The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) is finalising a plan to create a 5,000-strong joint military force to tackle terrorism. In a high-profile meeting last week, Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, Nigeria’s defence minister, announced that it would cost member states $2.6bn (€2.4bn) a year. When asked where the huge budget would come from, he said that member states would be expected to contribute an agreed amount. That is a pipe dream. Ecowas’s major economies – Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal – are currently enduring generational economic crises that have left them unable to service their annual budgets independently. While terrorism affects most of the region, with Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali bearing the brunt, pouring already scarce money into a tiny army is not the answer.
Ecowas is sharply divided between its democracies and its juntas. Last year, a war almost broke out in West Africa when the bloc threatened military action against Niger’s junta. Shortly afterwards, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso requested to exit the union, leaving it fractured. A regional force that can cross borders will probably not be tolerated by paranoid juntas – and there is also the risk that it will be politicised or coerced by those regimes. In the Lake Chad region, the Multinational Joint Task Force – comprising Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Benin and Cameroon – is already fighting Boko Haram.
With terrorists operating transnationally, what West Africa needs is a framework for effective intelligence-gathering and sharing knowledge among its regional armies. In 2006 the bloc signed a protocol in Niamey, Niger, that established a Bureau of Intelligence and Investigation on Criminal Matters. Gathering funds from across Ecowas countries to boost this would be a significantly less expensive solution.
Ope Adetayo is a Lagos-based journalist and writer, and a regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight,
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