THE AFRICAN PUBLIC SQUARE (APS) Second Continental Edition At the ECOWAS @ 50 Conference
FUTURE PROOFING REGIONAL INTEGRATION IN AFRICA: ECOWAS @ 50
Regional integration in Africa is a story of two worlds: the world of states and the world of people. This is an unintended consequence of a growing distance between the stated regional integration ambitions of governments and the realities of life among their peoples. The drive for integration among people is outpacing their governments and regional organisations’ progress. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which was among the first in Africa to set the pace for regional integration has had some setbacks in recent years. This year’s celebration of 50 years of ECOWAS provides an opportunity to look back and look forward, imagining what the future of regional integration could be for African peoples.
Governments pursue regional integration through shared institutions to achieve common goals, not least stability, development and the prosperity of their peoples. Success typically requires organising principles, along with shared norms and a supporting political community with shared values and aspirations. We have seen transitions in norms and values induced by the African Union’s (AU) organising principles from non-intervention in countries’ internal affairs to the principle of non-indifference. Another is the rejection of unconstitutional change in government, which the AU and ECOWAS have pursued with inconsistency. Such distinguishing principles and norms help define the identity of regional organisations as they advance toward integration.
ECOWAS set the pace in making regional integration a reality in the lives of West African citizens, through free movement of peoples and shared institutions. The ECOWAS Passport has been an important feature of integration in West Africa for several decades. But factors ranging from large scale insecurities, macro-economic inequalities (hindering the launch of a common currency), geopolitics, and inconsistent application of its own norms, have stalled progress toward integration.
Meanwhile, African peoples lived experiences continue to drive the quest for regional integration even when it appears to hold no urgency for their governments. Lack of integration does not seem to hinder governments, but it hinders people. Governments and people are driven by different logics. While governments respond to external pressures to tighten border controls, their people welcome porosity of borders – active borderland communities and markets are important connectors of people. While structurally the state remains an incubator of violence, notions of peace and the agency and resilience of the youth support in creating alternatives to violence. While people look for opportunities, most governments impose clear limits on what (young) people can do and their freedom to organize publicly by restricting civic space or closing public spaces. Despite the restrictive environment people continue to work hard to hold the line. Governments are focused on transnational illegalities; their people embrace transnational organising in pursuit of development. And while governments struggle with digital transformation and grapple with the illusive digital sovereignty, their youth innovate through digital technologies. To be future proof, African regional organisations must work at pace to meet the integration needs of the next generation.
ECOWAS at 50 years provides an opportunity to reimagine a new future by rethinking approaches to managing the obstacles to integration and considering the profound change occurring among West African peoples, which can accelerate regional integration. In its 2050 vision, ECOWAS projects a transition from an ECOWAS of States to a “fully integrated community of peoples in a peaceful, prosperous region with strong institutions and respect for fundamental freedoms and working towards inclusive and sustainable development.” Making this a reality requires a closing of the distance between people and their governments, and the renewal of a political community in the region.
APS SECOND CONTINENTAL EDITION DURING THE ECOWAS AT 50 CONFERENCE
The Second Continental African Public Square will be held during the Conference on ECOWAS at 50 on 31 October and 1 November 2025 in Abuja, Nigeria. Co-hosted by the African Leadership Centre, Amandla Institute and CODESRIA in collaboration with WATHI, this edition of the APS open debate asks a core question: Are regional organisations a necessity for regional integration in Africa? The debate will open additional questions: What needs will drive a future ECOWAS of peoples? Can regional integration be achieved without a political community and economic base?
ABOUT THE AFRICAN PUBLIC SQUARE (APS)
The African leadership Centre established the African Public Square (APS) in 2023 as a plaborm to harness Africa’s intellectual power and inter-generational agency. The APS aims to:
- Speak back to established agendas in the global landscape that place Africa at a disadvantage.
- Offer new solutions and proposals for re-energising Africa’s normative and response framework, with possibilities for Africa’s renewal.
- Expand the constituency of actors that speak for Africa when the spaces for engaging state and continental action are closed.
The APS offers a three-part intervention to raise Africa’s position in the world:
- A convening plaborm: to convene new and established voices constituting an intergenerational community of African public intellectuals catalysing the repositioning of Africa in the global order.
- An annual high-level (continental) forum – an African/global public debate bringing together prominent African intellectuals along with a variety of interlocutors to frame and propose an alternative framework of engagement on issues of the day shaping Africa’s trajectory.
- An inter-generational community of African public intellectuals in co-leadership of special interventions that propose new ideas and forms of collaboration for responding to Africa’s challenges and reshaping global engagement to raise Africa’s position in the world.
