“No option is taken off the table, including the use of force as a last resort,” said Nigerian president and ECOWAS chairman Bola Tinubu on 10 August 2023, shortly after his speech at an emergency ECOWAS summit in Abuja following the coup in Niger. Two weeks before the ECOWAS summit, an official communiqué was issued ordering the “immediate activation of the ECOWAS Standby Force with all its elements.” Even by the tumultuous standards of West Africa, this was an unexpected escalation of rhetoric, complete with the sort of gun-cocking posturing that would not have looked out of place if it was directed at warring belligerents in a country engulfed in a civil war.
While many scratched their heads trying to figure out the reason behind what looked like a startling overreaction to a bloodless, garden-variety coup in an impoverished Sahelian country, the truth of the situation was even more fraught than the messaging suggested. Shortly before the ECOWAS summit, Tinubu had attempted to deploy the Nigerian Air Force and Army to the northwestern border state of Sokoto, with orders to invade Niger under the infamous euphemism of “enforcing a No-Fly Zone.” These orders were delivered clandestinely and without authorisation from the Senate – which must authorise all foreign deployment of the military under Nigerian law. This attempt to invade Niger Republic failed only because a whistleblower within the military leaked the orders to the media, making it absolutely necessary for the president to follow due process by taking the matter to the Senate for debate. As a result of public backlash, the attempt to gain Senate approval for the military invasion was unsuccessful.
While Tinubu may not have succeeded in getting Nigerian boots on Nigerien soil, he made sure to explore every other course of action open to him in pursuit of the self-imposed “red line” position adopted by ECOWAS: that ousted President Mohamed Bazoum must be freed and restored to power immediately. The entire range of economic sanctions that ECOWAS could theoretically apply on Niger was deployed and dialled up to the maximum intensity. All ECOWAS borders with Niger were closed, leaving the landlocked nation of 21 million people effectively unable to access the staple foods, fuel and medicine that were necessary for everyday survival. In an unprecedented move, Tinubu unceremoniously tossed the half-century-old Niger River Treaty into the dirt as Nigeria switched off electricity supply to Niger.
The message was clear – this was a foreign policy objective so important to ECOWAS that it apparently warranted more of a vigorous response than with anything since the Sierra Leonean civil war. Everything was on the table, and it was time to throw it at General Abdourahamane Tchiani and Niger. As we now know, all this pressure on Niger only ended up constituting the backdrop to one of the most visually spectacular foreign policy disasters in modern African history.
Make sure the solution is not worse than the problem
If the goal of the sanctions was to break the spirits of Nigeriens and turn them against the military junta, it had the exact opposite effect. Food and fuel supplies did indeed dry up, leading to significant everyday difficulties in Niger. The lights did go out in Niamey’s hospitals, and prematurely born children inside the incubators lost their lives. Thousands of Nigeriens did hit the streets to protest – but not against the coup regime, as was expected.
Instead of General Tchiani, it was President Tinubu who became the focus of fury on Niger’s streets, and the new military leaders duly followed up with their own retaliatory sanctions targeted at Nigeria. Among other things, they ensured that all air traffic originating from, or terminating in, Nigeria was denied use of Niger’s strategically important airspace. Nigerian flights to and from Europe and Asia were forced to detour west via Mali, or east via South Sudan, to avoid the airspace of a country that makes up essentially all of Nigeria’s northern border. In one noteworthy incident, the Nigerian presidential jet with Tinubu onboard was chased out of Nigerien airspace while returning to Abuja from Paris, leading to an embarrassing 40-minute forced detour through Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Benin.
The shutdown of trade and diplomatic relations cost Nigerian traders who exported goods to Niger an estimated $9 million weekly in lost revenue, with a further $1.3 billion in trade volumes. In a patchily connected region of a poor continent that already suffers from the world’s lowest rate of intra-regional trade, this sort of economic carnage was the very last thing that any ECOWAS action should have resulted in.
Eight months into the ruinous staring contest, Burkinabe military leader Captain Ibrahim Traoré upped the ante even further, announcing the creation of the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) in collaboration with Niger and Mali. In the space of just 8 months, 20 per cent of the ECOWAS alliance that had taken 48 years to build simply got up and walked out of the door.
From sabre-rattling about immovable “red lines” and activating an “ECOWAS standby force,” Tinubu found himself looking flat-footed and out of his depth. Not only had he failed to weaken the Nigerien junta in any way, but Niger’s exit from the bloc had also removed any pretext for any future intervention. In quick succession, ECOWAS first issued a press statement that stopped just short of pleading with the AES states to return, and then it unconditionally dropped all the sanctions it had imposed on Niger. The entire strategy for Niger had turned into a massive foreign policy failure and an unprecedented humiliation for the Tinubu administration in particular and ECOWAS in general.
