“The Commission has not yet received a formal and direct notification from the three Member States of their intention to withdraw from the organization.” Through a statement where an acknowledgment of receipt was refusedECOWAS reacted in the early hours of the night to the announcement made last Sunday by the representatives of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso and where they made the announcement “immediate” withdrawal their countries in the Economic Community of West African States. In the same statement, the organization of states reiterated its “determination to find a negotiated solution to this political impasse.”
ECOWAS is dissolving 49 years after its creation. An organization that has borne the burden of 22 years of dictatorship in Burkina Faso and decades of dictatorship in Guinea Conakry, two civil wars in Ivory Coast, two civil wars in Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Liberia, the jihadist attacks that began in 2012, coups in Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Conakry and Guinea Bissau, chained crises in Nigeria and The deep pressure of underdevelopment has found the stone that finally suited it in the events of the last few years. What could have changed?
Veteran professor at the University of Abidjan, Yao N’guetta, emphasizes that “a repressive attitude from ECOWAS (in response to recent coups) must be accepted while the affected countries suffer from terrorism without real commitment.” “by the organization to provide its support.” He regrets, like so many other Africans, that ECOWAS has shown no real commitment to the fight against terrorism, when this issue could have been seen as an opportunity to reassert its authority in terms of a cohesive organization ready to deliver results. This distance between ECOWAS and the needs of its various states, according to N’guetta, is due to the fact that “it has ceased to be, or has never been, a group for the benefit of the people, but rather an institution motivated by them.” political Interests.” .
“Europeans have a common idea of Europe and Africans want the same thing, but we don’t want it to be something hollow, like a common language, but we are looking for something based on our identity and our deepest needs.” Both the professor, as well as those who support the decision of the Alliance of Sahel States (composed of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso) to withdraw from ECOWAS, point to the search for a new African identity that emerges from the treaties signed by its former leaders with the former colonial authorities and this “benefited the colonial power”. The break with ECOWAS is seen as a break with a previous, outdated order based on a currently non-existent relationship with Europe. It represents a paradigm shift that has already taken place since the beginning of the 1920s.
One of the most representative changes compared to the coups that have taken place in recent years, according to N’guetta, is the decrease in violence in attacks on power: “Previously, coups were carried out with blood, the coups of not now. Before they killed it was kill, kill and kill, and now they don’t do it anymore. Lumumba and Sankara were killed in the last century, Bazoum and Bongo were not killed“.
Paradigm shift. New military leaders who have managed to gain the support of their citizens by channeling them through the frustrations they have aroused Neocolonialism in recent decades, but also due to the lack of results in the fight against terrorism with the help of the West. Those who support the military junta in the Sahel see gestures such as the break with ECOWAS as liberation movements whose guarantees seek real independence and sovereignty. The professor specifies that “colonial history is not our history, but the history of Europe. We are objects and victims of this history,” and the military junta offers an alternative that breaks out of this dynamic.
It’s a fight. A paradigm shift cannot take place without contributing large amounts of social, political and intellectual violence, violence through gestures and words rather than through the actions themselves. And Russia is the ideal ally for this. The teacher already says: “In my city, when a fighter goes to war, he looks for support, even if it’s a wall or a tree. “It’s not that we want to exchange one colonizer for another, but we are looking for tactical support.” No one doubts that one of the fundamental changes in recent years, apart from the jihadist question and weariness with French influence, is Russia dealing with the nations involved.
The low GDP of the Sahel Alliance makes exiting ECOWAS and establishing a new independent path extremely risky. Without international support on their side, catastrophe would be guaranteed. The first critics are already questioning it that the AES is on the way to becoming a satellite organization of Russiaalthough the professor says goodbye with an enigmatic sentence with a Camus character: “Just because it is something logical doesn’t mean it has to be true, and we often even make mistakes in logic.” The alliance of the Sahel states is thus breaking away from of logic in search of its particular truth, which is alien to European analysis and which must first travel a path of historical changes and a still doubtful result.