Thanks for the insight. I believe we need to go back to the basics and look at how the EU got started. Part of the Schuman Declaration (May 9, 1950), is very insightful: it starts with an industrial project, the European Coal and Steel Community. A regional industrial project is key because it makes the participants interdependent.
How did ECOWAS start? The wrong way, unfortunately. ECOWAS membership does not reflect countries' ability to add value to the integration process. It is geographic.
Regional integration involves making sacrifices (like losing import tax revenue). If there isn't anything that far exceeds those sacrifices, countries will not want to stay in or contribute to deepening the process. That's the story of ECOWAS.
In 49 years, there has not been an industrial project to bring the countries together. Yes, the free movement of goods and people (still not 100% effective though) is an achievement, but you've got to do more.
Today, Nigeria builds (assembles) cars, and Benin, its neighbor, makes beautiful T-shirts. The ECOWAS Commission has failed to make member countries interdependent through industrial projects. I wish AES countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger) would focus on fostering economic interdependence.
I really appreciate and fully concur not just with this article in particular but the whole philosophy of not abandoning institutions in frustrations but to do the hard work of fighting for them and nurturing them. Recently there I have heard lots of complaints from people from different political tribes have regarding different international institutions like EU, UN, Nato, etc. I am sympathetic to some of them. But we should rather do the hard work of amending the institutions and doing compromises rather than taking the easy path of abandoning it.
An interesting article, but I obviously disagree. Allowing these juntas to thrive will only encourage more coups. Over 60 years of post-colonial history tells us that coup d'etats in Africa have often led to political instability and civil wars. ECOWAS can lift some sanctions, but the idea of just allowing these juntas to have their way is just silly.
Nigeria enjoys a high volume of trade with France, and so there is nothing wrong with Tinubu spending time there. It does not mean that my country is subservient to Macron. That is totally absurd and flies in the face of history of French-Nigerian relations, which has its ups and downs, including the expulsion and banishment of the French Ambassador from 1961 to 1965 to protest Nuclear Tests in the Sahara Desert
Why can't these west Africans have a policy of non interference like ASEAN? Why do they feel the need to effect each other's political systems when each one of them have massive problems of their own?
Apologies in advance as this isn’t directly related to your post, but I’d nonetheless appreciate your insight in this issue. Over the last few months, I have been working on a project to attempt to determine the optimal economic ‘niches’ of every country in the world. It’s a fairly trivial fact to say that the UK’s key economic strengths lie in services exports and research orientated businesses - while by no means is this the full extent of the UK’s highly diverse economy, you nonetheless aren’t going to be able to build an economic strategy around aeronautical engineering or whatever. Equally, it is also fair to say that Germany’s economy can be roughly defined as an advanced manufacturing economy, a niche it shares with Japan, and one that it could make sense for the likes of Turkey and South Africa to move into.
However, there is remarkably little literature I have found which seeks to chart these tendencies, and to determine which niches make logical sense for developing countries to move into (and thus begin figuring out how to get there). This is something I’ve been seeking to rectify, and I am gradually attempting to put together an attempt at mapping this for every country. However, with the African countries in particular, this has been more complex - since many of the countries lack obvious existing footholds to draw from, more fine grained information is necessary to predict the optimal positioning for each state. Because of this, I was wondering if I would be able to draw upon your expertise for this issue - I have found your posts enormously illuminating and have changed many of my views on this issue. With that in mind, would you be willing for us to get in contact and discuss this issue further?
> Perhaps with the exception of Guinea, all affected countries experienced coups partially as a by-product of the imbalanced aggrandizement of their armed forces in the face of serious security threats...
The question posed by Captain Ibrahim Traoré is poignant: where was this ECOWAS force, which was threatened to called up for subduing Niger, when the people of ECOWAS states were/are attacked by terrorists? Why hasn’t ECOWAS leadership called on member states to solve the safety & security issues that are hampering the economic exchange in the vast affected areas?
Seems ECOWAS has proven itself to be useless as pertains the issues hampering real economics for people of Member States.
