West Africa is in Political Disarray

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), whose leaders met in Abuja, Nigeria, on July 7, warned that the region faced “disintegration” after the military rulers of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso cemented a breakaway union. The three states had already left the bloc earlier this year.

The three countries formed a “Confederation of Sahel States” at a rival meeting a day before the ECOWAS summit, creating another problem for the bloc. ECOWAS is already wrestling with sweeping jihadist violence, financial trouble and challenges mustering a regional force.

The head of the ECOWAS Commission, Omar Alieu Touray, said the Sahel countries’ withdrawal risked “political isolation,” losing millions of dollars in funding and hampering freedom of movement. The break would also worsen insecurity and disrupt the work of the long-proposed regional force, Touray stressed. “Our region is facing the risk of disintegration.”

Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, having ousted weak civilian-led governments, have railed against the presence of the former colonial power, France, and turned toward Russia and China for support. The new military authorities are one after the other pledging their allegiance to Moscow and driving the West out of the Sahel.

The three juntas came to power in a series of coups over recent years and announced their intention to leave ECOWAS in January. They have shifted away from former colonial ruler France and expelled French troops, with Niger’s General Abdourahamane Tiani calling for the establishment of a “community far removed from the stranglehold of foreign powers.

“Our people have irrevocably turned their backs on ECOWAS,” Tiani said at the Sahel group meeting in Niamey, Niger, rebuffing the bloc’s pleas to come back into the fold. The three countries’ decision to leave was fuelled in part by their accusation that Paris was manipulating ECOWAS and not providing enough support for anti-jihadist efforts.

Before the coup last year, Niger was seen by Western diplomats as something of a bulwark in a region where juntas and radical Islamist insurgencies were gaining ground. Now its regime has pivoted the impoverished country firmly away from the West, booting out French troops before it moved to end the significant American footprint in the country’s desert uplands.

The United States over the last decade has spent nearly one billion dollars in Niger. It maintained a force of some 1,100 service members at two bases in Niger, the larger of which, at Agadez in the north of the country, served as a regional hub for drones in the fight against terrorism. Created six years ago at a cost of $110 million, this base was already essentially inactive since the coup.

On April 19, Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine announced to Kurt Campbell, the U.S. State Department’s second-in-command, that the American contingent was no longer welcome. Russian military personnel arrived in Niger soon afterwards.

Some Nigeriens see the junta exercising a new kind of sovereignty after years of overweening French interest. Abdoulaye Oussein, who leads a new civil society organization in Niamey, said that Niger and Russia would have a “win-win partnership” and that he was proud that Russian instructors would train Niger’s military.

“Why is it a problem for the Americans and France that the Russians are helping us?” he asked. “I think we’re free to make our own choices.”

The developments are “a blow to Western counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel,” Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank, indicated. “Perhaps even worse, a U.S. pullout will further open the door for an expansion of Russia and Iran in the Sahel.”

Geopolitical intrigue courses through the region. This part of Africa has become a playground for foreign powers, not least Russia, which provides security for coup regimes and orchestrates massive disinformation campaigns leading to the ousting of Western forces.

A Russian deputy defence minister, General Yunus-bek Yevkurov, with special responsibility for relations with the region, makes frequent visits to Sahel countries that sign military cooperation agreements with Moscow. It’s no coincidence that, as soon as the Russians landed in Niamey, an anti-American demonstration drew several thousand people.

“Washington has a lack of self-awareness about how it is coming across,” Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, remarked. “They have made Russia the boogeyman in all of this, like what the French have done, but that is a way to deflect responsibility and to avoid any kind of introspection about the policies the U.S. has pursued.”

Meanwhile, a China-backed pipeline that would make Niger an oil-exporting country is being threatened by a diplomatic dispute with neighbouring Benin. The 1,930-kilometer pipeline runs from Niger’s Chinese-built Agadem oil field to the port of Cotonou in Benin.

It was designed to help oil-rich but landlocked Niger achieve an almost fivefold increase in oil production through a $400 million deal signed in April with China’s state-run national petroleum company.

But Niger has kept its border with Benin closed, accusing the country of hosting French troops that pose a threat to it, which Benin denies. “It is a completely messy situation and the only way for a resolution is if both administrations directly engage and resolve issues,” according to Ryan Cummings, director of the Africa-focused security consulting company Signal Risk.