For anyone with some historical knowledge of African governance, this sort of disastrous outcome caused by a shoot-first-think-later style of policymaking is unfortunately not uncommon. It was observed in places like Kenya and Nigeria during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when police officers were observed beating and even shooting civilians who came out to look for food during the hastily imposed lockdowns. At no point was any thought given to the question: “If the purpose of imposing a lockdown is to stop COVID-19 from killing people, does it make sense to impose said lockdowns if doing so creates the circumstances for starvation, unemployment and police brutality, all of which would kill the same people in greater numbers?”
Certainly, no thought was given to the question: “Do we even have any business locking down when we have carried out no independent research of our own to establish the efficacy of a lockdown, or are we merely locking down because foreign governments and institutions have stampeded us into it?” If ECOWAS had any questions along this line before being stampeded by foreign actors into a completely avoidable diplomatic quagmire with Niger, the bloc might still have 15 members instead of 12. As it stands, whatever plans ECOWAS had for consolidation and convergence (common currency, anyone?) are now dead in the water.
By adopting a knee-jerk, French-dictated hard line in complete disregard of Nigeria’s own longstanding trade and security partnerships with Niger, Tinubu effectively sanctioned Nigeria and scored one of the great diplomatic own-goals of the 21st century. If any actual strategic thought went into the reaction to the Niger coup last year, it would have been apparent to ECOWAS that a full-scale military intervention in Niger would have been suicidal for West Africa, and there should have been a lot more carefully considered messaging and a lot less inexplicable bombast.
Do as they do, Not as they Say
Despite the sweet nothings from European mouths into Tinubu’s ears at a time when France was desperate to force Niger back into its geostrategic ambit, a cannier policymaking approach would have been to ask “What would the Europeans themselves do?” One does not have to go far to answer that question. In April 2022, two months after the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, despite being understood on all sides to be a NATO vs. Russia proxy war, the largest single supplier of gas to Europe continued to be – you guessed it – Russia.
Despite slamming a raft of economic sanctions on Russia, Europe continued importing gas from Russia in large volumes for months afterwards. Even now, Russia continues to supply many European countries, including Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Italy, with large proportions of their gas imports. In other words, regardless of whatever diplomatic kerfuffle, the Europeans generally do not starve each other to death, turn off each other’s lights or use life-threatening sanctions targeted at each other’s civilians as tools of diplomacy. Emmanuel Macron might have been happy to see Africans do these things to each other as long as it achieved France’s foreign policy outcome in Niger, but as at February 2024, France still received about 15 per cent of its gas imports from Putin’s Russia. The point is easy enough to grasp – only Africans are expected to murder each other and destroy their economies to please outsiders!
The same pattern is observable elsewhere. Despite the clear and obvious diplomatic, political and economic schism that exists between China and the US, China remains America’s 3rd largest trading partner. During the half-century that the Cold War lasted, the US and Russia fought each other in a series of proxy wars all over the world – primarily in Africa and Asia – but somehow managed to avoid importing conflict into their own territories despite being only a 58 KM Bering Strait crossing away from each other. Nigeria, on the other hand, was willing to open a war front on its own northwestern border and potentially open Niger’s doorway to the chaos of Libya’s ungoverned spaces. Why?
African countries must learn to avoid offering themselves up as pawns and battle theatres in power games between nuclear-armed states. They must understand that foreign actors are often very happy to act in ways that are harmful to the shared growth and economic convergence of African nations. Consequently, a primary priority in policy formulation must be thinking carefully through all potential first-, second- and third-order effects of any policy before rushing it out.
One way to avoid situations like the ECOWAS debacle is to place collective action at the centre of all trade and foreign policy doctrines. Individual silos and unilateral actors should have no place in high-stakes local and foreign policy decisions. Historically, foreign actors like the US and EU prefer dealing with individual silos through the instrument of weighted bilateral partnerships. When African countries act as a collective, these foreign actors often deploy the diplomatic tactic of union-busting.
An example of this is the EAC’s 2016 ban on used clothing imports, which aimed to boost local textile industries. The US sabotaged the plan by threatening participants with exclusion from the American Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA). Only Rwanda stood its ground, and it was duly removed as an AGOA beneficiary. Both the US and EU have acted in a similar manner towards the AfCFTA and the EAC, offering bilateral trade deals to individual member states instead of negotiating with the collective. Unfortunately, in both cases, these tactics worked, and collective African interests were sacrificed for the sake of individual morsels.
This must change going forward. As a matter of urgency, Africa must develop a general standard for local and foreign policy engagements. This standard must make it routine for African policy decisions to be well-considered, extensively thought-out, and decided for and by the African collective. Never again should we witness the sort of slapstick policy gaffes that would turn Nigeria and Niger into enemies, or prevent Kenya and Tanzania from integrating each other’s economies.
