Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, three West African states led by the military on Saturday ruled out returning to the West Africa regional bloc whose division could further jeopardize regional efforts to revert coups and curb the violence spreading across the region.
Military junta leaders of the three countries announced that during their first summit in Niamey, the capital of Niger, after their withdrawal from the West Africa bloc known as ECOWAS in January.
They also accused the bloc of failing its mandate and pledged to consolidate their union – the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) — created last year amid fractured relations with neighbors.
The nearly 50-year-old ECOWAS has become “a threat to our states,” Niger’s military leader Gen Abdourahmane Tchiani said. “We are going to create an AES of the peoples, instead of an ECOWAS whose directives and instructions are dictated to it by powers that are foreign to Africa,” Tchiani said.
“Our peoples have irrevocably turned their backs on ECOWAS,” Tiani said in a speech. “It is up to us today to make the AES Confederation an alternative to any artificial regional group by building … a community free from the control of foreign powers,” Tchiani added.
The meeting of the three countries that border one another comes a day before an ECOWAS summit in Nigeria where other heads of state in the region are to meet.
At the meeting in Niamey, Burkina Faso’s leader Capt Ibrahim Traoré reaffirmed those concerns and accused foreign countries of exploiting Africa.
“Westerners consider that we belong to them and our wealth also belongs to them. They think that they are the ones who must continue to tell us what is good for our states. This era is gone forever; our resources will remain for us and our populations,” Traoré said.
“The attack on one of us will be an attack on all the other members,” Mali’s leader Col. Assimi Goïta also said.
ECOWAS has made diplomatic efforts to dissuade the three states from quitting the 50-year-old alliance. The split will reverse decades of regional integration and threatens a messy disentanglement from trade and services flows worth nearly $150 billion a year.
The falling-out is linked to the ECOWAS decision to respond to the trio’s coups with stringent sanctions and its unrealised threat to use force to restore constitutional rule in Niger last year.
Peoplesmind