Thanks for the insight. I believe we need to go back to the basics and look at how the EU got started. Part of the Schuman Declaration (May 9, 1950), is very insightful: it starts with an industrial project, the European Coal and Steel Community. A regional industrial project is key because it makes the participants interdependent.
How did ECOWAS start? The wrong way, unfortunately. ECOWAS membership does not reflect countries' ability to add value to the integration process. It is geographic.
Regional integration involves making sacrifices (like losing import tax revenue). If there isn't anything that far exceeds those sacrifices, countries will not want to stay in or contribute to deepening the process. That's the story of ECOWAS.
In 49 years, there has not been an industrial project to bring the countries together. Yes, the free movement of goods and people (still not 100% effective though) is an achievement, but you've got to do more.
Today, Nigeria builds (assembles) cars, and Benin, its neighbor, makes beautiful T-shirts. The ECOWAS Commission has failed to make member countries interdependent through industrial projects. I wish AES countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger) would focus on fostering economic interdependence.
I really appreciate and fully concur not just with this article in particular but the whole philosophy of not abandoning institutions in frustrations but to do the hard work of fighting for them and nurturing them. Recently there I have heard lots of complaints from people from different political tribes have regarding different international institutions like EU, UN, Nato, etc. I am sympathetic to some of them. But we should rather do the hard work of amending the institutions and doing compromises rather than taking the easy path of abandoning it.
An interesting article, but I obviously disagree. Allowing these juntas to thrive will only encourage more coups. Over 60 years of post-colonial history tells us that coup d'etats in Africa have often led to political instability and civil wars. ECOWAS can lift some sanctions, but the idea of just allowing these juntas to have their way is just silly.
Nigeria enjoys a high volume of trade with France, and so there is nothing wrong with Tinubu spending time there. It does not mean that my country is subservient to Macron. That is totally absurd and flies in the face of history of French-Nigerian relations, which has its ups and downs, including the expulsion and banishment of the French Ambassador from 1961 to 1965 to protest Nuclear Tests in the Sahara Desert
Why can't these west Africans have a policy of non interference like ASEAN? Why do they feel the need to effect each other's political systems when each one of them have massive problems of their own?
Apologies in advance as this isn’t directly related to your post, but I’d nonetheless appreciate your insight in this issue. Over the last few months, I have been working on a project to attempt to determine the optimal economic ‘niches’ of every country in the world. It’s a fairly trivial fact to say that the UK’s key economic strengths lie in services exports and research orientated businesses - while by no means is this the full extent of the UK’s highly diverse economy, you nonetheless aren’t going to be able to build an economic strategy around aeronautical engineering or whatever. Equally, it is also fair to say that Germany’s economy can be roughly defined as an advanced manufacturing economy, a niche it shares with Japan, and one that it could make sense for the likes of Turkey and South Africa to move into.
However, there is remarkably little literature I have found which seeks to chart these tendencies, and to determine which niches make logical sense for developing countries to move into (and thus begin figuring out how to get there). This is something I’ve been seeking to rectify, and I am gradually attempting to put together an attempt at mapping this for every country. However, with the African countries in particular, this has been more complex - since many of the countries lack obvious existing footholds to draw from, more fine grained information is necessary to predict the optimal positioning for each state. Because of this, I was wondering if I would be able to draw upon your expertise for this issue - I have found your posts enormously illuminating and have changed many of my views on this issue. With that in mind, would you be willing for us to get in contact and discuss this issue further?
What distinguishes ECOWAS relations with Guinea from ECOWAS relations with Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso?
I'm wondering if it's related to the origin of the governments, as contrasted previously (https://kenopalo.substack.com/p/putting-the-recent-coups-in-the-sahel):
> Perhaps with the exception of Guinea, all affected countries experienced coups partially as a by-product of the imbalanced aggrandizement of their armed forces in the face of serious security threats...
The question posed by Captain Ibrahim Traoré is poignant: where was this ECOWAS force, which was threatened to called up for subduing Niger, when the people of ECOWAS states were/are attacked by terrorists? Why hasn’t ECOWAS leadership called on member states to solve the safety & security issues that are hampering the economic exchange in the vast affected areas?
Seems ECOWAS has proven itself to be useless as pertains the issues hampering real economics for people of Member States.