There appears no end in sight to the raging crisis gripping the West African sub-region in view of the military coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Niger Republic and the resolve of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) heads of governments to restore the country’s constitutional order through military activation if all diplomatic measures to force the Nigerien junta into total compliance fail.

Rising from a meeting in Ghana’s capital, Accra, on Thursday, the ECOWAS defence chiefs said they were prepared to reinstate the democracy in Niger as all elements that would go into the military intervention had been worked out and were being refined.

Despite the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council not backing the military action, ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Abdel-Fatau Musah, after the Accra’s meeting, noted that there was no going back on the military activation as the military junta in Niger has remained defiant, playing a cat-and-mouse game with the ECOWAS body.

While noting that the junta has flouted the country’s constitution and ECOWAS protocols, Musah said: “Let no one be in doubt if everything else fails, the valiant forces of West Africa are ready to answer the call of duty. By all means available, constitutional order will be restored in the country.”

But while observers have noted that the military action against the Nigerien junta is in line with ECOWAS protocol as the entire arrangements that came after the third wave of democratisation in the West-Africa sub-regions was for countries to peer-protect one another and their democracies, the successive military interventions the ECOWAS standby troops have had in the past, albeit successful, have failed to prevent fresh military coup detat in the region.

It will be recalled that since the 1990s, ECOWAS forces have been employed to end civil conflicts and coups in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau, as well as to assist Mali authorities in their struggle against Islamists in 2013 and to facilitate the transfer of power in the Gambia in 2017. However, coups have persisted in the region due to what many have described as contagious failures of successive civilian governments to return their countries on the path of socio-economic prosperity. Political leaders in the region have been been accused of using democracy as a pretext to commit serious crimes amid pervasive corruption, incompetence and looting of the public treasury.

This much was given as reasons by the Nigerien coupists for toppling Mohamed Bazoum’s gpovernment. Leader of the junta, who is the commander of the Nigerien Presidential Guard, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, in his statement on July 28, 2023, attested to the failure of political leadership in the region when he described his action as a war against public-fund misappropriation, impunity, fraud in all its manifestation and nepotism.

Tchiani had said that the action of the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Country (CNSP), the group of soldiers he led to stage the takeover, was motivated by the need to rescue the country after being plagued by the worrisome security situation and pitiable economic and social crisis, despite being the world’s seventh largest importer of uranium which top European countries like France rely on for their energy needs.

But Niger is not the only West African country with deficit political governance. Most, if not all, countries in the region are experiencing excruciating socio-economic whirlwind caused by poor political leadership unabashedly enrobed in corruption and severely impared economic vision, which forced the coup detat in Niger. From, Nigeria, Ghana to Chad, Mali, Senegal, among others, especially the ECOWAS members rooting for war in Niger, the story is the same.

Nigeria

Nigeria, the self-acclaimed giant of Africa, has consistently been short-changed by its leaders. The fast-paced retrogression of the country, officially the most populous country of the Blacks, is not too different from the Nigerien experience. It is on record that since the country voyaged into the civilian era having exited the military regimes of the 1980s/90s, its development has drastically fallen short of the progress recorded during the regional era of the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and other founding fathers. They said the country had since then been crawling from grace to grass.

Remarkably, Nigerian socio-economic misery witnessed an upsurge in 2020 when the country experienced its second recession. Since then, industry statistical records say the country has been grappling with the worst economic decline in almost four decades. While other countries like Rwanda have since efficiently exploited the gains from the global oil prices after the coronavirus nightmare, the African giant hasn’t been able to recover from the economic battery it suffered in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Jermome-Mario Utomi, the programme coordinator (media and public policy) of Social and Economic Justice Advocacy (SEJA), Lagos, since 1999 till date, Nigeria has been afflicted with widespread poverty, insecurity, corruption, gross injustice, and ethnic politics.

Utomi noted that successive governments in the country have been unable to clearly unleash economic development, promote growth and structural change with some measures of distributive equity, emplaced evidential political transformation, advance the health and education sector of the country, and create a sustainable employment rate for the teeming Nigerians, yet the past presidents had always been at the forefront of every democracy preservative move in the region.

In a similar vein, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) says the country’s economy is mired in a mesh of problems that have constrained its performance over the years, but that the biggest missing variable is purposeful leadership.

