BEHIND WEST AFRICA’s ‘BREXIT’
The exit of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso from Ecowas is a significant realignment of geopolitics within the Sahel. It may be to the detriment of the three rebel states
Apending “Wexit ”— a withdrawal of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) — is the most significant geopolitical realignment in the region in three decades, as Western influence plummets and the Russia-backed Wagner Group prowls around.
Ironically, part of the secessionist drive in the three Sahel states can be located in France’s more progressive attitude recently towards former colonies it once treated as its own chasse gardée through control of their currencies, foreign reserves and central banks.
The looming replacement of West Africa’s euro-pegged CFA franc by the “eco”, administered by the Uemoa regional monetary union — along with the end to the requirement that former colonies deposit 50% of their foreign reserves with France — was supposed to be the key signal that the Élysée intended treating African countries as equal partners in future.
But such liberalisation seems instead to have inspired the rebel states to consider establishing their own regional currency to be administered by their Moscow-backed breakaway, the Alliance of Sahel States. It has also exited the French-led G5 Sahel security alliance.
The tipping point was the apparent inability of the Western powers, primarily France and the US, to assist Sahel states in crushing jihadist insurgencies. That and the consistent trashing of France and promotion of Russia on West African social media by Wagner troll farm the Internet Research Agency.
In 2013, a muscular French military intervention, Operation Serval, recaptured Mali’s north from its jihadist rebels and secured a peace deal with the Tuareg. France ended Serval in 2014, redeploying under the more general Operation Barkhane, in Burkina Faso, which focused on counterterrorism via G5 Sahel.
Those days are gone.
Jihadist attacks escalated and spread to neighbouring countries, fuelling rumours that France was secretly arming the jihadis to entrench its presence in the Sahel. Then the 2021 overthrow of Mali’s coup-installed transitional government put into play a powerful faction that had had enough of Western intervention.
The French military contingent in
Mali fell out with the junta and was pulled back to Niger by August 2022, joining troops who’d been withdrawn there after a coup in Burkina Faso. But the concentration of 1,500-odd French troops (plus a perhaps 300-strong ultrasecret “Sabre” special forces component) and 1,000 US troops tipped the scales of anti-Western sentiment.
As Africa correspondent and author Rémy Carayol tells it, French military officers “operated with a colonial mindset,” taking their cue from leaders “convinced of being engaged in a global, even civilisational, war”.
Then, last July, Niger had its own coup, ousting France ally president Mohamed Bazoum, who had done a plausible job against Salafist insurgency. On August 23, the Nigerien junta announced it would evict French and US troops. While the US is trying to find ways to keep troops in the country, France withdrew by year-end. Still, it’s building new reconnaissance outposts in countries such as Benin.
Several hundred Wagner mercenaries, regular Russian army instructors and logistics personnel replaced the French in Mali and have since been engaged in fighting the rebels. Meanwhile, the Malian junta demanded that all UN peacekeepers withdraw, which they agreed to last June, and this January it scrapped the peace accords with the Tuareg.
In December, when Russian deputy defence minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov visited the rebel states, they agreed to strengthen military ties with Russia. And so, a month later, Wagner’s estimated 5,000-strong presence was renamed the Africa Corps and put under the direct supervision of Yevkurov’s ministry.
This is an unvarnished game of men toying with guns in some of the poorest countries in the world, with no industries to speak of, and exporters of identical crops.
Olivier Walther at the University of Florida argues on academic website The Conversation that these states are so heavily reliant on largely informal trade flows with and critical imports via their former Ecowas partners that it is easy to see that secession will benefit only the military elites and severely damage the livelihoods of their populations.
Monthly magazine Jeune Afrique has reported how the mining, construction and banking sectors of the dissident states are already suffering from their economic isolation, while investment is in a tailspin, and even street traders are expecting bitter harvests.
“While the putschists in West Africa justify their action by promising an improvement in collective wellbeing,” writes journalist Yara Rizk, “the result is often the opposite: increase in poverty, reduction in budget and social spending, decline in economic activity.”
Increased poverty will inevitably drive jihadism in an inescapable cycle. Like Brexit before it, Wexit’s “cure” is likely to prove more disastrous than the disease.