CONCEPT NOTE
REIMAGINING WEST AFRICAN REGIONAL COOPERATION AND INTEGRATION: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
ECOWAS At 50
Abuja, Nigeria
October 31, 2025
When the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was founded in 1975, it marked the onset of a new phase in the post-colonial trajectory of the sub-region. Against various odds, and despite the overbearing influence of France on several of its former colonies, the establishment of the Community was a victory for those in the leadership of West Africa at the time who believed that the countries stood to gain more from cooperation and integration than they would lose. Although the process of establishing and consolidating the sub-regional project required the speedy building of mutual trust and understanding, it received a significant boost following the adoption in 1978 of the protocol on the free movement of people, goods, and services. That protocol was a radical step forward that immediately stood ECOWAS apart from its peers. More impressive policies, measures, and innovations were to follow in the subsequent years as leaders ajempted to improve the internal operations of the community, strengthen its institutional structures, presence, and reach, expand intra-West African trade, investment, and infrastructure, promote shared governance values and standards, and sustain sub-regional peace and stability.
For many years aker its founding, ECOWAS was seen, with some justification, as a pace sejer in African regional cooperation and integration majers. This was so until the outbreak of a bijer disagreement between the leaders of three of the member states – Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger – and the ECOWAS leadership over the unconstitutional changes of government that had taken place in the three countries. Resentment by the military leaders of the three countries over the rejection by ECOWAS of the military coups and the punitive measures taken against them very quickly boiled over and resulted in their decision to terminate their membership of the Community. That announcement was followed by the announcement by the three countries to create a confederation that they named the Alliance of Sahel States. It represented their answer to what they considered as the unjust treatment meted out to them by ECOWAS, which they also accused of colluding with France, their former colonial ruler, to undermine their sovereignty and forcibly overthrow their governments.
The exit of the three countries from ECOWAS took effect from January 2025. It represented the biggest challenge to the West African cooperation and integration project. As can be expected, the circumstances leading to the decision of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to withdraw from the West African community project has generated considerable debate about the future of ECOWAS itself. While a section of opinion insists that the departure of the AES countries is lijle more than an opportunist action led by a group of illegitimate, self-serving, and anti-democratic military officers hiding behind the acute and prolonged crisis of insecurity in the Sahel to grab power, another body of opinion welcomes the decision of the three countries as a bold step to build an alternative and more radical integration project allegedly anchored on a clear anti-imperialist agenda. The two competing positions represent polar opposites. They are seemingly irreconcilable, for the immediate at least.
The official position taken by the ECOWAS leadership on the departure of the three countries from the Community has been that their decision was a highly regrejable overreaction to the punitive measures imposed on them as part of the package of incentives designed to ensure their speedy and orderly return to constitutional governance in line with the regional body’s charter on democracy to which Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger were themselves signatories. Rejecting the claim of the AES leadership that it had been hijacked in the service of French imperialist interests, the ECOWAS Authority and its Commission offered to leave the doors open to the three countries should they decide to return to the Community fold. As it is, the membership of ECOWAS has dwindled from 15 West African countries to 12. Mauritania had lek ECOWAS much earlier, in 2000, in order to pursue4 integration with the Arab Maghreb Union, but its decision was not taken in the context of a crisis within the Community or a disagreement with Community policies. It had more to do with domestic political considerations within Mauritania itself.
Under normal circumstances, even without the crisis it has faced, it could have been expected that 50 years on, a strong case could be made for a reinvention of the West African integration project. The grounds for such a reinvention are many, and they were already a source of discussions well before the decision of the AES countries to pull out of ECOWAS. At one level, there were strong concerns that the promised transition from the ECOWAS of rulers – an elite club of incumbent political rulers – to a community of the people, centred on citizens, was not happening – at least not as quickly and effectively as was wished. At another level, concerns were cumulating that much-promised internal reforms designed to make the Community more agile had stalled, with the consequence that the organisation was becoming much more remote from the peoples of West Africa it was meant to serve, and in danger of being reduced to a wobbly bureaucratic juggernaut.
Furthermore, for all the efforts that had been made in adopting various inter-West Africa trade promotion policies, progress was far from being optimal. And on such critical majers as the ECOWAS single currency, its promised launch had become an endless wait for Godot as the target date kept being shiked on account of various technicalities. Obstacles to intra-West African investments and the flow of services have persisted beyond what can be easily explained, suggesting a deficit of political will among leaders. While steps were taken to improve the internal finances of the Community, the problem of the inadequate funding of many of its programmes and agencies remains a huge challenge, a situation which exposed the Community to external manipulation by various donors who have not lost any opportunity to embed themselves in its structures and processes. The disarray with which West Africa responded to the European Union’s free trade proposals, packaged as the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), was telling in this regard.
The challenge posed to ECOWAS by the AES countries can, therefore, be understood as feeding into a broad groundswell of growing discontent among a cross-section of West Africans with the overall performance of the organisation. The case for re-imagining West African cooperation and integration is strong, and the ongoing crisis of membership that it is experiencing offers an opportunity for such a re-imagination to be undertaken with all the seriousness that can be mustered. To lead the exercise, the Amandla Institute is assembling a select group of West African thinkers to take the occasion of the 50th anniversary of ECOWAS to reflect on what needs to be done in order for the next 50 years to deliver an integration project that encompasses all of West Africa and meets the aspirations of the peoples of the sub-region for unity, peace, and prosperity. It is an exercise that will require a boldness of imagination, drawing on the rich history of the region and the old inter connections among its peoples, learning the lessons of experience presented by the last 50 years, and projecting into the future with the audacity of a people determined to reclaim their place in the comity of nations.