“Bad leadership has been Nigeria’s biggest problem since 1960. Nigeria’s political process is highly commercialised or monetised; thus, the process is plagued with a deficit of ideas competition,” NESG stated in a report of its National Economic Dialogue held in Abuja on May 20, 2022.

The group added that: “Since politics is superior to the economy as it provides the process or ecosystem that produces the type of leaders to govern the country, Nigeria’s lack of strong leadership with the capacity to understand its problems and solve them is her biggest problem. Due to this bad leadership experience, Nigeria is classified as a nation with a low-grade civil war on the Failed Nation Index.”

The group further listed a weak and non-inclusive economy, highly volatile macroeconomic environment, weak economic competitiveness, infrastructure and social sector collapse, and national insecurity as some of the issues eclipsing the country’s development.

It stressed that with a compound annual growth rate estimated at 1.92 percent between 2012 and 2021, the Nigerian economy grew below the yearly population rate of 2.6 percent, adding that: “After netting out inflation and other costs, the real size of the Nigerian economy has remained relatively the same since 2012. This implies that the country is experiencing economic stagnation. Consequently, for the average Nigerian, real income had been declining since 2012, and welfare worsening.

With this, combined with heightened inflationary pressure and deteriorating security challenges, observers opined that the Nigerian government, despite being one of the key drivers of ECOWAS, has a lot of challenges to contend with than spearheading a rescue mission to Niger, whose citizens have somehow backed their military intervention.

Ghana

Ghana is another big figure among the 10 West African countries rooting for military action against the Nigerien junta. But successive democratic governments in the country haven’t delivered the dividends of democracy to its teeming masses for years.

According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Ghana potentially has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, but the country’s long-term economic growth is challenged by high energy costs; high levels of government debt, including in the energy sector; low access to credit; high borrowing costs; low agricultural productivity; a business climate that restricts private sector growth; and regional trade barriers.

Worst still, Ghana is among the United Nation’s least-developed countries, with four out of 10 people living in poverty, says the USAID, noting that the country ranks 131 out of 177 countries listed in the 2004 Human Development Index, reflecting insufficient progress in improving its citizens’ levels of health and education.

In his assessment of the current state of development in Ghana, a columnist with GhanaWeb, Joel Savage, said the Gold Coast should not have faced any high unemployment and economic crisis, if it had not been plagued with poor management, chronic corruption, and ineffective leadership, despite being rich in agriculture and mineral resources, including gold, diamond, bauxite, and oil.

In a public lecture, he delivered earlier this year at the University of Ghana to mark the 75th anniversary of the institution, the Coordinator of the Pan-African advocacy organisation, Third World Network-Africa, Dr. Yao Graham, also opined that successive Ghanaian governments have failed to orchestrate a smooth development of the country through wanton resources mismanagement and ill-conceived socio-economic policies.

He said: “We have gone from a country which aspired to be a Ghana beyond aid to being a country which is desperate for aid. There is widespread destitution as a result of the cost-of-living crisis.

Stating that the economic crisis cannot be blamed on a single regime, Dr. Graham said that “Government after government have seen the problems and addressed it differently and have only succeeded in piling up the country’s debt stock in an attempt to solve the problem.”

Like Nigeria, Dr. Yao Graham pointed out the Ghanaian government has been contending with a surging debt profile occasioned by weak accountability of the public treasury.

During the same lecture, the Managing Director of Ghana Stock Exchange, Ms. Abena Amoah, stated that: “The Ghanaian economy has indeed faced a lot of challenges, and in recent years, we have seen high inflation, low productivity, high unemployment rates, poor resource management, and the lack of accountability, among others. These challenges have significantly impacted the growth and development of our economy, leading us further away from our ideal socio-economic environment.”

But yet again, the country’s president is one of the leading voices for the ECOWAS military action, despite the widespread public anger in his country against the move.

Ivory Coast

Despite being the world’s leading cocoa and cashew producer, Ivory Coast or Cote d’Ivoire has had its own fair share of poor leadership. The country’s president Alassane Ouattara had initially been constitutionally mandated to serve the maximum of a two-term limit, but the man has been ruling the country since December 2010, having succeeded in influencing the country’s parliaments to change the Ivorian constitution in his favour and make him run for both third and fourth terms. In essence, Ouattara has so far spent over 12 years in government, but his long reign has reportedly not translated into enviable developments for his country as almost 40 per cent of the country’s about 27 million people still languish below the national poverty line, while more than 40 per cent of the people are battling food insecurity, according to World Data.

