Gambia: ECOWAS comes of age
The decision by ECOWAS to send a 7,000 strong military force into Gambia to remove the incumbent Yahya Jammeh, after he refused to accept his defeat in December’s election, was a seminal moment for regional body. Does this mark the turning point in West Africa of a new generation of leaders committed to maintaining democratic elections?
Some international commentators have expressed surprise over the swift intervention by ECOWAS in the Gambia’s post-election crisis. But for more seasoned observers it was merely the confirmation of a longer trend of democratisation in the region. Over the last decade, West Africa has become the poster-child for democracy across Africa. Ghana and Senegal have long been seen as regional bastions of democracy. They have now been joined by the likes of Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Benin in seeing smooth transfers of power after opposition parties won elections.
The crisis in Gambia threatened to challenge this story of democratic progress. Yet the decisive action of regional body ECOWAS, showed the growing strength of West Africa’s democratic institutions. ECOWAS demonstrated that, decisive action taken by African leaders, works without them having to rely on external support. Indeed, the West African appetite for military intervention outpaced that of the international community, as the UN Security Council had called for the use of “political means first” on the same day that Senegalese forces crossed the border into Gambia.
ECOWAS is now dominated by a new generation of democratically elected leaders. It is currently chaired by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, while the leaders of all the other major regional powers — Ouattara in Cote d’Ivoire, Buhari in Nigeria, Akufo-Addo in Ghana and Sall in Senegal — are all committed democrats who themselves won power as opposition leaders.
The Gambian intervention with its 7,000-strong troop deployment, codenamed “Operation Restore Democracy”, marks the latest in a series of regionally led interventions by ECOWAS, over the last decade and a half. The region’s leaders have shown a growing willingness to mediate. They intervened in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990’s, supported French action in Cote d’Ivoire in 2011, and negotiated an end to the coups in Guinea-Bissau in 2012 and Burkina Faso in 2015. This is in stark contrast to the recent dithering and inaction from other regional bodies, namely the East African Community over Burundi and the Economic Community of East African States in Congo. There has also been a general failure of the African Union to act against what President Buhari’s spokesman called “stay-put dictators”.
The roots of this stretch back to 1999 and 2001 when ECOWAS adopted two little known protocols, that allow it to intervene in member states that aren’t democratic, even though at the time it was dominated by leaders who were in breach of the protocol terms themselves. Pushed by newly democratic Nigeria, many leaders, including Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, signed up to the protocols expecting that they would never be enforced. However, 18 years later with the emergence of new democrats heading so many key West African states, the protocols and ECOWAS itself appear to have come of age.
