ABUJA, Nigeria
West Africa’s regional bloc known as ECOWAS has lifted travel, commercial and economic sanctions imposed on Niger that were aimed at reversing the coup staged in the country last year, a senior official announced Saturday.
The sanctions will be lifted
with immediate effect, the president of the ECOWAS Commission, Omar Alieu
Touray said after the bloc’s meeting in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, that aimed to
address existential threats facing the region as well as implore three junta-led
nations that have quit the bloc to rescind their decision.
The lifting of the sanctions
on Niger is “on purely humanitarian grounds” to ease the suffering caused as a
result, Touray told reporters. “There are targeted (individual) sanctions as
well as political sanctions that remain in force,” he added.
The summit of the 15-nation
regional economic bloc known as ECOWAS in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, comes at a
critical time when the 49-year-old bloc’s future is threatened as it struggles
with possible disintegration and a recent surge in coups fueled by discontent
over the performance of elected governments whose citizens barely benefit from
mineral resources.
Decisions to be made at the
summit “must be guided by our commitment to safeguarding the constitutional
order, upholding democratic principles, and promoting the social and economic
wellbeing of the citizens,” Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, current chairman of
ECOWAS, said at the start of the summit.
Top of the agenda is the
recent decision by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to leave ECOWAS, or the
Economic Community of West African States, over “inhumane sanctions.” That move
is unprecedented since the bloc was established in 1975 and grew to become the
region’s top political and economic authority.
“We must re-examine our
current approach to the quest for constitutional order in our member states,”
Tinubu said. “I therefore urge them to reconsider the decision ... and not to
perceive our organization as the enemy.”
The summit is also expected to
review the harsh sanctions imposed on Niger. This week, one of the bloc’s
founding leaders and Nigeria’s former military ruler, Yakubu Gowon, urged
regional leaders to lift the sanctions, noting that the bloc is “more than a
coalition of states (but) is a community established for the good of our
people.”
In the past year, however, the
bloc has struggled to resolve the region’s most pressing challenge: The Sahel,
the vast, arid expanse south of the Sahara Desert that stretches across several
West African countries, faces growing violence from Islamic extremists and
rebels, which in turn has caused soldiers to depose elected governments.
The nine coups in West and
Central Africa since 2020 followed a similar pattern, with coup leaders
accusing governments of failing to provide security and good governance. Most
of the coup-hit countries are also among the poorest and least developed in the
world.
The sanctions against Niger
and the threat of military intervention to reverse the coup were “the likely
triggers to an inevitable outcome” of the three countries’ withdrawal from the
bloc, said Karim Manuel, an analyst for the Middle East and Africa with the
Economist Intelligence Unit.
With their withdrawal, “the
West African region will be increasingly fragmented and divided (while) the new
alliance between Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger fragments the West African bloc
and reflects an axis of opposition to the traditional structures that have
underpinned the region for decades,” Manuel added.
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