Though the country is well known to parade sit-tight presidents, investigation reveals that the many years of misrule from the successive democratic presidents have greatly plundered the country’s common wealth. Instead of fast-paced development, the country has also been caught in a severe leadership crisis triggered by the refusal of Ouattara’s predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo, to hand over power after spending over 10 years and being defeated during the country’s last presidential election run-off held in 2010.

This leadership wrangling, according to Oscar Otindo, a Kenyan activist, has drastically deepened the severity of the socio-economic and bad leadership hitches gripping the country in the last decade.

According to the Ivory Coast Travel Advisory released earlier this month by the United States Bureau of Consular Affairs, terrorism has sunk deeply in the Northern and North-Eastern parts of the country. Crime has continued to be a major public security concern in Côte d’Ivoire. The US travel advisory notes that apart from terrorism, violent crimes such as carjacking, robbery, and home invasion have deeply prevailed in the country. In view of this, one wonders why Ouattara has not been able to deploy the country’s whole armoury and security architecture to dislodge the festering security breaches, but throwing greater attention to the democratic infringement of another sovereign country, while outlaws are feasting under his nose.

Republic of Benin

Benin Republic is another country that has indicated interest to commit security forces to the ECOWAS military actions against the Niger junta, but the country also has its own attendant security crisis. Despite being populated with just 13 million people, the country is depleted by corruption and illicit diversion of public funds. The Africa Organised Crime Index says the country’s leadership has poorly implemented laws that criminalise corruption and degenerate criminality.

The crime index says even though the country may be faring better when compared to its neighbours in the region, its political stability is greatly being threatened and its government has shown little will to curb existing organised crime.

It stressed that the country’s national legal framework against organised crime remains inadequate and there is little capacity and willingness to improve it, noting that there is no record of any clear national strategies to address the crimes and the weakness of the country’s current legal regulations, which allows for significant smuggling and trafficking, has made the government appear helpless.

“Benin’s judicial system is also weak and ineffective, burdened by insufficient funding and corruption. Political interference is inappropriate, and President Patrice Talon has consistently exhibited undemocratic tendencies by appointing his own judges,” the crime index says, noting that the porous judicial move has ensured the prevalence of mob justice with many criminals able to escape legal sanctions through corruption in the country.

It is said that Benin’s underdeveloped financial system occasioned by President Talon’s weak and ineffective leadership has hindered his government from combating money laundering and flagrant abuse of public office power.

It added that while the president is making efforts to correct the shortfall of his administration, its lack of adequate employment opportunities has expanded its criminal markets, while ethnic conflict and political instability have weakened its economic capacity.

The way out

Like Niger Republic and other countries appraised so far, failure of political leadership has remained widespread among other West African climes at the vanguard of the ECOWAS’ military intervention in Niger. Amid the rapid efforts being deployed by the ECOWAS Defence Chiefs to restore the deposed constitutional order back in Niger, political observers are of the view that only good governance can preserve democracy in the West Africa sub-region. They said no degree of military activation and machinery can build up and strengthen the declining democracy in the region.

“West African leaders are only being blindfolded by greed and self-preservation agenda. But no amount of combined military machinery can stop them from being deposed by any vibrant and tactical coupists with spot-on strategies like the Niger Junta. The only way is for ECOWAS to ensure good governance thrives and delivers the dividends of democracy to the people in the region. Doing this will not only discourage coup d’état, but also deepen the love for democratic government among the people, such that you will not see them jubilating when a military government takes over power as we have seen in Niger,” says professor of Conflict, Security Governance, and Comparative Politics at the Nnamdi Azikwe University, Awka, Professor Chukwuemeka Jaja Nwanegbo.

“As I have said earlier, the whole issue is quite complicated. But the only way aside from preaching good governance is for ECOWAS leadership, ahead of time, to begin to intervene in the governance principles in the West Africa sub-regions to avert a further reoccurrence of this kind of crisis that is happening in Niger. Anything thing other than the diplomatic option will create war and anarchy in the region. And at the end, the same people, whose interests ECOWAS is mandated to protect will be severally killed,” Nwanegbo submitted. (Nigerian Tribune)

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