminary thoughts as a contribution to this debate.
Implications for Pan-Africanism: SMG sees ASS’ breakaway from ECOWAS not as a setback for continental unity but a defeat for neo-colonialism posing as unity.
ECOWAS, since its early strides in facilitating the free movement of people, goods, and capital for economic integration and self-reliance, has stalled. ECOWAS does not even pretend to promote Pan-Africanism. It has indeed become a conduit for more efficient Imperialist penetration of West Africa. It is because ECOWAS is so useful to Imperialism that “development partners” are so willing to fund its activities. Donor funding lubricates the exploitation of West Africans. The ASS breakaway could reinject energy into the unification project.
If ASS became a single state, it would be the second-largest population in West Africa (after Nigeria) and the third-largest territory in Africa after Sudan and DRC. Simply by positing unification as a goal, ASS has already become a powerful Pan-Africanist voice and a rallying point for Pan-Africanists. Having escaped the ECOWAS straitjacket, ASS can now lead in providing a positive model of integration.
Implications for Economic Development in ASS:
We hope ASS will embrace self-reliant, rational, democratic, and accountable central economic planning. Only such planning can optimise the use of our significant natural resources with the mobilisation of our young population to meet our social needs and aspirations. It is instructive that Niger has become the fastest growing economy in the world simply by prioritizing the national interest and changing the terms on which private French companies conducted
their sales of uranium and gold to Europe and demanding world market prices for Niger. Economically, it is difficult to see a downside for ASS.
Implications for Participatory Democracy in ASS:
We reject ECOWAS’ leaders’ reduction of
“democracy” to the aping of specific European institutions and practices. ASS countries are correct to reject ECOWAS pressure to restore neo-colonial constitutional systems that have helped disempower and impoverish our people while vesting real power in our former colonial masters and the corporate interests behind them.
We hope the leadership in these countries will combine their Pan-Africanism with democratic economic planning and with a process of democratic consultation and mobilisation that devolves more and more power to the organised people in their communities and workplaces. We do not underestimate how challenging this is amid Jihadist insurgencies and reckless threats from ECOWAS leaders.
However, history shows that Leadership trust in, and accountability to, the masses is the condition for true popular ownership of a national process. And that with such ownership, the People, and not just soldiers, will militantly defend and consolidate the national process.
Implications for Security in ASS:
We fully support ASS in its struggle against sectarian violence and insurrection. We believe that with the new ASS coordinated approach, ASS countries have taken the first critical step towards lasting security. We believe that planned democratic management of the economy and society will deny Jihadists social space to operate. Finally, ASS must develop a coordinated foreign and defence policy that aligns with their neighbours in the North (especially Algeria and Mauretania with whom ASS shares significant borders), West, and Central Africa and that systematically reduces and then ends foreign military operations in the Region.
Implications for ECOWAS as an institution
ASS’ exit is a serious blow to ECOWAS’ functionality and prestige. After months of sabre rattling, it has been exposed for the paper tiger that it is. In one stroke Tinubu, Akufo-Addo, Ouattara, and Talon have lost 17% of the ECOWAS population and 40% of its land mass including direct borders with North Africa.
Unsurprisingly, ECOWAS has not responded substantively to this political development except arid comments about ASS not following the correct procedure. A summit is no doubt in the offing. We can only hope that the Heads of State will approach deliberations soberly and constructively. Comments such as we have heard from President Akufo-Addo to the effect that the ASS split will damage ASS more than ECOWAS are wholly inappropriate and delusional.
These comments are bravado and a refusal to take responsibility for their blunders. These comments fail to understand that it is ECOWAS leaders that have forced ASS to withdraw in self-defence. These comments suggest a hostility towards ASS that nobody in West Africa shares. ECOWAS should be seeking rapprochement. An ECOWAS summit that does not conclude with a commitment to ensure all West Africans continued enjoyment of trade and immigration privileges in place before 27thJanuary 2024 and to seek steady improvement with ASS would be an abject failure and hasten the demise of ECOWAS.
HOW SHOULD PAN-AFRICANISTS RESPOND?
What should our attitude be going forward?
- We must continue to focus on the capacity of the working people and their allies (whether in or out
of ECOWAS) to struggle towards substantive democracy, planned development, social cohesion,
peace, and unity. We recognise that ASS is now qualitatively more advanced than ECOWAS and
relate to it accordingly. However, all West Africa remains a theatre of Pan-African class struggle.
b.Immediately we call for ECOWAS and ASS leaders to adopt a “do no further harm” policy. As soon as possible both sides should meet to negotiate a treaty that:
- acknowledges ASS’s exit from ECOWAS and puts an end to further threats or sanctions;
- acknowledges the legitimacy of different approaches to democratic development;
iii. protects the free movement and trade across West Africa by both ECOWAS and ASS citizens); and
- outlines the vision for a future successor to ECOWAS that might unify our subregion.
- Even as interim treaty talks commence at the State level, we call on the West Africa People’s Organisation to convene a citizens’ process to develop: i. a strategy and plan for regional integration; and
- a representative coordinating institution capable of guiding the process.
Kwesi Pratt Jnr.
General Secretary
