Amid high-profile crises, notably in the Middle East and Ukraine, the United States and other international partners are struggling to maintain a steady focus on the Sahel, where eight coups in three years are part of a pattern increasing violence. Insurgencies, coups and instability caused by a multi-year breakdown of effective governance in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have caused violent incidents and more than 100,000 refugees in coastal West African states from Benin to Ghana. A wider spread of the western Sahel crises to coastal West Africa—a region five times more populous, with some 368 million people from Senegal to Nigeria—would pose a massively greater threat to U.S. security and international security, trade routes and economies.
The United States, France and other international partners have long ignored governance crises that for years have too often failed to meet even the basic needs of the 68 million people in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, allowing the rise of community and jihadist insurgencies that eventually led to military coups and current humanitarian crisissay analysts like Bisa Williams, former US ambassador to Niger.
Needed: a Broader, Proactive Partnership
“For a very long time, US policy in Africa has generally not been a priority,” Williams told a Sahel forum at USIP. Only after failed governance fueled mass violence during the 2010s did “attention turn to the Sahel.” Williams echoed scholars who say Western policies have sought to build security through narrow military means rather than helping people and governments in the region solve the underlying problems of indifferent, often corrupt, governance that tends to serve the needs of elites. and not of their populations.
Williams was one of 10 diplomats and scholars who issued a report last month outlining improved policies to stabilize the Sahel and prevent the devastation of a wider crisis in West Africa. He underlined the finding of this bipartisan and multinational study group that the international community is missing a vital opportunity to shape the much larger changes that population growth, the rise of digital technologies and the needs of climate change may bring to the Sahel in the coming years. few. decades.
The region’s expansive fertile lands are ripe for innovative, sustainable agriculture. The sunny terrain calls for lucrative solar energy ventures that can lead to energy independence. and the region is on the brink of a technological revolution fueled by increasing mobile connectivity and digital access,” the report notes. “The United States has an opportunity: by engaging now, it can steer this explosive growth in a positive direction that benefits both the people of the Sahel and the United States and its African allies. Ignoring this possibility and focusing solely on political instability and security challenges risks, paradoxically, exacerbating instability in the Sahel and increasing risk.”
Previous efforts at “partnership” by aid donors have failed to offer truly equal roles to African nations, Williams said, echoing criticisms of the study group and other scholars. The United States pledged to build more equal partnerships as part of its new strategy for Africa, unveiled at the US-Africa Leaders Summit it hosted 14 months ago.
A Crisis of Multilateralism
Addressing West Africa’s crises requires strong leadership from the region’s multilateral community, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), experts noted at the USIP forum. ECOWAS intervened repeatedly between the 1990s and 2007 to provide peacekeeping forces, diplomatic mediation and other support for democracy and peace in the region. In recent years, ECOWAS has suffered an erosion in its influence, highlighted by the announced withdrawal in recent weeks of the juntas now ruling Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
“This is part of a bigger picture. a global multilateral crisis,” said Tiéman Hubert Coulibaly, Mali’s former foreign minister. The United Nations and its allied global institutions, established after World War II, have lost influence in part because of a failure to evolve with global realities—a problem reflected in Africa’s continued lack of a permanent seat on the Security Council of the UN, he noted. “The African Union and [African] regional economic commissions,” such as ECOWAS, “face the same problem” of eroding influence, he said. “What it leads to is rule by force, politics carried out through force and the creation of regional rulers, often by forces external to the region.”
The roots of the global multilateral crisis include “hypocrisy in the international community,” said Francis Béhanzin, a former army general from Benin who has worked to mediate regional crises, notably as the recent ECOWAS commissioner for political affairs, peace and security.
Béhanzin highlighted the failures of the leading powers to treat peoples and entire regions with equal value, and offered an example. He noted that ECOWAS had developed a broad plan to counter extremism and violence through improved governance and human security that he and others agreed were at the root of the Sahel crises. That plan, drawn up in 2019, called for a $2.3 billion budget, but “didn’t get a kopek from 2020 to 2024,” he said. In contrast, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted tens of billions of dollars in direct Western aid, such as 44 billion dollars in US military aid over the past 24 months, he noted.
No loss of hope
Béhanzin and Coulibaly both stressed that policymakers should not see the announced withdrawal from ECOWAS of the three junta-led nations — Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso — as final. First, these withdrawals cannot be immediate under the treaty binding members of ECOWAS, which requires one year’s notice for any withdrawal to take effect. Coulibaly emphasized that deepening isolation through such a withdrawal would be self-destructive for these countries and their closed populations and economies. And, Béhanzin stressed, dialogue continues between ECOWAS members and the junta.
Changes in recent years have eroded ECOWAS’ previous effectiveness in supporting stability and democracy in the region, so in a sense “that engine has broken down,” Coulibaly said. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed.”